boucher book oct28.pdf - Index of

288 Anthony Boucher
The man from the colony base was on a routine patrol—a patrol imposed by the
captain for reasons of discipline and activity-for-activity’s-sake rather than from any
need for protection in this uninhabited waste. He had seen, over beyond the next
rise, what he would have sworn was the braking blaze of a landing rocket—if he
hadn’t known that the next rocket wasn’t due for another week. Six and a half days,
to be exact, or even more exactly, six days, eleven hours, and twenty-three minutes,
Greenwich Interplanetary. He knew the time so exactly because he, along with half
the garrison, Father Malloy, and those screwball Israelis, was due for rotation then. So
no matter how much it looked like a rocket, it couldn’t be one; but it was something
happening on his patrol, for the first time since he’d come to this God-forsaken hole,
and he might as well look into it and get his name on a report.
The man from the spaceship also knew the boredom of the empty planet. Alone
of his crew, he had been there before, on the first voyage when they took the samples
and set up the observation autoposts. But did that make the captain even listen to
him? Hell, no; the captain knew all about the planet from the sample analyses and
had no time to listen to a guy who’d really been there. So all he got out of it was the
privilege of making the first reconnaissance. Big deal! One fast look around reconnoitering
a few googols of sand grains and then back to the ship. But there was some
kind of glow over that rise there. It couldn’t be lights; theirs was the scout ship, none
of the others had landed yet. Some kind of phos-phorescent life they’d missed the
first time round … ? Maybe now the captain would believe that the sample analyses
didn’t tell him everything.
The two men met at the top of the rise.
One man saw the horror of seemingly numberless limbs, of a headless torso, of
a creature so alien that it walked in its glittering bare flesh in this freezing cold and
needed no apparatus to supplement the all but nonexistent air.
One man saw the horror of an unbelievably meager four limbs, of a torso
topped with an ugly lump like some unnatural growth, of a creature so alien that
it smothered itself with heavy clothing in this warm climate and cut itself off from
this invigorating air.
And both men screamed and ran.
“There is an interesting doctrine,” said Rabbi Acosta, “advanced by one of your
writers, C. S. Lewis …”
“He was an Episcopalian,” said Father Malloy sharply.
“I apologize.” Acosta refrained from pointing out that Anglo-Catholic would
have been a more accurate term. “But I believe that many in your church have found
his writings, from your point of view, doctrinally sound? He advances the doctrine
of what he calls hnaus—intelligent beings with souls who are the children of God,
whatever their physical shape or planet of origin.”
“Look, Chaim,” said Malloy with an effort toward patience. “Doctrine or no doctrine,
there just plain aren’t any such beings. Not in this solar system anyway. And if
you’re going to go interstellar on me, I’d just as soon read the men’s microcomics.”
“Interplanetary travel existed only in such literature once. But of course if you’d
rather play chess …”
“My specialty,” said the man once known to sports writers as Mule Malloy, “was