“Say what?”
“The kids. Yours and mine. I'm almost proud of them.
Imagine seizing these creatures, feeding them or trying to, and keeping them hidden. The amazing gall of it. Red told me it was his idea to get a job in a circus on the strength of them. Imagine!”
The Astronomer said, “Youth!”
Thirteen
The Merchant said, “Will we be taking off soon?”
“Half an hour,” said the Explorer.
It was going to be a lonely trip back. All the remaining seventeen of the crew were dead and their ashes were to be left on a strange planet. Back they would go with a limping ship and the burden of the controls entirely on himself.
The Merchant said, “It was a good business stroke, not harming the young ones. We will get very good terms; very good terms.”
The Explorer thought, Business!
The Merchant said, “They've lined up to see us off. All of them. You don't think they're too close, do you? It would be bad to burn any of them with the rocket blast at this stage of the game.”
“They're safe.”
“Horrible-looking things, aren't they?”
“Pleasant enough, inside. Their thoughts are perfectly friendly.”
“You wouldn't believe it of them. That immature one, the one that first picked us up-”
“They call him Red.”
“That's a queer name for a monster. Makes me laugh. He actually feels bad that we're leaving. Only I can't make out exactly why. The nearest I can come to it is something about a lost opportunity with some organization or other that I can't quite interpret.”
“A circus,” said the Explorer briefly.
“What? Why, the impertinent monstrosity.”
“Why not? What would you have done if you had found him wandering on your native world; found him sleeping on a field on Earth, red tentacles, six legs, pseudopods and all?”
Fourteen
Red watched the ship leave. His red tentacles, which gave him his nickname, quivered their regret at lost opportunity to the very last, and the eyes at their tips filled with drifting yellowish crystals that were the equivalent of Earthly tears.
The Deep
One
In the end, any particular planet must die. It may be a quick death as its sun explodes. It may be a slow death, as its sun sinks into decay and its oceans lock in ice. In the latter case, at least, intelligent life has a chance of survival.
The direction of survival may be outward into space, to a planet closer to the cooling sun or to a planet of another sun altogether. This particular avenue is closed if the planet is unfortunate enough to be the only significant body rotating about its primary and if, at the time, no other star is within half a thousand light-years.
The direction of survival may be inward, into the crust of the planet. That is always available. A new home can be built underground and the heat of the planet's core can be tapped for energy. Thousands of years may be necessary for the task, but a dying sun cools slowly.
But planetary warmth dies, too, with time. Burrows must be dug deeper and deeper until the planet is dead through and through.
The time was coming.
On the surface of the planet, wisps of neon blew listlessly, barely able to stir the pools of oxygen that collected in the lowlands. Occasionally, during the long day, the crusted sun would flare briefly into a dull red glow and the oxygen pools would bubble a little.
During the long night, a blue-white oxygen frost formed over the pools and on the bare rock, a neon dew formed.
Eight hundred miles below the surface, a last bubble of warmth and life existed.
Two
Wenda's relationship to Roi was as close as one could imagine, closer by far than it was decent for her to know.
She had been allowed to enter the ovarium only once in her life and it had been made quite clear to her that it was to be only that once.
The Raceologist had said, “You don't quite meet the standards, Wenda, but you are fertile and we'll try you once. It may work out.”
She wanted it to work out. She wanted it desperately. Quite early in her life she had known that she was deficient in intelligence, that she would never be more than a Manual. It embarrassed her that she should fail the Race and she longed for a single chance to help create another being. It became an obsession.
She secreted her egg in an angle of the structure and then returned to watch. The “randoming” process that moved the eggs gently about during mechanical insemination (to insure even gene distribution) did not, by some good fortune, do more than make her own wedged-in egg wobble a bit
Unobtrusively she maintained her watch during the period of maturation, observed the little one who emerged from the particular egg that was hers, noted his physical markings, watched him grow.
He was a healthy youngster and the Raceologist approved of him.
She had said once, very casually, “Look at that one, the one sitting there. Is he sick?”
“Which one?” The Raceologist was startled. Visibly sick infants at this stage would be a strong reflection upon his own competence. “You mean Roi? Nonsense. I wish all our young were like that one.” I
At first, she was only pleased with herself, then frightened, finally horrified. She found herself haunting the youngster, taking an interest in his schooling, watching him at play. She was happy when he was near, dull and unhappy otherwise. She had never heard of such a thing, and she was ashamed.
She should have visited the Mentalist, but she knew better. She was not so dull as not to know that this was not a mild aberration to be cured at the twitch of a brain cell. It was a truly psychotic manifestation. She was certain of that. They would confine her if they found out. They would euthanase her, perhaps, as a useless drain on the strictly limited energy available to the race. They might even euthanase the offspring of her egg if they found out who it was.
She fought the abnormality through the years and, to a measure, succeeded. Then she first heard the news that Rio had been chosen for the long trip and was filled with aching misery.
She followed him to one of the empty corridors of the cavern, some miles from the city center. The city! There was only one.
This particular cavern had been closed down within Wenda's own memory. The Elders had paced its length, considered its population and the energy necessary to keep it powered, then decided to darken it. The population, not many to be sure, had been moved closer toward the center and the quota for the next session at the ovarium had been cut.
Wenda found Rio's conversational level of thinking shallow, as though most of his mind had drawn inward contemplatively.
Are you afraid? she thought at him.
Because I come out here to think? He hesitated a little, then said, “Yes, I am. It's the Race's last chance. If I fail-”
Are you afraid for yourself?
He looked at her in astonishment and Wenda's thought stream fluttered with shame at her indecency.
She said, “I wish I were going instead.”
Roi said, “Do you think you can do a better job?”
“Oh, no. But if I were to fail and-and never come back, it would be a smaller loss to the Race.”
“The loss is all the same,” he said stolidly, “whether it's you or I. The loss is Racial existence.”
Racial existence at the moment was in the background of Wenda's mind, if anywhere. She sighed. “The trip is such a long one.”