The Future Is Female!: 25 Classic Science Fiction Stories by Women, from Pulp Pioneers to Ursula K. Le Guin

MARGARET ST. CLAIR The Inhabited Men

NORTON was the only one of the three on the Ara who was superstitious, and even he didn’t attempt serious argument against landing on the planetoid. Making repairs on the Ara was absolutely necessary; the repairs couldn’t be made in space; and he couldn’t even remember who had told him that the planetoid was unlucky. So they landed.

The repairs went briskly. The crew worked for eighteen hours out of the day, and ate on the job. Inside of a week the Ara was lifting her tired old shoulders up from the surface of the planetoid. She got to a frequented portion of the spaceways before she broke down completely. It was as much as her crew had dared hope for. They were picked up by a passing freighter which claimed the Ara as salvage, and six months later they were landed, gaunt and angry and soiled, at Port Pendraith. None of the three, Evans or Norton or Miller, was ever to realize that on the planetoid he had been colonized.

In Pendraith, they discussed their situation. They wanted to stay together, if it was possible. They tried to lease another ship, and couldn’t raise the deposit money. They asked acquaintances and friends for grubstakes, and were rejected. Finally they saw that if they weren’t to starve in Pendraith, they’d have to separate. And from then on different things happened to them. But they ended up exactly the same.

Norton was the superstitious one. He was short, dark, thickset, and inclined to be irascible. He shipped out of Pendraith on a freighter which was almost as foul and ill-found as the one which had landed him there in the first place. On the ship he was assigned to the steward’s department, as waiter and galley boy.

The cook, Gongo, was a native of Pendraith. He had been kicked about, with various degrees of brutality, ever since his fifth birthday, and by now he could fawn or cringe or snarl with equal facility. In his way, he was a religious man.

Gongo and Norton bunked together in a room so small that if one of them stood up in it, the other had to stretch out full length in his berth. The one desirable thing in the room was the airduct which, instead of being in the ceiling as was customary, had been located in the wall just over the upper berth. Fresh air can be a considerable luxury. Gongo slept in the upper berth.

On the second day out from Pendraith, Norton took Gongo’s things out of the upper berth and put his own in. Naturally, he moved the bedding at the same time. Under Gongo’s pillow he found a small cloth bag.

He opened it. It held a vaguely man-shaped piece of hard root, a wad of lint mixed with hair, and some crystals of what looked like rock salt.

Norton held the bag by the strings, thinking. A less superstitious man would have laughed and put the bag back under the pillow of Gongo’s new bunk. But Norton was a little afraid of the thing. After a minute he took it out in the corridor and threw it in the reducer. It flared up briefly and then went to join the freighter’s auxiliary fuel supply.

Gongo discovered the change of bunks that night. He was not much surprised. He had been rather expecting it, since Norton was bigger and heavier than he. But when he felt under the pillow of his new bunk and couldn’t find his bag, he turned quite white. He said, “What did you do with my bag?”

“Threw it out, sticky.” The last word was a nickname much resented by the natives of Pendraith. Norton was lying in the upper bunk. His hand was resting on the blaster he wasn’t supposed to have, and did have. “Want to make something out of it?”

There was a silence. Then Gongo said, “I guess not.”

In the third week, when the two men were in the galley, Gongo said, “What’s the matter, you don’t eat? You think I poison the food?” There was hopeful malice in his voice.

“Naw,” Norton replied judicially, “you wouldn’t have the nerve.” He spat into the sink. “Your chow’s not so hot, that’s all. It don’t appeal to my appetite.”

That night Norton talked in his sleep. The voice was thin and small, to come from his chunky body. Gongo would not have heard it at all if he had not been lying awake thinking of his lost god.

After a second he slipped out of his bunk and stood with his head leaned toward Norton in the dark. “Thya,” came a thread, a wisp of sound, “do you hear me?”

“Why not?”

“And I.”

“And I.”

“Isn’t it wonderful,” came the first filament, “to live, be free, grow, expand?”

“I warn you—Thya, Pohm, Rya, all the rest—you grow too far. It is dangerous. You grow too far.” The wisp of sound managed to be harsh.

“How can we help it? It is difficult to refuse to grow.”

“You must try. No excuses. It must be done.”

The half-dozen filaments of sound swelled into a tiny clamor in the dark. Gongo sucked in his breath. He was thinking of folk-lore. He found the switch and turned on the light.

Norton sat up in his bunk, instantly angry. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?’’

“You were talking in your sleep.”

“Oh,” Norton yawned and rubbed his hand over his face. “Did I say anything?” he asked.

“You… were talking about growing. There were more voices than one in your throat.”

“Yeah? You must of imagined it. Stow it, sticky, and turn out the light. I got to have my sleep.”

He rolled over as Gongo obeyed. Gongo sat down on the edge of his berth. He was badly frightened.

He sat there in the dark, thinking about what had happened to his divinity and the various disguises the devil can assume, until Norton’s breathing grew regular. When he was sure that Norton was asleep again, he got one of his kitchen knives out from under his mattress. He opened Norton with it from pubic bone to diaphragm. It was a mistake for Norton to have gone back to sleep.

Evans was the second of the crew of the Ara. He was a big, slow-moving man, with a friendly smile and a mind which also moved rather slowly. Since he spoke politely and was presentable, he got a berth on a luxury liner as a steward.

The name of the liner was the Bootic. It was a new ship, equipped with the latest devices, and it carried four stewardesses to cater to the needs of women passengers. Since Evans was friendly, obliging, and not offensively on the make, he soon got to be a favorite with the stewardesses.

One of them, a small, dark girl named Helen Dawes, he more than liked. She teased him a good deal, since he was easy to tease, but he thought she liked him too. He began to wonder what the attitude of the Bootic’s owners would be toward letting a married couple work out on the same ship, and how much the down payment on a semi-house in Port Pendraith would be.

The fuel tanks of the Bootic exploded when the ship was entering the asteroid belt. For a moment there was a flare almost as bright as a nova, and then the safety devices went to work. The result was that though everybody aft of partition number one was killed almost instantly, those forward of it had about two minutes to don suits and get out through the emergency hatch.

Evans and Helen and a middle-aged woman named Edna Kinch were on the right side. The emergency hatch, though it was red-hot, worked. When the three of them were about half a kilo away they turned and saw the Bootic, with the curious transparent look burning objects have, eaten with fire from stem to stern. Then they jetted their way to the nearest asteroid and sat down to wait.

For the first hour or so they talked about rescue. The Bootic, after all, had been in a main-travelled spaceway. Though the explosion had given her no time to send out an S.O.S., the force of the explosion—(What had caused it? Evans said he thought some tiny irregularity must have developed in the lining of the fuel tanks since they had had their last microscopic inspection. The Board of Inquiry, months later, was to echo his opinion.)—the force of the explosion would certainly have registered on the instrument panel of any ship in the vicinity.

That meant that ships would soon be jetting up to look for survivors. And, though the asteroid the three had landed on was only about a third of a kilo through, and their suit radios couldn’t project a signal for more than a kilo and a half, it was reasonable to assume they’d be found. Oh, yes. But as time passed and the three began to realize the odds against them, they fell silent.

They had oxygen for about twelve hours. The joker in their theories about rescue, of course, was that ships in space are usually separated by the kind of distance known as astronomical. It was almost impossible that any ship had been near enough to the Bootic to have the explosion register. When the time came at which the Bootic ought to have reached another signal point in her course, and no signal was sent, she would be missed. A search ship would be sent out then, no doubt about it. But that would take almost six days. The survivors had oxygen for twelve hours.

Edna Kinch had hurt her leg rather badly getting through the escape hatch. There were analgesics in her suit, and she took doses of them, but even when she was nearly unconscious she kept moaning. Since the other two couldn’t help her, they walked—floated, rather—a little away from her and sat down. They looked out at the stars.

The constellations were not much changed from their familiar shapes on earth. The swan was overhead, eternally flying between Altair and Vega, and Antares burned redly in the forepart of the scorpion. If Evans and his girl wanted to see Achenar, all they had to do was to walk around the asteroid.

Helen said. “Vega’s a beautiful star…. I can’t realize that we’re going to die.”

Evans wanted to kiss her so much that he felt like crying. He didn’t dare open his helmet, of course. He put his arm around her, and they sat with their gloved fingers interlaced. He told her how he felt about her, and about the semi-house in Port Pendraith.

She said, “One of those semi-houses with the round living room. Yes. I wish I could kiss you, Bill…. I wish….”

He said, “I’m going to give you my oxygen tank.”

She cried out at that. “You can’t be so cruel! No, please, no. I love you, Bill. Are you going to make me watch you die?”

So he gave up that idea. He put his arm around her again and they sat there, talking from time to time, and seeing the gauges on their oxy-tanks move from three-quarters to half to one quarter and on down. When the needles pointed to one eighth, Helen said, “We’ve got analgesics, Bill. Let’s take them. That way, we won’t ever know.”

He nodded. Together, smiling at each other in the starlight, they sipped at their stirrup cups. The stars seemed to swell and billow, and then a fog fell over them. It got dark.

Evans roused at last. He was confused, and then surprised, and then he looked around for Helen. Had there been a miracle?

She had fallen over on her side. Her face was dark and congested, and when he saw her he was glad he hadn’t let himself hope. He went back to Edna Kinch, and found that she was dead too. Both Helen’s tank and hers were quite empty. So was his. But he was still alive.

Evans couldn’t understand it. He thought for a while, and then he took off his helmet. No rush of air left his suit; it was empty. He wasn’t breathing. But he was still alive.

He sat there for about half an hour, between the bodies of the two women, trying to understand it. He couldn’t make any sense out of it. Finally he unhooked his blaster from its holster. The gauge read full charge. So he blew his head off.

Miller had the hardest time of the three getting a job. He hung around employment agencies until the clerks frowned when they saw his lean, angry face coming in the door. He borrowed money from acquaintances as long as they would loan him any, and then he tried panhandling. He grew desperate. He didn’t take to drinking—that was not one of his vices—but if he had not pawned his blaster early in his difficulties, he would certainly have tried a stick-up job with it. He had almost reached the point of no return which separates the merely unemployed from the unemployable, when Quilk, the proprietor of the Royal Glory, hired him.

The Royal Glory was a “louse house,” a fifth-rate stereo theatre which specialized in pornographic tactifilms and historical epics slanted to appeal to Pendraithian patriotism. Whether the undernourished derelicts who composed the Royal Glory’s audiences were capable of responding to either of these classes of stimuli is doubtful, but Quilk took his programs seriously. He thought of himself as a patron of the arts, and he wanted to attract “A better class of personages” than the Royal Glory had been getting. He laid down, as a house rule, that nobody was to sit through the same program more than three times. And he hired Miller, as ticket-taker and bouncer, to enforce this.

Miller did not dislike his new work. His air of repressed anger made him an efficient bouncer, and he was amused by Quilk. As he grew more familiar with the Royal Glory’s routine, he had leisure moments, and he took to spending these in a tiny paved court at the back of the theatre where Quilk also took the air.

Quilk was a health faddist. He would sit on a bench in the patch of sunlight in the little court, sipping a health drink or occasionally getting up to take an exercise, and discourse to Miller about the benefits of the latest health diet he was following. He tried a new one every week or so. Miller, sprawled on the pavement, would listen in indolent, half-scornful amusement, as pleased with the sunlight as a vegetable.

Time passed. Miller though Quilk was paying him poorly, was saving money. Quilk let him sleep in the ticket office—he took the box-office receipts home with him at night, of course—and Miller’s expenditure for food was almost nothing. It was not that he was starving himself—in fact, he was gaining weight. But food did not much interest him. He began to think dreamily of buying a new spaceman’s outfit and going back to the employment agencies. Presentable and prosperous-looking, he was sure he could ship out into space again. Then the green plague broke out in Port Pendraith.

Quilk was terrified. He talked of closing up the Royal Glory, and for a day Miller’s future hung in the balance. Then the two strongest traits in Quilk’s personality reasserted themselves.

“The show must go on,” he said solemnly to his employee. “In a time of crisis such as this, personages have a particular need for the solace of art. The show must go on! Don’t you agree, Miller?”

“Sure,” Miller answered. Quilk, as always, amused him. He was trying to smile.

“And besides, I am in no danger,” Quilk continued, a little hastily. “Personally, I mean. It is not as if I were an ignorant, undernourished Pendraithian, with no awareness of the basic laws of health. With my new diet…. Yes, the show must go on!”

“You bet!” Miller agreed. This time, he did smile. Quilk looked at him a little suspiciously.

“Of course, we will take elementary prophylactic measures. You can wear my blaster. When you take the tickets, Miller, I want you to look in their mouths.”

“H’um?” Miller said.

“Yes, in their mouths. It is well known that the first signs of the plague appear there. If there are spots, they are not to enter. Perhaps in their ears also. I have heard that sometimes it appears in the ears.”

Quilk was shivering. Miller, though he never could take him seriously, was sorry for him. “O.K. I’ll look in their mouths and ears.”

Miller made his inspections conscientiously. He turned away two or three of the infected daily. He was not at all afraid of the plague himself, though terrestrials did contract it, for he had never felt more fit in his life.

Surprisingly, business at the Royal Glory was good. Perhaps Quilk had been right, and personages at a time of crisis did need the solace of art. Quilk, counting his receipts at night and shivering, could congratulate himself.

The port health authorities, meantime, were not idle. Disease is no respecter of status. What begins in the slums of a city may end by menacing government hill. They laid down a cordon sanitaire around the infected areas. For a while, as the plague grew more severe, the cordon tightened. Then it began to relax. In the fourth week the city was officially declared free of plague.

“We came through that rather nicely, I think,” Quilk said. It was after theatre hours, and he was putting the night’s take in a metal mesh satchel. “Tomorrow I will get out some new posters—‘The only Vid House that stayed open all during the plague! The Royal Glory is first, as always—first in service, first in programs, first in artistic pleasure for you!’” He nodded. He picked up his blaster from the desk and strapped it around his waist.

“Sounds good,” Miller said, in lazy agreement. He yawned and stretched. The light fell full in his open mouth.

Quilk looked at him. His jaw dropped. Miller saw, without understanding it, that he had turned pale. Quilk said, in a wobbling voice, “It isn’t possible. They said there were no new cases.” He began to back away, one hand on his blaster, the other on the metal valise.

“What are you talking about?” Miller asked irritably.

“Your throat. There are plague spots, the green plague spots, in your throat.”

“No, there aren’t. You’re crazy. I’m not sick.”

“I saw the spots myself,” Quilk answered. He was trembling all over. “Keep away from me. After all my precautions! Get out!”

Miller couldn’t understand the situation. After a minute he asked, “You mean I’m fired?”

“If you like. Anything. Only get out.”

“You owe me four days’ wages.”

“Take it, then.” Quilk opened the valise, took out a handful of coins, and threw it at him. “Get out.”

Miller turned an angry red. “Don’t talk to me like that, sticky. What in hell is the matter with you?” He advanced a step.

Quilk drew the blaster. “Don’t come near me! I’m warning you!”

“I tell you, I haven’t got the plague,” Miller answered. He was trying to be reasonable. “You’re too excitable.” Once more Quilk saw the plague spots in his throat.

“Stay away! Stay away!” The blaster described a wobbling circle in Quilk’s hand.

Miller bit his lip. Even at this moment the contemptuous amusement Quilk inspired in him kept him from taking the Pendraithian seriously. He picked up the coins from the floor and counted them. “You’re a day and a half short, sticky,” he said, looking at Quilk. “Pay me.” He walked toward him, holding out his hand.

“No! Don’t! I—” Quilk shuddered. He couldn’t get any farther away from Miller because he was already against the wall of the box-office. He moaned. Then he closed his eyes and fired.

It was all a mistake, of course. Miller never did have the plague. But he was just as dead, after Quilk blasted him, as if he had.

The organisms that had colonized the crew of the Ara died with them, naturally. They were able to survive for considerably longer than the men, but the knife wound and the blaster charges disrupted their nicely balanced economy beyond repair.

What they had done, as they grew on the men’s mucous membranes and in their body cavities, was to convert Norton and Evans and Miller into Wardian cases, terrariums—units in which chlorophyll and radiant energy (it did not have to be sunlight) cooperated to turn the carbon dioxide of katabolism into oxygen, complex starches, and growth. After the economy was well established, its hosts, had they known it, were potentially immortal. They could have gone for years without needing to eat or breathe. But the plants in a Wardian case die when the case is broken. And the tenants of Norton and Evans and Miller, for all their complex mental organization, were basically plants.

They were not in the least resigned to dying, however. For hours they fought against it, screaming to each other, imploring, cursing, praying not to die. In the end, Evans and Miller and Norton had this in common, that each of them kept on talking for a long time after he was dead.