Gordon R. Dickson - Danger-Human.pdf - Gordon R. Dickson - widez2

DANGER – HUMAN

By Gordon R. Dickson

Smith Publications, Inc.

The spaceboat came down in the silence of perfect working

Order--down through the cool, dark night of a New Hampshire lute

spring. There was hardly any moon and the path emerging from the clump

of conifers and snaking its way across the dim pasture looked like a long

strip of pale cloth, carelessly dropped and forgotten there.

The two aliens checked the boat and stopped it, hovering, some fifty feet

above the pasture, and all but invisible against the low-lying clouds. Then

they set themselves to wait, their Woolly, bearlike forms settled on

haunches, their uniform belts glinting a little in the shielded light from the

instrument panel, talking now and then in desultory murmurs.

"It's not a bad place," said the one of junior rank, looking down at the

earth below.

"Why should it be?" answered the senior.

The junior did not answer. He shifted on his haunches.

"The babies are due soon," he said. "I just got a message."

"How many?" asked the senior.

"Three--the doctor thinks. That's not bad for a first birthing."

"My wife only had two."

"I know. You told me."

They fell silent for a few seconds. The spaceboat rocked almost

imperceptibly in the waters of night.

"Look--" said the junior, suddenly. "Here it comes, right on schedule."

The senior glanced overside. Down below, a tall, dark form had emerged

from the trees and was coming out along the path. A little beam of light

shone before him, terminating in a blob of illumination that danced along

the path ahead, lighting his way. The senior stiffened.

"Take controls," he said. The casualness had gone out of his voice. It

had become crisp, impersonal.

"Controls," answered the other, in the same emotionless voice.

"Take her down."

"Down it is."

The spaceboat dropped groundward. There was an odd sort of

soundless, lightless explosion--it was as if concussive wave had passed,

robbed of all effects but one. The figure dropped, the light rolling from its

grasp and losing its glow in a tangle of short grass. The spaceboat landed

and the two aliens got out.

In the dark night they loomed furrily above the still figure. It was that of

a lean, dark man in his early thirties, dressed in clean, much-washed

corduroy pants and checkered wool lumberjack shirt. He was unconscious,

but breathing slowly, deeply and easily.

"I'll take it up by the head, here," said the senior. "You take the other

end. Got it? Lift! Now, carry it into the boat."

The junior backed away, up through the spaceboat's open lock, grunting

a little with the awkwardness of his burden.

"It feels slimy," he said.

"Nonsense!" said the senior. "That's your imagination."

Eldridge Timothy Parker drifted in that dreamy limbo between

awakeness and full sleep. He found himself contemplating his own name.

Eldridge Timothy Parker. Eldridgetimothyparker. Eldridge

TIMOTHYparker. ELdrlDGEtiMOthyPARKer. . . .

There was a hardness under his back, the back on which he was

lying--and a coolness. His flaccid right hand turned flat, feeling. It felt like

steel beneath him. Metal? He tried to sit up and bumped his forehead

against a ceiling a few inches overhead. He blinked his eyes in the

darkness--

Darkness?

He flung out his hands, searching, feeling terror leap up inside him. His

knuckles bruised against walls to right and left. Frantic, his groping

fingers felt out, around and about him. He was walled in, he was

surrounded, he was enclosed.

Completely.

Like in a coffin.

Buried--

He began to scream. . . .

Much later, when he awoke again, he was in a strange place that

seemed to have no walls, but many instruments. He floated in the center of

mechanisms that passed and repassed about him, touching, probing,

turning. He felt touches of heat and Cold. Strange hums and notes of

various pitches came and went. He felt voices questioning him.

Who are you?

"Eldridge Parker-Eldridge Timothy Parker-"

What are you?

"I'm Eldridge Parker-"

Tell about yourself.

"Tell what? What?"

Tell about yourself.

"What? What do you want to know? What-"

Tell about. . . .

"But I--"

Tell. . . .

. . . well, i suppose i was pretty much like any of the kids around our

town . . . i was a pretty good shot and i won the fifth grade seventy-five

yard dash . . . i played hockey, too . . . pretty cold weather up around our

parts, you know, the air used to smell strange it was so cold winter

mornings in January when you first stepped out of doors ... it is good,

open country, new england, and there were lots of smells . . . there were

pine smells and grass smells and i remember especially the kitchen smells .

. . and then, too, there was the way the oak benches in church used to

smell on Sunday when you knelt with your nose right next to the back of

the pew ahead. . . .

. . . the fishing up our parts is good too . . . i liked to fish but i never

wasted time on weekdays ... we were presbyterians, you know, and my

father had the farm, but he also had money invested in land around the

country ... we have never been badly off but i would have liked a

motor-scooter. . . .

... no i did not never hate the germans, at least i did not think i ever did,

of course though i was over in europe i never really had it bad, combat, i

mean . . . i was in a motor pool with the raw smell of gasoline, i like to

work with my hands, and it was not like being in the infantry. . . .

. . . i have as good right to speak up to the town council as any man ... i

do not believe in pushing but if they push me i am going to push right

back . . . nor it isn't any man's business what i voted last election no more

than my bank balance . . . but i have got as good as right to a say in town

doings as if i was the biggest landholder among them. . . .

. . . i did not go to college because it was not necessary . . . too much

education can make a fool of any man, i told my father, and i know when i

have had enough ... i am a fanner and will always be a farmer and i will do

my own studying as things come up without taking out a pure waste of

four years to hang a piece of paper on the wall. . . .

... of course i know about the atom bomb, but i am no scientist and no

need to be one, no more than i need to be a veterinarian . . . i elect the

men that hire the men that need to know those things and the men that i

elect will hear from me johnny-quick if things do not go to my liking. . . .

... as to why i never married, that is none of your business ... as it

happens, i was never at ease with women much, though there were a

couple of times, and i still may if jeanie lind. . . .

. . . i believe in god and the united states of america. . . .

He woke up gradually. He was in a room that might have I been any

office, except the furniture was different. That is, there was a box with

doors on it that might have been a filing cabinet and a table that looked

like a desk in spite of the single thin rod underneath the center that

supported it. However, there were no chairs-only small, flat cushions, on

which I three large woolly, bearlike creatures were sitting and watching

him in silence.

He himself, he found, was in a chair, though.

As soon as they saw his eyes were open, they turned away I from him

and began to talk among themselves. Eldridge Parker shook his head and

blinked his eyes, and would have blinked his ears if that had been possible.

For the sounds the creatures were making were like nothing he had ever

heard before; and yet he understood everything they were saying. It was

an odd sensation, like a double-image earwise, for he heard the strange

mouth-noises just as they came out and then something in his head

twisted them around and made them into perfectly understandable

English.

Nor was that all. For, as he sat listening to the creatures talk, he began

to get the same double image in another way. That is, he still saw the

bearlike creature behind the desk as the weird sort of animal he was, out

of the sound of his voice, or from something else, there gradually built up

in Eldridge's mind a picture of a thin, rather harassed-looking gray-haired

man in something resembling a uniform, but at the same time not I quite

a uniform. It was the sort of effect an army general might get if he wore

his stars and a Sam Browne belt over a civilian double-breasted suit.

Similarly, the other creature sitting facing the one behind the desk, at the

desk's side, was a young and black-haired man with something of the

laboratory about him, and the creature further back, seated almost

against the wall, was neither soldier nor scientist, but a heavy older man

with a sort of book-won wisdom in him.

"You see, commander," the young one with the black-haired image was

saying, "perfectly restored. At least on the physical and mental levels."

"Good, doctor, good," the outlandish syllables from the one behind the

desk translated themselves in Eldridge's head. "And you say it ... he, I

should say ... will be able to understand?"

"Certainly, sir," said the doctor-psychologist-whatever-he-was.

"Identification is absolute--"

"But I mean comprehend-encompass--" The creature behind the desk

moved one paw slightly. "Follow what we tell him-"

The doctor turned his ursinoid head toward the third member of the

group. This one spoke slowly, in a deeper voice.

"The culture allows. Certainly."

Gordon R. Dickson - Danger-Human.pdf

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