Only the golden indicators burned now-full to the top, the deep vats brimming, golden-lipped, gravid, a month before the time. Wesson shuddered.
Water spurted in the bathroom, hissing steadily on the tiles, rattling in the plastic bowl at the bottom of the shower stall. The light winked on and off again. In the dining room, he heard the autochef clucking and sighing. The freezing wind blew harder; he was numb with cold to the hips. It seemed to Wesson abruptly that he was not at the top of the sky at all, but down, down at the bottom of the sea-trapped in this steel bubble, while the dark poured in.
The pain in his head was gone, as if it had never been there, and he understood what that meant: Up there, the great body was hanging like butcher’s carrion in the darkness. Its death struggles were over, the damage done.
Wesson gathered a desperate breath, shouted, “Help me! The alien’s dead! He kicked the Station apart-the methane’s coming in! Get help, do you hear me? Do you hear me?”
Silence. In the smothering blackness, he remembered: She can’t understand me anymore. Even if she’s alive.
He turned, making an animal noise in his throat. He groped his way on around the room, past the second doorway. Behind the walls, something Was dripping with a slow cold tinkle and splash, a forlorn night sound. Small, hard, floating things rapped against his legs. Then he touched a smooth curve of metal-the air lock.
Eagerly he pushed his feeble weight against the door. It didn’t move. Cold air was rushing out around the door frame, a thin knife-cold stream, but the door itself was jammed tight.
The suit! He should have thought of that before. If he just had some pure air to breathe and a little warmth in his fingers… But the door of the suit locker would not move, either. The ceiling must have buckled.
And that was the end, he thought, bewildered. There were no more ways out. But there had to be… He pounded on the door until his arms would not lift anymore; it did not move. Leaning against the chill metal, he saw a single light blink on overhead.
The room was a wild place of black shadows and swimming shapes-the book leaves, fluttering and darting in the air stream. Schools of them beat wildly at the walls, curling over, baffled, trying again; others were swooping around the outer corridor, around and around; he could see them whirling past the doorways, dreamlike, a white drift of silent paper in the darkness.
The acrid smell was harsher in his nostrils. Wesson choked, groping his way to the console again. He pounded it with his open hand, crying weakly-he wanted to see Earth.
But when the little square of brightness leaped up, it was the dead body of the alien that Wesson saw.
It hung motionless in the cavity of the Station, limbs dangling stiff and still, eyes dull. The last turn of the screw had been too much for it. But Wesson had survived…
For a few minutes.
The dead alien face mocked him; a whisper of memory floated into his mind: We might have been brothers… All at once Wesson passionately wanted to believe it-wanted to give in, turn back. That passed. Wearily he let himself sag into the bitter now, thinking with thin defiance, It’s done-hate wins. You’ll have to stop this big giveaway-can’t risk this happening again. And we’ll hate you for that-and when we get out to the stars-
The world was swimming numbly away out of reach. He felt the last fit of coughing take his body, as if it were happening to someone else besides him.
The last fluttering leaves of paper came to rest. There was a long silence in the drowned room.
Then:
“Paul,” said the voice of the mechanical woman brokenly; “Paul,” it said again, with the hopelessness of lost, unknown, impossible love.
EACH AN EXPLORER
by Isaac Asimov
Dr. Asimov is an expert on non-human life, as well as on nonliving intelligence. As the author of “I, Robot,” he is probably the world’s foremost (fictional) authority on the positronic brain and “robopsychology,” and is the originator of the “three basic laws of robotics” (which have by now become the axiomatic property of all science-fiction writers). As a biochemist working in cancer research, he is in daily contact with life-forms both microscopic and monstrous.
Here he develops the reverse of Mr. Knight’s theme. The most disgusting slobs of e-t’s may be gentlemen under their scaly skins, warns the learned doctor, but the friendliest and most innocuous li’l fellas may also be dangerous.
Herman Chouns was a man of hunches. Sometimes he was right; sometimes he was wrong—about fifty-fifty. Still, considering that one has the whole universe of possibilities from which to pull a right answer, fifty-fifty begins to look pretty good.
Chouns wasn’t always as pleased with the matter as might be expected. It put too much of a strain on him. People would huddle around a problem, making nothing of it, then turn to him and say, “What do you think, Chouns? Turn on the old intuition.”
And if he came up with something that fizzled, the responsibility for that was made clearly his.
His job, as field explorer, rather made things worse.
“Think that planet’s worth a closer look?” they would say. “What do you think, Chouns?”
So it was a relief to draw a two-man spot for a change (meaning that the next trip would be to some low-priority place, and the pressure would be off) and, on top of it, to get Allen Smith as partner.
Smith was as matter-of-fact as his name. He said to Chouns the first day out, “The thing about you is that the memory files in your brain are on extraspecial call. Faced with a problem, you remember enough little things that maybe the rest of us don’t come up with to make a decision. Calling it a hunch just makes it mysterious, and it isn’t.”
He rubbed his hair slickly back as he said that. He had light hair that lay down like a skull cap.
Chouns, whose hair was very unruly, and whose nose was snub and a bit off-center, said softly (as was his way), “I think maybe it’s telepathy.”
“What!”
“Nuts!” said Smith, with loud derision (as was his way). “Scientists have been tracking psionics for a thousand years and gotten nowhere. There’s no such thing: no precognition; no telekinesis; no clairvoyance; and no telepathy.”
“I admit that, but consider this. If I get a picture of what each of a group of people are thinking—even though I might not be aware of what was happening—I could integrate the information and come up with an answer. I would know more than any single individual in the group, so I could make a better judgment than the others—sometimes.”
“Do you have any evidence at all for that?”
Chouns turned his mild brown eyes on the other. “Just a hunch.”
They got along well. Chouns welcomed the other’s refreshing practicality, and Smith patronized the other’s speculations. They often disagreed but never quarreled.
Even when they reached their objective, which was a globular cluster that had never felt the energy thrusts of a human-designed nuclear reactor before, increasing tension did not worsen matters.
Smith said, “Wonder what they do with all this data back on Earth. Seems a waste sometimes.”
Chouns said, “Earth is just beginning to spread out. No telling how far humanity will move out into the galaxy, given a million years or so. All the data we can get on any world will come in handy someday.”