boucher book oct28.pdf - Index of

382 Anthony Boucher
Later, when he thought he was alone, I overheard him talking to himself. There
was something so emphatically inimical in his thought patterns that I transcribed
his words, though I have not yet had a chance to secure Trubz’s opinion on them.
He beat the clenched digits of one forelimb against the other and said:
SO THAT’S WHAT YOU’RE UP TO! WE’LL SEE ABOUT THAT. BUT
HOW? HOW … ? GOT IT! THOSE PICTURES I TOOK FOR THE PUBLIC
HEALTH CAMPAIGN …
I am worried. If this attitude indicated by his thought patterns persists, we
may have to bring about his extinction and proceed at once by ourselves. At
least it will give Lilil a chance to compose one of his masterpieces.
Final Report of the First Interplanetary Exploratory Expedition, presented by
Falzik, specialist in reporting:
How I could so completely have misinterpreted the man’s thought patterns
I do not understand. Trubz is working on the psychology of it. Far from
any hatred or enmity, the man was even then resolving to save our lives. The
First Interplanetary Exploratory Expedition owes him a debt that it can never
repay.
It was after sunup the next day that he approached us with his noble change
of heart. As I describe this scene I cannot unfortunately give his direct words;
I was too carried away by my own emotions to remember to transcribe. Such
phrases as I attribute to him here are reconstructed from the complex of our
intercourse and were largely a matter of signs and pictures.
What he did first was to show us one of his pictures. We stared at it and
drew back horrified. For it represented a being closely allied to us, almost to
be taken for one of us, meeting extinction beneath a titanic weapon wielded
by what was obviously the characteristic five-digited forelimb of a man. And
that forelimb was many, many times the size of the being resembling us.
“I’ve been keeping this from you,” he informed us. “I’ll admit I’ve been trying
to trap you. But the truth is: I’m a dwarf man. The real ones are as much bigger
than me as you are bigger than the kitten. More, even. And their favorite
pastime—only they call it a sport, not art—is killing bugs like you.”
We realized now what should have struck us before—the minute size of
his structure compared with those which we had seen before. Obviously he
spoke the truth—he was a dwarf specimen of his race.
Then he produced more pictures—horrible, terrifying, monstrous pictures,
all showing something perturbingly like us meeting cruel extinction at the
whim of a man.
“I’ve just been keeping you here,” he said, “until some real members of my
race could come and play with you. They’d like it. But I haven’t got the heart
to do it. I like you, and what you told me about your art convinces me that you
don’t deserve extinction like that. So I’m giving you your chance: Clear out of
here and stay away from this planet. It’s the most unsafe place in the universe
for your kind. If you dread extinction, stay away from the third planet!”
His resolve to spare our lives had made him happy. His face kept twisting into
that grimace which we had learned to recognize as a sign of man’s pleasure. But