Science Fiction Plus – October 1953
(1953)
Eric Frank Russell
illustrated by Charles Hornstein
How great are the odds against human beings feeling emotions of sympathy, understanding, and compassion for any alien races that may be discovered on distant worlds in the years following interplanetary travel? View the great difficulty the peoples of the world seem to have in getting along with human beings who are different only in color of skin. Consider the tendency to treat groups of opposing religious or political thought as "different," and something less than human. Eric Frank Russell, one of the more skilled craftsmen in science-fiction, poignantly poses and answers the question.
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He was elderly, dapper, and dignified. A trim figure from his polished shoes to his small, neatly clipped beard. One could think of him as a retired orchestral conductor or perhaps a college don grown old with the oaks around the campus.
Most obviously he was enjoying an eventide stroll with the observant leisureliness of the aged, sharing the shouts of children, the chirps of sparrows, the tender hand-claspings of lovers, the makings of life. He was bathing in the human mainstream as he'd done in days of yore. And he was gaining some compensation for those closer ones who through the years had slipped away silently, like fugitives in the night.
It was a poor, unhygienic district that he still visited from time to time no matter where else he went. Once it had been his, all his, and that gave him a sort of proprietary interest in it. He knew every scruffy street and neglected house. He had visited them all, time and again, bearing a little bag.
In the earliest days the police had walked warily around these parts. He'd had no need to do so. Nobody had ever obstructed his passage, no hoodlum had ever mugged him, no juvenile delinquent had snatched his bag and raced down an alley. One and all had granted him free passage, saluted him with the same words.
"Good evening, Doc!"
For more than a quarter century his practice had been down that very side-street, amid the weak and the strong, the sober and the sodden. There he had suffered all their demands and idiosyncrasies with patient understanding.
The irate bellowings of men with nagging wives and peptic ulcers, the yipping and yapping of prolapsed women, the shrill, hysterical voices of martyrs to the menopause, the dreary wail of teething children, and the imperative yelpings of those who were bursting to wee-wee, the hints, insinuations, and implications of bitter virgins. All this cacophony had beaten upon his expert ears, and been reduced to symptoms that were for him to assuage as best he could and by any means at hand.
That was the penalty of being seventy-seven. One must bid farewell person by person to those who've been part of one's existence. One must seek solace in the places with which they were associated and cling to the few who remain.
Despite its bitter reminder of absences, he loved to explore this well-known locality. He enjoyed the rawness of life within it, the spawnings and brawlings of humanity fermenting like yeast. He liked these things because this was now the only area still untouched by modernistic schemers and planners. All other similar districts had succumbed to the cordite stick and the bulldozer before being reborn in garish freshness.
These were the days when like every man born of woman he had to face the final challenge, namely, that of gaining fresh strength from the same source whence it had been poured so liberally and so long.
"Physician, heal thyself!"
It couldn't be done.
As always, he turned up Bleeker and made his way to Silvio Musitano's tiny coffee shop. It was not that he needed coffee. His thirst was for the shop and, of course, Silvio. They were milestones to be rested against and contemplated.
It seemed only yesterday that he'd rolled out of bed at four in the morning and followed an agitated Pietro Musitano along moonlit, cat-ridden streets. Through a paintlees and creaky door. Up dilapidated stairs. Into a fusty room where Mama was having her rhythms and calling upon Holy Mary.
Hot water, please. Now, now, don't let it worry you. It's a perfectly natural process and everything's going fine. Think how proud you're going to be mighty soon.
Then a little later, "Congratulations, signora. A big and beautiful boy. A bambino with a voice like Caruso's." That had been Silvio.
He went into the shop. It looked the same. Every time he entered he thanked God for its sameness. It spoke of years that never pass and a world that does not change. He knew that it spoke falsely but he valued the illusion and wished to preserve it to the very last. When the future is small one must find compensation in a past that is large.
Silvio appeared at the sound of the doorbell. His plump, olive-colored face grinned widely, showing even teeth. He did not hurry forward with his accustomed eagerness, brushing a table with his apron, gesturing extravagantly while pouring forth a torrent of words. Instead, he registered excitement, turned toward the room from which he'd emerged and bellowed.
"Jeem! Jeem! Come see who is here!"
The sound of a chair scraping backward. Firm feet advancing. A tall figure appeared in the doorway, his pay eyes quizzical. The newcomer had fresh, unlined features and red hair. He wore a trimly tailored dark green uniform with silver buttons, silver epaulettes, and the comet-insignia of the Space Service gleaming on his chest.
He paused a moment while Silvio watched his face with happy expectancy. Then slowly he moved round to the table. His eyes registered slight incredulity.
"Doctor Harrison, as I live and breathe!"
The Doctor stood up, found his spectacles, put them on and surveyed the speaker with care.
"You have the advantage of me, sir."
"That makes it even. The advantage was yours when I was four and you caught me parading through the park in the nude. Your hand was swift and heavy those days."
"Jim Corlett!" He took off his glasses, put them on again, was momentarily bewildered. "The last time I saw you you were only so high." He put out a hand at random.
"Not quite that small," laughed Corlett. "I was fifteen when I left these parts."
"It was a long time ago, a long time," said Doc Harrison. He took a chair, signed the other to do the same. "Two coffee, Silvio." Then he smiled across the table. "Well—young Jim Corlett. One of my ghosts returned to Earth."
"I'd make a rather substantial spook. I'm putting on weight."
"It will do you no harm to have a little more flesh. You look as fit as a man can be."
"One has to be fit in the Space Service."
"I'm sure. How do you like it?"
"Suits me fine. Though once in a while I think it has its drawbacks."
"In what way?" Doc Harrison prompted.
"No home, wife, or family. I have just returned from a trip taking seventeen years. The next one may last equally as long. What wife would stand for that?"
"Dear me! It certainly is a problem." He took his cup, thanked Silvio, sipped thoughtfully. "So now you're trying to refresh memories of bygone days. It seems that we're both in the same fix."
"I'll be lugged out of mine. We blast off at dawn."
"Indeed? So soon?"
"I've had three months on Earth," Corlett informed. "Spent most of the time studying for an examination held last Thursday. If I've passed I'll have qualified as ship's commander. Since then I've been trying to hunt up old friends."
"And finding them?"
"Some," admitted Corlett. "Not as many as I'd hoped. Silvio was about the last on the list. And I'm truly happy to have met you again. I hadn't expected to do so."
"Thinking I would be dead?"
Jim Corlett looked uncomfortable. "Well, when one has been gone a good many years one fears a few losses."
"Would you have considered me a loss?"
"Certainly."
"That is extremely kind of you," said the Doctor. "In return I can only remark that I've numbered you among my own losses since the time you went away."
"Oh, don't say that. I was nobody in particular. I was just a kid."
"The world is not made of dirt, no matter what the geologists may say. It is composed of people."
For a little while Corlett was silent, thoughtful, then commented, "I guess you're right." The other leaned forward. "Let's not indulge morbid talk about the empty places in our lives. Tell me about the full ones in yours."
"Hah! I tried telling that. I was a prize flop."
"How do you mean?"
"I traced a college friend and looked him up. He was married, bald, and had twin boys aged ten or eleven. He showed me to them as if I were the only original space-rover but they weren't impressed. So I started telling them all about Sartur which is far and away the most important planet I've struck. They sniffed their disdain. They knew more about Sartur than I did, having seen it often on the stereops."
"To all intents and purposes any place picked on by the stereop crews becomes as good as next door," Doc Harrison contributed. "I have roamed the cosmos myself in a two-dollar seat a hundred yards from my flat."
"Not much use me saying anything then, is there?" asked Corlett lugubriously.
"How about the lesser known, relatively untouched places? You must have been to some of those."
"A few. They're unimportant."
"Why?"
He shrugged. "They lack natural resources to exploit. They're devoid of anything worthy of development. We landed on several for fresh food, water, and exercise, then blasted away from them." He was meditative awhile before he went on: "I suppose that from the viewpoint of a few generations back the biggest disappointments of space conquest have been the number of uninteresting worlds and the lack of bug-eyed monsters. As you know, most sentient forms are more or less like us; the margin by which they vary is not great. The number of really weird types encountered so far can be counted on the fingers of one hand."
"Have you met any of those?"
"Oh, yes. On Reba, for instance—"
"Reba?" Doc Harrison's coffee slopped into his saucer.
"Don't tell me you've actually heard of that dump?" said Corlett, openly surprised.
The Doctor recovered, murmured, "The name is familiar. Carry on and tell me about it."
"Earth-mass, misty, marshy, and off the beaten track," Corlett obliged. "It is visited by a local missionary-rocket about once in six months. The Earth-human population numbers exactly one: a character called Father Joseph. He belongs to one of those obscure sects that doesn't know when it's beaten."
"He has made no converts?"
"He hasn't the vaguest notion whether he has or not. His predecessor taught many of the natives to read and write in our language, but how far they've progressed theologically is anyone's guess."
"This interests me greatly," assured his listener.
"Trouble is that the Rebans aren't remotely human," Corlett continued. "That they have some sort of intelligence cannot be denied, but we can find no satisfactory yardstick with which to measure it. For myself, I prefer to think they're not so much."
"They repel me. They look lousy. Father Joseph must have the mind of a martyr to have lived among them so long. It's like voluntarily existing in a leper colony."
Taking a deep breath, the Doctor asked quietly, "What's wrong with them?"
"I don't know how a biologist would classify them but they seem to me more like odious plants or fungi than anything else ... give me flesh and blood, rather than such oddities. They're about eighteen inches high, gray-green and knobbly. They can haul up their roots and totter around like drunks a little while before they have to bury their feet again. No eyes, no ears, no mouths, no faces. First time you see them they turn your stomach."
Waving away a proffered cigarette, the Doctor asked in still more subdued tones, "How does this missionary communicate with them?"
"Easily enough. They have esp and are telepathic. You think the questions and they write the answers. They read books by esping them. I've seen one hold a pen in a dozen fibers like long hairs and make a copy of what it had no eyes to see."
It?"
"Yes. I think they're sexless."
"You amaze me," said Doc Harrison. "How do they propagate?"
...
jeff.blazkowicz