Collected short fiction, p.771
Collected Short Fiction, page 771
Frankie was turning pink till Meriden touched his arm.
“At least we’re safe.” She swung hopefully to Kallio. “So long as we get back home—”
“Ishtar’s loading fuel,” he assured her. “Lifting early tomorrow.”
“Without me,” Frankie said.
We all stared at him. I thought he’d gone crazy. He pushed his plate away, half his meal uneaten, and sat scrubbing that wispy moustache with a lean forefinger. Abruptly he frowned at Meriden.
“Merry—” He stopped and gulped, turning pinker. “You remember our wager.” He stabbed an odd glance at me. “It’s awkward. I hate to be welshing, but I’m not coming home. I must talk to the worms.”
“Sir?” Kallio looked stunned. “Sir?”
“I must find them.” With an air of solemn regret, Frankie shook his head at Meriden. “I must ask them—” His big Adam’s apple bobbed up and down. “Ask them to forgive me.”
“Really, sir?” Kallio’s rusty voice lifted unbelievingly. “Do you imagine you’ll ever find another?”
“I’ll keep looking till I do.” His narrow jaw jutted stubbornly. “I want you to build me a long-range crawler, equipped and supplied to search all the seismic zones.”
“Even if you meet them, sir, will they ever understand?”
“They’ll have to, because I killed their child.”
Sitting farther down the table, the mechanic shook his head and shrugged at me. And Frankie stayed on Venus to hunt another fireworm. I watched Meriden kiss him goodbye next morning before we went aboard the Ishtar. I think she still felt sorry for him.
But not too sorry.
1993
The Litlins
Jack Williamson’s next novel, Demon Moon, is awaiting publication. His most recent appearance in F&SF was in our October/November issue in 1992. For more on Jack’s career, please see the editorial.
“The Litlins” was originally a novel idea that didn’t quite have enough material to sustain a longer work. Luckily for us, Jack has turned it into a strong science fiction story.
MAROONED ON MARS FOR twenty years, I escaped alone.
We had come feeling like young gods staking out a new creation. Landing the shuttle in the great Hellas Basin, we brought the reactor module down for power and the main cabin for a temporary habitat, set up the signal system, ran rover surveys, and waited through a long Mars year for the Marineris to bring the relief team and take us home. It never came. We never knew why. All we ever had was a single brief message from the lunar relay station.
“Marineris scrubbed. Explanation to follow.”
No explanation followed, nor anything else. Listening when Earth swung back around the sun, all we heard was a garbled distress call that seemed to come from a military spacecraft we could not identify.
“. . . station abandoned . . . enemy . . . litlins aboard . . .”
That was all. We could only wonder who the enemy had been and what litlins were, though we had left the world in trouble enough. Ozone depletion, global warming, glaciers and icecaps thawing, lowlands flooding, uplands gone to desert, famines everywhere. That’s why we’d come to Mars, inspired by grand dreams of doing better on a new and unspoiled planet. Eight of us.
Eight was not enough.
Waiting for rescue through conjunction after slow conjunction, we’d watched the blue Earth appear and brighten slowly in the murky dawns and dusks as its orbit brought it past us, watched it fade and vanish, till all hope had died. No relief craft ever came, nor any signal we could hear.
Fungus killed the greenhouse crops. Something in the dust proved deadly to us, and dust was everywhere. Lifted by storm winds when the seasons changed, it dyed the whole sky tomato-red. When our masks and medical supplies ran out, it killed three men and two women. Companions I had nursed and fought, helped and hated, learned to love, finally grieved.
Left with only Olga and Elena, I decided to go home.
Elena coughed and spat red dust and asked if I meant to teleport.
“Why?” Olga asked. “What can you hope to find?”
I couldn’t teleport, but we had the lander and nothing else to live for. The old Olympus was still out in orbit, though cannibalized of engine and life support and even half the wiring. Loyally, sick and weak as we all were, they toiled with me through more cruel years, rebuilding it. Even with the reactor finally back in place and fuel mass aboard, we had space and life support for only one.
When the takeoff window opened, Olga tossed the smooth-worn ten-ruble lucky piece that had brought so little luck to anybody. I called heads. Elena picked up the coin, made a face at me, and whispered that she’d always meant to die a Martian. She tossed it again. Olga snatched it before I could see, and said its luck had never been for her. Accepting that, swallowing the shame, I took off alone.
Earth looked lovely when I got near enough to see its disk, blue and swirled with blazing white against the dark, but my calls from space got no response I understood. TV signals were flickering blurs, radio a chorus of squeaks that might have come from a colony of mice.
Nearer, I searched the clouds and haze for Texas, where I was born. My happiest times had been the long summers on my Uncle Clint’s hill country ranch, riding fence through the mesquite, rounding up the longhorns he bred because he said they were survivors, listening to the sad Mexican songs the vaqueros sang. I longed for it now, an island of permanence and peace.
Clint had liked me enough to hint that it might come down to me if I wanted to stay with him. That seemed too easy. Looking for a larger life, I’d won the Zorch scholarship that took me through to grad school and finally all the way to Mars.
Zorch never intended that. He was a genetic engineer, driven by his own wild dream that he could breed mutant plants magical enough to feed the crowded planet. Neidra Nom and I had been among his “wizard kids,” as the media liked to call us, the bright youngsters he chose from nowhere and trained to staff his research lab.
Brighter than I was, Neidra had been slim and violet-eyed, as lovely as her unlikely name. She’d loved me, I never knew why. We lived together till she went into Zorch’s Bion Labs after graduation. She wanted me with her, but I’d caught my own dream of Mars from the videos the probes brought back.
She cried the rest of the night when I told her I was going, and made me come with her to see Zorch next morning. She worshiped him, a huge bear of a man with a bullfrog voice and ambitions as large as Earth. His office was half laboratory, walled with workbenches and computer terminals and a tall electron microscope.
What caught my eye was the odd clutter of toys on his desk. A model steam engine I’d have given half my life for when I was seven years old. A tiny power hammer loaded on a mouse-sized truck that looked ready to run. Enough perfect little miniatures to equip a doll’s machine shop, and neat little plastic cases lined with foam shaped to fit them.
Lovely toys, but why did he want them?
He was showing Neidra a new computer, a working model so tiny that he held a reading glass over it and used a toothpick to touch the keys. I got only a nod till she told him I wanted to break my contract with the corporation. He glared at me then with an outrage I never forgot, his eyes the color of steel behind old-fashioned black-rimmed glasses.
“Mars, Kellahin?” he roared at me. “What do you want on Mars?”
I tried to say.
“Nothing there!” he cut me off. “If you’re looking for a better human future, Bion’s building it here. With bio-engineering. We can create food for a thousand times the people. And create space for them to live in.”
He had no time to hear my startled skepticism.
“Wait.” He shook his head at Neidra when she wanted to explain. “Let him wait till our patents clear.”
Her sick face made me sorry for her, but I broke the contract and went on to Mars. Now, searching the cloudy planet for Texas, I thought their vast dreams must have failed as dismally as mine.
FLIGHT SKILLS dulled by those twenty years, I had to circle the planet twice to find the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex. Dust fever and Martian gravity had left me helpless against the gees of landing. I tried to set the lander’s robot pilot to set us down at DFW. I must have bungled.
We crashed. Groggily conscious afterward, I found myself trapped in the flattened pilot bubble, too heavy to move. Aching everywhere, I felt blood drying stickily on my face. I lay trapped in the wreckage, listening for help that never came.
Once I heard a tiny scurry somewhere under me. It paused and came again, seemed nearer, passed above, and finally ceased. I heard no fire, felt no heat, smelled no smoke. My bruises throbbed, but I found no broken bones. A ray of hot sunlight struck through a shattered viewport overhead. It showed a scrap of blue and dazzling sky, good to see after the dull red murk of Mars, but never a human face.
Gritting my teeth against the pain, I wormed to reach a water bottle and the last of my hoarded rations. The yellow sunbeam crawled across my chest and climbed the crumpled metal around me, narrowed and died. I slept and shivered and ached in the dark, woke and hoped again.
On the third day, hammering and prying my way with a steel bar broken off the seat, I reached the escape hatch. It was jammed. I battered at it till I passed out, battered and passed out again, till it came open on a wet and unrevealing dusk. At last, next morning, I crawled off the lander into a hot glare of sunlight on empty runways.
A flock of crows cawed and rose, but I saw nothing else alive. The fields of flat gray concrete showed no harm except from years of weathering. The standing airliners bore faded names and emblems I remembered, but no engines screamed. The jetways at the terminal gates lay where storms had tumbled them, twisted crazily, bleached rags and weathered oddments from broken luggage scattered around them. Except for the crows, the only sound I heard was a dry rattle of something against my foot.
A naked human skull in a pile of time-bleached bones.
I stood there a long time, numbed and reeling, wondering blankly why I should care. My old dream of returning to a brighter life with Neidra had faded long ago. Olga and Elena were doubtless dead by now. Was I a modern ghost, lost in a world of ghosts, with nothing better left to live for?
Yet I had to care. In our hard training for the mission and the harder years on Mars, I’d learned to look to basics and keep myself alive. Whatever the catastrophe, I was here, I was hungry, the water bottle empty. If the killer of the planet was still at work, I had to know its name.
Clues, however, were hard to find.
Tall weeds and here and there a sapling had pushed through cracked concrete, which must mean that many years had passed since the last planes took off. I saw no marks of bombs or fire or any source of harm. I glanced into an ambulance and saw a huddle of bones. Yet most of the rusting vehicles looked undamaged, as if they had simply been abandoned. An open doorway let me peer into the terminal; sickening odors kept me out. Death must have came fast and unforeseen.
Still too weak for the gravity, I scrabbled for tarnished keys among the bones beside an empty police car and climbed inside. The battery had died long ago. Walking on when I found strength and will to walk, I took all morning getting off the airport into the suburbs around it. Once-neat homes stood ruined in forests of shrubs grown to trees, shingles missing, gutters falling, broken windows blind. Looking into them, I discovered skeletons and evil odors, but nothing left alive.
Giddy with thirst and hunger before noon came, I used a rock to smash my way into a convenience store that looked intact. Mice and rats had been at the stock, but the roof had not leaked. I found unrusted cans of sausage and tomatoes and corn, washed them down with dead and tasteless diet sodas. That night I slept in an empty van that puzzled me with the dimming legends on its sides.
Odd tools and tanks and coils of plastic tubing lay rotting and rusting in the van. Gear for killing litlins? Some rat-like household pest that must have become something worse? I had no way to know.
In a still and blazing afternoon, I blundered out of that soundless desolation into something stranger. Beyond the cracked and weedy pavement of an unused highway, I came upon a seamless carpet of something that looked like moss or very short grass stretching off as far as I could see.
Nothing broke that velvet turf, no trees or homes or barns or other works of man. No creature grazed it. No bird or insect flew. Billboards behind me had peeled or faded or fallen; beyond that empty road something had removed them all. I heard no sound, saw no motion—till something whined and I saw a doll-sized police car darting toward me on a road I had overlooked, a strip of gray pavement not half a meter wide. Far away along it, I found the rooftops of a distant town.
Red-tiled houses on tree-lined streets. Half a dozen taller buildings around a bright golden dome. A freight train creeping along a row of grain elevators. I stood wondering if I had strength to walk there till I heard the police siren shrilling like an angry hornet and saw six-inch men tumbling out of the car.
Perception had shifted when I looked again. The town had become a city of toys, hardly a quarter-mile away. Or was I gone mad? Sick from too many riddles, I groped for anything I could understand. This was my native Earth. The cloudless sky was softly blue, not the orange-red of Mars. The air was warm and natural, scented with a summer sweetness. I breathed with no need of pressure gear. The hot sun felt good on my naked face.
Yet terror gripped me.
I stood there swaying, the gravity abruptly crushing. This toy world was a second jolt, more dazing than all the evidence of holocaust behind me. Through all those desperate years on Mars, I’d imagined mischance in many shapes, but none so utterly insane.
Had this different oxygen and gravity done something to my brain? Or was I still on Mars, sick from starvation and the bitter dust, dying perhaps in Elena’s arms, all these dreadful riddles of mankind’s end and this Lilliputian landscape my last hallucinations?
Lilliputian?
The word echoed in my mind. Were these tiny people the “litlins?” The “enemy” of that final signal? Or was all this only my own sick imagination? I blinked and peered again at that golden dome and the flat velvet landscape beyond it. Taller shapes rose along the green horizon, most of them mysterious, though one cluster of taller towers might have been some artist’s dream of his ideal future world.
Something stung my neck. Rubbing at the spot, I found the unhealed cuts from the crash, the hard flakes of dried blood, the rough stubble on my chin. All sticky with grime and sweat, too real to be illusion. What was I to think?
The sting began to burn. Numbness spread across my cheek. My head swam. Uncertain of anything, I heard another insect whine and a high-pitched squeaking at my feet. A tiny ambulance had followed the police car, and little men were tumbling out of it to aim tiny cameras at me and the enormous footprints I had left in the field.
I staggered away, the dead human city behind me seeming suddenly simpler and safer than this crazy toyland. The police car jolted off the road to follow me, mosquito siren shrieking. I tried to run and stumbled. Something came droning close to my head. Clumsily, I batted at it. My hand struck nothing, but I saw a hawk-sized aircraft climbing away.
Something popped. Something popped again. Little puffs of gray-green smoke expanded around my head. A whiff of hot and acrid bitterness took my breath. I knew I was falling, and tried not to crush the little men. . . .
I woke naked, lying in bed between clean sheets. For only an instant, I clung to a dream where I had been a child again, back in my mother’s home and eager to open a birthday gift from my Uncle Clint, perhaps the cowboy boots I’d longed for. Shocked wide awake when memory came, I discovered a gray-walled room around me, a normal human bedroom, almost a copy of my old room at home.
No bruises ached when I moved. Gravity was no longer quite so crushing. Fingering my face, I found it shaven smooth, beard and grime and clotted blood removed, the lacerations of the crash smoothly healed. Or was this another dream?
Music came on when I sat up. The score of Transmania, which had been a hit the year we went to space. I was alone, no little men visible. Clean and neatly compact, the room contained a tall bookcase standing at one end, a table and chair by an open doorway, two windows in the opposite wall.
Only one window, really. The other perplexed me till I saw that it was a holographic picture, so sharp that the people in it looked almost alive. They stood on a hill, a rosy halo bathing them. I stepped closer, and they took my breath.
Neidra Nom and Herman Zorch!
They stood together. Zorch smiled down through those odd black-rimmed glasses at a little man and woman kneeling on the palms of his two open hands. A tiny girl between the two was offering him a huge red rosebud, its stem as tall as she was.
I stood there a long time, trying to find some sense in the scene. The little people wore expressions of rapt devotion. A tender pride lit Neidra’s eyes, but Zorch’s austere features were etched with lines of pain or sorrow. The whole scene dumbfounded me again.
I remembered those tiny machines on his desk, and the miracles they’d expected from genetic engineering. Were the litlins their creation? A lunatic experiment gone unthinkably wrong?
Shaking and weak in the knees, I sat back on the side of the bed. The holograph had changed when I looked again. Zorch had raised those steel-blue eyes, staring away as if he saw some arresting vision in the sky. The little people had turned to Neidra, the child offering her the gigantic rose. Lips parted as if to speak, she seemed so real that I shut my eyes against the pain of memory.
Yet I had learned to live with all the cruelties of Mars. When my breathing had slowed, I walked to the actual window. That green velvet landscape sloped to the shore of a calm blue lake. Perhaps half a mile beyond it, the silvery domes and spires of another fairy city shimmered in the sunlight. A miniature train came fast around the lake and across a graceful bridge. I watched till it was gone.
