Big Book of Science Fiction (2 page)

“There is something wrong, Mr.
Fowler,” she declared.

“Precisely,” agreed Fowler. “That’s
why I’m sending young Allen out alone. He may find out what it is.”

“And if he doesn’t?”

“I’ll send someone else.”

She rose slowly from her chair,
started toward the door, then stopped before his desk.

“Some day,” she said, “you will
be a great man. You never let a chance go by. This is your chance. You knew it
was when this dome was picked for the tests. If you put it through, you’ll go
up a notch or two. No matter how many men may die, you’ll go up a notch or two.”

“Miss Stanley,” he said and his
voice was curt, “young Allen is going out soon. Please be sure that your
machine—”

“My machine,” she told him,
icily, “is not to blame. It operates along the co-ordinates the biologists set
up.”

He sat hunched at his desk,
listening to her footsteps go down the corridor.

What she said was true, of
course. The biologists had set up the co-ordinates. But the biologists could be
wrong. Just a hairbreadth of difference, one iota of digression and the
converter would be sending out something that wasn’t the thing they meant to
send. A mutant that might crack up, go haywire, come unstuck under some
condition or stress of circumstance wholly unsuspected.

For Man didn’t know much about
what was going on outside. Only what his instruments told him was going on. And
the samplings of those happenings furnished by those instruments and mechanisms
had been no more than samplings, for Jupiter was unbelievably large and the
domes were very few.

Even the work of the biologists
in getting the data on the Lopers, apparently the highest form of Jovian life,
had involved more than three years of intensive study and after that two years
of checking to make sure. Work that could have been done on Earth in a week or
two. But work that, in this case, couldn’t be done on Earth at all, for one
couldn’t take a Jovian life form to Earth. The pressure here on Jupiter couldn’t
be duplicated outside of Jupiter and at Earth pressure and temperature the
Lopers would simply have disappeared in a puff of gas.

Yet it was work that had to be
done if Man ever hoped to go about Jupiter in the life form of the Lopers. For
before the converter could change a man to another life form, every detailed
physical characteristic of that life form must be known—surely and positively,
with no chance of mistake.

~ * ~

Allen
did not come back.

The tractors, combing the nearby
terrain, found no trace of him, unless the skulking thing reported by one of
the drivers had been the missing Earthman in Loper form.

The biologists sneered their most
accomplished academic sneers when Fowler suggested the co-ordinates might be
wrong. Carefully they pointed out, the co-ordinates worked. When a man was put
into the converter and the switch was thrown, the man became a Loper. He left
the machine and moved away, out of sight, into the soupy atmosphere.

Some quirk, Fowler had suggested;
some tiny deviation from the thing a Loper should be, some minor defect. If
there were, the biologists said, it would take years to find it

And Fowler knew that they were
right.

So there were five men now
instead of four and Harold Allen had walked out into Jupiter for nothing at
all. It was as if he’d never gone so far as knowledge was concerned.

Fowler reached across his desk
and picked up the personal file, a thin sheaf of papers neatly clipped
together. It was a thing he dreaded but a thing he had to do. Somehow the
reason for these strange disappearances must be found. And there was no other
way than to send out more men.

He sat for a moment listening to
the howling of the wind above the dome, the everlasting thundering gale that
swept across the planet in boiling, twisting wrath.

Was there some threat out there,
he asked himself? Some danger they did not know about? Something that lay in
wait and gobbled up the Lopers, making no distinction between Lopers that were
bona fide
and Lopers that were men? To the gobblers, of course, it would
make no difference.

Or had there been a basic fault
in selecting the Lopers as the type of life best fitted for existence on the
surface of the planet? The evident intelligence of the Lopers, he knew, had
been one factor in that determination. For if the thing Man became did not have
capacity for intelligence, Man could not for long retain his own intelligence
in such a guise.

Had the biologists let that one
factor weigh too heavily, using it to offset some other factor that might be
unsatisfactory, even disastrous? It didn’t seem likely. Stiffnecked as they
might be, the biologists knew their business.

Or was the whole thing
impossible, doomed from the very start? Conversion to other life forms had worked
on other planets, but that did not necessarily mean it would work on Jupiter.
Perhaps Man’s intelligence could not function correctly through the sensory
apparatus provided Jovian life. Perhaps the Lopers were so alien there was no
common ground for human knowledge and the Jovian conception of existence to
meet and work together.

Or the fault might lie with Man,
be inherent with the race. Some mental aberration which, coupled with what they
found outside, wouldn’t let them come back. Although it might, not be an
aberration, not in the human sense. Perhaps just one ordinary human mental
trait, accepted as commonplace on Earth, would be so violently at odds with
Jovian existence that it would blast all human intelligence and sanity.

~ * ~

Claws
rattled and clicked down the corridor. Listening to them, Fowler smiled wanly.
It was Towser coming back from the kitchen, where he had gone to see his
friend, the cook.

Towser came into the room,
carrying a bone. He wagged his tail at Fowler and flopped down beside the desk,
bone between his paws. For a long moment his rheumy old eyes regarded his
master and Fowler reached down a hand to ruffle a ragged ear.

“You still like me, Towser?”
Fowler asked and Towser thumped his tail.

“You’re the only one,” said
Fowler. “All through the dome they’re cussing me. Calling me a murderer, more
than likely.”

He straightened and swung back to
the desk. His hand reached out and picked up the file.

Bennett? Bennett had a girl
waiting for him back on Earth.

Andrews? Andrews was planning on
going back to Mars Tech just as soon as he earned enough to see him through a
year.

Olson? Olson was nearing pension
age. All the time telling the boys how he was going to settle down and grow
roses.

Carefully, Fowler laid the file
back on the desk.

Sentencing men to death. Miss
Stanley had said that, her pale lips scarcely moving in her parchment face.
Marching men out to die while he, Fowler, sat here safe and comfortable.

They were saying it all through
the dome, no doubt, especially since Allen had failed to return. They wouldn’t
say it to his face, of course. Even the man or men he called before this desk
and told they were the next to go, wouldn’t say it to him.

They would only say: “When do we
start?” For that was formula.

But he would see it in their
eyes.

He picked up the file again.
Bennett, Andrews, Olson. There were others, but there was no use in going on.

Kent Fowler knew that he couldn’t
do it, couldn’t face them, couldn’t send more men out to die.

He leaned forward and flipped up
the toggle on the intercommunicator.

“Yes, Mr. Fowler.”

“Miss Stanley, please.”

He waited for Miss Stanley,
listening to Towser chewing half-heartedly on the bone. Towser’s teeth were
getting bad.

“Miss Stanley,” said Miss Stanley’s
voice.

“Just wanted to tell you, Miss
Stanley, to get ready for two more.”

“Aren’t you afraid,” asked Miss
Stanley, “that you’ll run out of them? Sending out one at a time, they’d last
longer, give you twice the satisfaction.”

“One of them,” said Fowler, “will
be a dog.”

“A dog!”

“Yes, Towser.”

He heard the quick, cold rage
that iced her voice. “Your own dog! He’s been with you all these years—”

“That’s the point,” said Fowler. “Towser
would be unhappy if I left him behind.”

~ * ~

It
was not the Jupiter he had known through the televisor. He had expected it to
be different, but not like this. He had expected a hell of ammonia rain and
stinking fumes and the deafening, thundering tumult of the storm. He had
expected swirling clouds and fog and the snarling flicker of monstrous
thunderbolts.

He had not expected the lashing
downpour would be reduced to drifting purple mist that moved like fleeing
shadows over a red and purple sward. He had not even guessed the snaking bolts
of lightning would be flares of pure ecstasy across a painted sky.

Waiting for Towser, Fowler flexed
the muscles of his body, amazed at the smooth, sleek strength he found. Not a
bad body, he decided, and grimaced at remembering how he had pitied the Lopers
when he glimpsed them through the television screen.

For it had been hard to imagine a
living organism based upon ammonia and hydrogen rather than upon water and
oxygen, hard to believe that such a form of life could know the same quick
thrill of life that humankind could know. Hard to conceive of life out in the
soupy maelstrom that was Jupiter, not knowing, of course, that through Jovian
eyes it was no soupy maelstrom at all.

The wind brushed against him with
what seemed gentle fingers and he remembered with a start that by Earth standards
the wind was a roaring gale, a two-hundred-mile an hour howler laden with
deadly gases.

Pleasant scents seeped into his
body. And yet scarcely scents, for it was not the sense of smell as he
remembered it. It was as if his whole being was soaking up the sensation of
lavender—and yet not lavender. It was something, he knew, for which he had no
word, undoubtedly the first of many enigmas in terminology. For the words he
knew, the thought symbols that served him as an Earthman would not serve him as
a Jovian.

The lock in the side of the dome
opened and Towser came tumbling out—at least he thought it must be Towser.

He started to call to the dog,
his mind shaping the words he meant to say. But he couldn’t say them. There was
no way to say them. He had nothing to say them with.

For a moment his mind swirled in
muddy terror, a blind fear that eddied in little puffs of panic through his
brain.

How did Jovians talk? How—

Suddenly he was aware of Towser,
intensely aware of the bumbling, eager friendliness of the shaggy animal that
had followed him from Earth to many planets. As if the thing that was Towser
had reached out and for a moment sat within his brain.

And out of the bubbling welcome
that he sensed, came words.

“Hiya, pal.”

Not words really, better than
words. Thought symbols in his brain, communicated thought symbols that had
shades of meaning words could never have.

“Hiya, Towser,” he said.

“I feel good,” said Towser. “Like
I was a pup. Lately I’ve been feeling pretty punk. Legs stiffening up on me and
teeth wearing down to almost nothing. Hard to mumble a bone with teeth like
that. Besides the fleas give me trouble. Used to be I never paid much attention
to them. A couple of fleas more or less never meant much in my early days.”