The grimy, lanky individual in work clothes broke away from the group and followed after him. “Glen Beisnor,” he said, extending his hand.
“Seth Morley.”
“We’re a friggin’ mob, Morley. It’s been like this since I got here, right after Frazer came.” Belsnor spat into nearby weeds. “You know what Frazer tried to do? Since he was the first one here he tried to set himself up as the group-leader; he even told us–told me, for example–that he ‘Understood his instructions to mean that he would be in charge.’ We almost believed him. It sort of made sense. He was the first one to arrive and he started giving those friggin’ tests to everybody and then making loud comments about our ‘statistical abnormalities,’ as the creep puts it.”
“A competent psychologist, a reliable one, would never make a public statement of his findings.” A man not yet introduced to Seth Morley came walking up, hand extended. He appeared to be in his early forties, with a slightly large jaw, ridged brows, and shiny black hair. “I’m Ben Tallchief,” he informed Morley. “I arrived just before you did.” He seemed to Seth Morley to be a little unsteady; as if, Morley reflected, he’s had a drink or three. He put out his hand and they shook. I like this man, he thought to himself. Even if he has had a couple. He has a different aura from the others. But, he thought, maybe they were all right before they got here, and something here made them change.
If that is so, he thought, it will change us, too; Tallchief, Mary and I. Eventually.
The thought did not please him.
“Seth Morley, here,” he said. “Marine biologist, formerly attached to the staff of Tekel Upharsin Kibbutz. And your field is–”
Tallchief said, “I am a qualified naturalist, class B. Aboard ship there was little to do, and it was a ten year flight. So I prayed, via the ship’s transmitter, and the relay picked it up and carried it to the Intercessor. Or perhaps it was the Mentufacturer. But I think the former, because there was no rollback of time.”
“It’s interesting to hear that you’re here because of a prayer,” Seth Morley said. “In my case I was visited by the Walker-on-Earth at the time in which I was busy finding an adequate noser for the trip here. I picked one out, but it wasn’t adequate; the Walker said it would never have gotten Mary and myself here.” He felt hungry. “Can we get a meal pried loose from this outfit?” he asked Tallchief. “We haven’t eaten today; I’ve been busy piloting the noser for the last twenty-six hours. I only picked up the beam at the end.”
Glen Belsnor said, “Maggie Walsh will be glad to slap together what passes as a meal around here. Something along the lines of frozen peas, frozen ersatz veal steak, and coffee from the goddamn unhomeostatic friggin’ coffee machine, which never worked even at the start. Will that do?”
“It will have to,” Morley said, feeling gloom. “The magic departs fast,” Ben Tallchief said. “Pardon?”
“The magic of this place.” Tallchief made a sweeping gesture which took in the rocks, the gnarly green trees, the wobble of low hut-like buildings which made up the colony’s sole installations. “As you can see.”
“Don’t sell it completely short,” Belsnor spoke up. “These aren’t the only structures on this planet.”
“You mean there’s a native civilization here?” Morley asked, interested.
“I mean there’re things out there that we don’t understand. There is a building. I’ve caught a glimpse of it, one time on a prowl, and I was going back but I couldn’t find it again. A big gray building–really big–with turrets, windows, I would guess about eight floors high. I’m not the only one who’s seen it,” he added defensively, “Berm saw it; Walsh saw it; Frazer says he saw it, but he’s probably horse-crudding us. He just doesn’t want to look like he’s left out.”
Morley said. “Was the building inhabited?”
“I couldn’t tell. We couldn’t see that much from where we were; none of us really got that close. It was very–” He gestured. “Forbidding.”
“I’d like to see it,” Tallchief said.
“Nobody’s leaving the compound today,” Belsnor said. “Because now we can contact the satellite and get our instructions. And that comes first; that what really matters.” He spat into the weeds once more, deliberately and thoughtfully. And with accurate aim.
Dr. Milton Babble examined his wristwatch and thought, It’s four-thirty and I’m tired. Low blood sugar, he decided. It’s always a sign of that when you get tired in the late afternoon. I should try to get some glucose into myself before it becomes serious. The brain, he thought, simply can’t function without adequate blood sugar. Maybe, he thought, I’m becoming diabetic. That could be; I have the right genetic history.
“What’s the matter, Babble?” Maggie Walsh said, seated beside him in the austere briefing hall of their meager settlement. “Sick again?” She winked at him, which at once made him furious. “What’s it now? Are you wasting away, like Camille, from T.B.?”
“Hypoglycemia,” he said, studying his hand as it rested on the arm of his chair. “Plus a certain amount of extrapyramidal neuromuscular activity. Motor restlessness of the dystonic type. Very uncomfortable.” He hated the sensation: his thumb twitching in the familiar pellet-rolling motion, his tongue curling up within his mouth, dryness in his throat– dear God, he thought, is there no end of this?
Anyhow the herpes simplex keratitis which had afflicted him during the previous week had abated. He was glad of that (thank God).
“Your body is to you like what a house is for a woman,” Maggie Walsh said. “You keep experiencing it as if it were an environment, rather than–”
“The somatic environment is one of the realest environments in which we live,” Babble said testily. “It’s our first environment, as infants, and then as we decline into old age, and the Form Destroyer corrodes our vitality and shape, we once against discover that it little matters what goes on in the so-called outside world when our somatic essence is in jeopardy.”
“Is this why you became a doctor?”
“It’s more complex than a simple cause-and-effect relationship. That supposes a duality. My choice of vocations–”
“Pipe down over there,” Glen Belsnor yapped, pausing in his fiddlings. Before him rested the settlement’s transmitter, and he had been trying for several hours to get it functioning. “If you want to talk clear out.” Several other people in the hail added noisy agreement.
“Babble,” Ignatz Thugg said from the seat in which he sprawled, “you’re well-named.” He barked a canine-like laugh.
“You, too,” Tony Dunkelwelt said to Thugg.
“Pipe down!” Glen Beisnor yelled, his face red and steaming as he poked the innards of the transmitter: “Or by God we’ll never get our poop-sheet from the friggin’ satellite. If you don’t shut up I’m going to come over there and take you apart instead of taking this mass of metallic guts apart. And I’d enjoy it.”
Babble rose, turned and left the hall.
In the cold, long sunlight of late afternoon he stood smoking his pipe (being careful not to start up any pyloric activity) and contemplated their situation. Our lives, he thought, are in the hands of little men like Belsnor; here, they rule. The kingdom of the one-eyed, he thought acidly, in which the blind are king. What a life.
Why did I come here? he asked himself. No answer immediately came, only a wail of confusion from within him: drifting shapes that complained and cried out like indignant patients in a charity ward. The shrill shapes plucked at him, drawing him back into the world of former times, into the restlessness of his last years on Orionus 17, back to the days with Margo, the last of his office nurses with whom he had conducted a long, inelegant affair, a misadventure which had ended up in a heap of tangled tragicomedy–both for him and for her. In the end she had left him . . . or had she? Actually, he reflected, everyone leaves everyone when something as messy and jury-rigged as that terminates. I was lucky, he thought, to get out of it how and when I did. She could have made a lot more trouble. As it was, she had seriously jeopardized his physical health, just by protein depletion alone.
That’s right, he thought. It’s time for my wheat germ oil, my vitamin E. Must go to my quarters. And, while I’m there, I’ll take a few glucose tablets to counterbalance my hypoglycemia. Assuming I don’t pass out on the way. And if I did, who would care? What in fact would they do? I’m essential to their survival, whether they recognize it or not. I’m vital to them, but are they vital to me? Yes, in the sense that Glen Belsnor is; vital because they can do, or allegedly can do, skilled tasks necessary for the maintenance of this stupid little incestuous small town that we’re running here. This pseudofamily that doesn’t work as a family in any respect. Thanks to the meddlers from outside.