Short Fiction · The Mercurian (2/2)

“Intelligent, yes. So intelligent that you seem very primitive to us. It is a hindrance, in a way. Too wide a gulf.”

“Then you did this,” I choked. “You⁠—you froze every man on this ship.”

“Froze? Oh, I see what you mean. It is unfortunate that I am compelled to use your mental concepts to think with. You are giving my thoughts a verbal twist peculiar to yourself. You see, Rawley, I can correlate your fugitive reactions to a given phenomenon with everything experienced by you from the day of your birth. By simply tuning in on your thoughts I can get your⁠—your slant. Not merely your thought images, Rawley, but all the little twists and turns of your familiar speech. Fortunately you have telepathic powers, too. Somewhat rudimentary, but adequate.”

The frog’s eyes quivered. “Don’t glare at me, Rawley. I have no intention of harming you.”

“You harmed her,” I groaned.

“I harmed⁠—Oh, I see. The girl, eh? We propagate by fission, so we’ve been spared all that. I didn’t harm her, Rawley. All I did was diminish her mass. I had to do that to warm myself.

“Rawley, I was almost gone. I can stand a little cold, but that liquid air⁠—”

“You did what to her?”

“Diminished her mass. Now keep your shirt on, Rawley. I need the glow to warm me. Needed it badly. For real warmth there’s nothing like the radiant energies imprisoned in kalium. The bodies of terrestrials are ideal sources of heat in all respects; not only because they contain kalium, but because the other elements of which they are composed are among the easiest to tap.

“No harm done, you understand. I can radiate back subatomic particles at any time. All I did was squeeze out the radiations in a soft, glutinous mass. You don’t have to bombard atoms or surround them with water-jackets to strip them, Rawley. With a little patience you can squeeze out their energies the way you squeeze toothpaste from a tube.

“My body has soaked up a fine, tingling warmth from all those frozen terrestrials. They are mere atomic husks now, but perfectly preserved and restorable at any time.”

I scarcely heard it. Something was happening to the ship. Beneath my feet the deck was unmistakably swaying, and there were twangings and creakings all along the passageway which could only mean one thing.

The ship was in motion!

The frog had noticed it, too. It stiffened abruptly and cocked its head as though listening, its stalked eyes squinting shut.

In paralyzed astonishment I stood staring at the vibrating overhead, wondering what in hell it could mean. Had one of the frozen crewmen regained the use of his limbs and attempted an emergency takeoff? I strained my ears, but could detect no atomotor drone, or other indication that we were rocketing upward from the crust.

“No, Rawley,” the frog’s voice came again, vibrant but strained. “No, we are not leaving the planet. I think I know what is happening. Rawley, you have an instrument which enables you to see the ship as though it were being viewed from a distance by someone out on the planet. Horiz⁠—horizonscope. Suppose we see for ourselves.”

We descended in the jacket-lift together, the frog bracing its knees precisely as the commander had done long ago in another world.

I don’t know how I lived through the next ten minutes. When I stood in the control room and looked in the horizonscope I saw a sight which I shall never forget if I live to be a hundred.

On both sides of the ship were dozens of froglike shapes moving in single file, their bodies bent nearly double as though they were straining at the leash.

All about them swirled steamy vapors and flickering tongues of flame. A bloodred sun, so gigantic that it spanned a fifth of the sky, hung like a vast, glowing eye directly overhead, dazzling my pupils as I stared. Even in the horizonscope it seemed huge, blinding.

The scent was weird beyond all imagining⁠—weird and unutterably terrifying.

“Rawley, they are moving the ship. They are using magnetic tow lines and making a mighty good job of it.”

“Where⁠—where are they taking us?” I gasped.

The frog’s reply was utterly bewildering. “We’ll label it terrestrial fauna⁠—habitat group. We’ll take the ship right into the museum. Large-brained bipeds from the third planet, stooping above their artifacts in perfectly natural attitudes. Magnificent.

“Mustn’t let sunlight touch them. It’s curious I didn’t think of this when I absorbed their energies. My one thought was to warm myself, but necessity is the mother of invention. They’ll honor me for this. I’ll head the next expedition. My instructions were imbecilic. ‘Observe all their habits and then mummify them.’

“What good are shriveled specimens? So long as sunlight doesn’t touch them they’ll keep this way for a thousand years. This one has been⁠—helpful. Oh, enormously. Just as well I didn’t tap him.

“I mustn’t let him suspect that I couldn’t⁠—can’t. I’ve absorbed too much radiance as it is. My energies are brimming over. He thinks I can still diminish his mass. Might have to kill him if he knew.

“Kill him. I could do that, of course. But I’d hate to lose one of these specimens.”

It hit me all at once, with the force of a physical blow. There was something that the frog didn’t know. It didn’t know that I could listen in on its private thoughts. It thought it could shut off its mind from me. Hitting me also with force was the sudden realization that when in close proximity to it I had telepathic powers which were first rate, as good as its own.

Wait a minute⁠—better. Because it didn’t seem aware of what I was thinking now. So we were just animals to it, eh? Big-brained bipeds⁠—specimens. I was edging away from it and toward the control panel, very cautiously.

Keeping my excitement down wasn’t easy. There was a lot of anger mixed up with it, and more fear than a man of courage likes to own up to. I wondered how strong the magnetic tow lines were. Would they hold the ship if I blasted out all the rocket jets and started the atomotors ten seconds later?

It didn’t seem likely. If I could reach the control panel nine-tenths of the battle would be won. Nearer to it I inched, and nearer.

The frog stirred just as my hand touched the rocket control. I swung down on it hard. Something in my brain started babbling as I swung my other hand toward the atomotor emergency bulb and splintered it with my naked palm.

The whole ship seemed to explode, carrying the top of my skull with it. I was no longer in a Mercury run spaceship screaming defiance at a frog.

I was far out in space between massive gaseous suns, red and blue and mottled, with island universes to right and left of me and a long-tailed comet sweeping down from a ragged hole on the sky.

When I crawled through the fence into my own backyard again I was bruised and partly numb, but the ship was plowing steadily through the void, and Mercury was so far away from it that it was a mere flyspeck mottling on the dull-corona-encircled disk of the sun.

The frog? Yes, it was still with us, but all the cockiness had gone out of it. It came to me, as meek as a lamb, and laid all its cards on the table.

It would be the specimen now. So long as we didn’t cast it out through the airlocks to freeze in the void it would consent to be exhibited in every museum on Earth. Only the museums would have to be roofless, because it would need the sunlight.

It promised not to diminish the mass of a single human being on Earth. All it needed was our sunlight. Locked up in the Lyra and freezing to death it had been compelled to tap the nearest energy source, which happened to be us.

But on Earth it would tap the sunlight. It pointed out that the sunlight falling on one square foot of Earth would keep one of our big power plants running for a year, if we knew as much as the Mercurians did about radiant heat.

“I’ll be no trouble at all, Rawley. And if you wish, I’ll show you how to convert sunlight into useful energy. You won’t need so many cyclotrons then. Before I’d monkey with anything as unpredictable as a skinless atom I’d go jump in a lake.”

I was no longer listening. There was something I had left unfinished and it suddenly seemed more important to me than anything a frog could say or do.

Going down in the jacket-lift to Sylvia I kept trying to recall just how I felt when it had cheated me out of something I was entitled to.

It didn’t seem right to leave a kiss dangling in midair, and I was sure that Sylvia was feeling frustrated, too.

She was. She came into my arms in utter silence, and we did the kiss up brown, and stored it away in our memories for when we were eighty-eight.

“Darling,” she said. “I’m glad we thought of that.”

I felt better almost at once. They had sent me out from Earth with a pat on the back and a commission, and I was returning with the commander’s niece in my arms and a story in my brain which the news syndicates would certainly want.

I’d ask a good price for it. Lunar honeymoons were expensive, and although Sylvia wasn’t extravagant she liked orchids as well as the next girl and was just the right height to wear sables with grace.