The Silent Partners
by Bob Shaw
At first he could see nothing about her except that she was dressed in furs, then that her hair was blonde and, in spite of the night wind, as smooth as glass. When the woman drew nearer he made out the glitter of jewellery at her ears and throat, and of gold at her wrists. Then he could see her face, which was beautiful. He did not know the woman and yet her face was almost familiar, like that of someone he might have dreamt of a long time ago.
Purvey crouched in the utter darkness of the bushes and waited for her to come within reach.
From where he had stationed himself he could see both lamplit entrances to the tiny park, and something of the quiet suburban streets beyond. It was strange then that he had not noticed the woman come through the gates, but perhaps he had overdone it with the whisky while he was waiting. It was years now since he had had to go out and actually rob somebody, and his nerves had needed damping down with alcohol. The outlook in the confidence business was pretty bleak when a practitioner of twenty years’ standing had to resort to outright robbery.
Taking a deep breath, he slid the pistol from his pocket and quickly stepped out on to the path. “Don’t make a sound,” he warned the woman. “Just hand over your purse and that stuff you’re wearing.” He stared into her face, trying to gauge whether she was the type to do as she was told or the unpredictable, troublesome variety of customer.
In the dim light coming from the street Purvey saw that something had gone terribly wrong with the beautiful face. His hand flew nervously to his mouth and he took a step backwards, raising the pistol protectively.
The woman sagged bonelessly, crumpled, withered away in a second, leaving nothing but a small dark object writhing on the ground at Purvey’s feet. With a moan of sheer despair he turned to run …
He was much too late.
Purvey very rarely dreamed, but when he was twelve years old he had once had a nightmare in which he had committed suicide by lying in a coffin with earth and roses in it. The thorns had pierced his flesh and drawn the blood from him—making the roses flourish and bloom—until he had been sucked dry and was lying dead beneath a beautiful living shroud of blossoms. Then, as one can do in dreams, he had realized he did not want to commit suicide, after all.
He had that same feeling now.
Huge fleshy leaves and dozens of dark green tendrils lay across his chest and face, stirring slightly in the wind and sending exploratory tricklets of cold water into his clothing. Summoning all his strength, he pushed the tangled mass aside, sat up and realized at once that he was aboard a spaceship. He had been back and forth to the Langrangian colonies in moon orbit enough times to enable him to recognize the sensation, even though his surroundings looked less like the interior of a spaceship than almost anything else he had seen.
The low, almost circular room was brilliantly lit from the ceiling in some places and dark in others, giving an impression of shadowy vastness quite out of keeping with its true size. The walls were dark brown and streaming with moisture. Large fans, positioned at intervals around the walls, were making random-seeming movements on their bearings and creating a cold, irregular wind.
The floor was covered with a thin coating of mud from which jutted a disorderly clutter of instrument pedestals, machine housings, cables and low partitions. There appeared to be nobody in the room but himself.
Purvey scrambled to his feet, almost fell with dizziness, and made his way over to one of the instrument stands which was emitting a red glow and a peculiar high-pitched whistle which kept changing in tone. On the pedestal was a small screen depicting a few brilliant stars against a background of crimson space. The markings on the dials were little blobs of many different colours.
He made a circuit of the room, assuring himself that it was empty, then he began shouting for someone to come and let him out. Nobody came. Purvey was feeling dizzier by the minute as though the air contained some insidious intoxicant. He crossed the room, falling once on the slippery mud, and stood staring down at the little view screen, wondering how he got into the nightmarish predicament.
All at once his memory of recent events iced into sharp focus in his mind—the woman in the park! How could he have forgotten that hideously dissolving face or the way she had turned into the indescribable thing on the ground? He ran his fingers over the smooth glass of the view screen, feeling slightly relieved at the realization that she, it, was not in the immediate vicinity.
Something behind him made a wet, slithering sound.
Purvey spun round, feeling his mouth drag itself out of shape with fear. The dark green stuff which had been spilling across his face and chest when he awoke had come crawling after him, leaving a broad trail behind it in the mud. In the centre of the mass of leaves and tendrils Purvey glimpsed a complicated, knobbly core about half a metre in diameter. Some of the tendrils ended in shiny black beads which looked as though they might serve the function of eyes.
Purvey backed away from the thing and felt in his pocket for the pistol. It was not there. When a wall ended his retreat he stood staring at the moving growth as it laboured towards him propelled by some dimly seen agitation under its core. It stopped advancing when it was about one human pace away from him and remained motionless for what seemed to Purvey a long, long time. Then he noticed that—across one huge leaf on top of the mass—faint letters bleached out in a lighter green had appeared.
The thing was trying to communicate with him.
“You shall have gold,” the letters spelled out. The black-beaded tendrils waved gently in the air, and the odour of the thing reached up to Purvey—the smell of dusty ivy growing on a decaying wall.
Purvey, responding to one of his favourite words, was immediately less apprehensive. “What for?” He sank down on to his heels and tried to peer into the depths of the apparently intelligent vegetation. “Why will I have gold?”
Another long pause ensued, then the green writing faded and was replaced by, “Explosion wrecked part of ship,” then, “including repair shop,” then, “Lurr has made rough repairs,” then, “you are highly mobile,” then, “you will stand by during trip,” then, “Lurr will pay with gold.”
“I don’t know how to repair spaceships,” Purvey pointed out, playing for time in which to think.
“The work will be simple. You are mobile. I will direct you.” The sentences took a long time to come across by means of the thing’s, Lurr’s, controlled etiolation effect.
Purvey groped around in his pocket and found a flattened pack of cigarettes and a permatch. When he struck the match it burned with a large brilliant flame, and he guessed that the air in the ship was loaded with oxygen. That might explain why he felt so dizzy, almost drunk. He blew out the match with some difficulty, put it away, and drew deeply on the cigarette, relishing it.
“Will you take me back to Earth afterwards?”
“Yes.”
Purvey considered asking Lurr to promise, but decided against it as he had no way of knowing how much the vegetable’s word was worth. It might be no more trustworthy than some of his friends.
“I’d like to know how you got me here,” he said. “It seemed a bit … sort of unethical.” Not the sort of behaviour one would expect from a salad citizen, he thought reprovingly, but there was no reply to his question. He noticed that the black beads had dulled, as though Lurr had gone to sleep. Purvey snorted disgustedly. He crouched against the wall, coat collar turned up, and finished his cigarette. The only sound in the room was the restless whispering of the fans on the wall above.
Some time later, after a period of uneasy sleep, Purvey woke up with a new problem.