Galaxy Science Fiction Super Pack #2. Edgar Pangborn
back to normal with an embarrassed laugh. It was all over. It had lasted from its inception six weeks.
*
Bascomb Swicegood, a morning type, felt excellent this morning. He breakfasted at Cahill’s, and he ordered heavily as always. And he listened with half an ear to the conversation of two girls at the table next to his.
“But I should know you,” he said.
“Of course. I’m Teresa.”
“I’m Agnes,” said Agnes.
“Mr. Swicegood, how could you forget? It was when the dreams first came, and you overheard me telling mine to Agnes. Then you ran after us in the street because you had had the same dream, and I wanted to have you arrested. Weren’t they horrible dreams? And have they ever found out what caused them?”
“They were horrible, and they have not found out. They ascribe it to group mania, which is meaningless. And now there are those who say that the dreams never came at all, and soon they will be nearly forgotten. But the horror of them! The loneliness!”
“Yes, we hadn’t even pediculi to curry our body hair. We almost hadn’t any body hair.”
Teresa was an attractive girl. She had a cute trick of popping the smallest rat out of her mouth so it could see what was coming into her stomach. She was bulbous and beautiful. “Like a sackful of skunk cabbage,” Bascomb murmured admiringly in his head, and then flushed green at his forwardness of phrase.
Teresa had protuberances upon protuberances and warts on warts, and hair all over her where she wasn’t warts and bumps. “Like a latrine mop!” sighed Bascomb with true admiration. The cracked clang of Teresa’s voice was music in the early morning.
All was right with the earth again. Gone the hideous nightmare world when people had stood barefaced and lonely, without bodily friends or dependents. Gone that ghastly world of the sick blue sky and the near-absence of entrancing odor.
Bascomb attacked manfully his plate of prime carrion. And outside the pungent green rain fell incessantly.
The Imitation of Earth
By James Stamers
Once they had been human—now they shared a remarkable destiny on an incredible new planet....
He was in some dark, moving medium which pressed him gently and released him and pressed against him again with irregular rhythm. He could not feel his hands. He could not feel any part of his body, except a sort of itching in his calf.
He thrust downward to relieve this mild irritation and, surprisingly, seemed to rise up. He seemed to be alive. He had no idea where, or even when, or whether these were valid questions, for the ship had been entering hyper-spacetime when they hit the asteroid belt. Warps and elongations took place in hyper-spacetime. Perhaps he was now a hyper-spaceman.
He could recall his name. It was John Shepherd. He could remember objective events such as Doctor Adelitka Wynn creating a scene in the Mars terminal bar. Her sociology was better than her sense, as she accused him of making a pass at her. He would have liked to, perhaps, but ship’s etiquette said: “Crews date, captains wait, space is not the place.” He and she had been the last alive, and the last image he had seen on the screen had been a sun. Whose sun, which sun, and where were just uninformed speculations. But he was alive and conscious of himself. And he was buried deep in something.
He tried to define his feelings.
The alternating pressure of the darkness was felt only in one spot, in the area of his heart and about the size of a small bean. The occasional itching came from below this. He thrust again and again rose upward. Yet he had no heart, or no sense of hearing, for he could hear no sound of pumping. After several years in space he was only too familiar with the sound of his own blood circulating in his veins. The voids of space turned men into especially noisy bodily orchestras. There was none of that now.
He thought of himself as having the shape of a man, but perhaps that was just habit. The only area he could in fact feel was the bean slightly higher than his middle ... and a column perhaps attaching him to the bean ... and this itching down below, in what seemed to be one doubled-up leg. He thrust again and again, rising higher each time. There was nothing else to do. He never felt tired. He never felt anything, except the itching.
*
Eventually he felt a slackening on the upward pressure. He had kicked with his one leg, risen and found no resistance. Warmth played over him and he uncurled his head. So he had a head.
Habit had accustomed him to seeing with his eyes, from one set focal point. It was some time before he found he could see, in a general way, from any point on his exposed surface.
He could even see parts of himself, where the edges doubled over. It was like being able to run round a large gallery on the top of a dome, looking out at the view—and yet being the entire dome. He was green! He looked down beneath him and saw a long green pillar, tubular and shiny, rising out of a brown background.
He could still feel the beating pressure down below. It struck him that he was a plant, growing from seed which presumably his liquified, atomized or dissolved body had provided, and emerging on the surface of a planet.
Immediately overhead a bright orange satellite swung through a brilliant yellow and white sky. Unless there were two suns here, this was no more than a satellite body, trapped in orbit, for he could feel the fierce beat on his surface from another source on the other side of the sky. This was a vast fiery globe traveling at immense speed.
He felt a vigorous thrusting inside his structure as he expanded. But darkness rushed up from the bottom of the pit in which he stood, and cloud came in to mask the sky.
The general inference was that he was on a very warm planet around which the bright orange satellite swung, and that both were circling the hot sun at a speed far exceeding that of Mercury. Naturally that was only a subjective impression. But the little he had seen did not suggest any system he had ever heard of. He curled up.
Each time the sun went past he grew further out toward the edge of the pit. He branched and clung to the earth with subsidiary tendrils. It was exactly as though he were clawing with fingers into the earth, except that he did not remove them but simply grew on past them. When he reached the top of the pit, and accustomed his seeing to the greater distances now before him, he saw a violently active world of fire and steam. The ultra-rapid rotation of this planet made day and night into the flickering of a primitive film. Mountains of earth were raised up, broke off and shattered. Remote volcanoes fizzed into action briefly like fireworks and faded, their tremendous display spent. Whole swamps heaved and moved with internal motion. He became big enough to be able to lose a side creeper without giving it a thought. He felt no pain.
There were advantages in being a plant, and particularly in being an apparently highly active creeper. He could see from any point in his enormous network. He could organize races between his outlying tendrils. He found that the orange satellite exerted quite a strong pull on his internal sap system, which was not unpleasant.
*
The first sign of life other than himself, oddly, came up from a neighboring pit.
It lay within the area he had grown over, but he had never bothered to send down shoots and side creepers into it. It was a peculiar sensation to recognize—Dr. Adelitka Wynn.
He sent out a sly root and detected that she was a bulb formation. Her indignation was transmitted violently along the ground, in a series of sharp shocks. She stood in tall sheaves of broad-bladed grass which rustled in the wind. He found it was intelligible, though of a different timbre than the deep, rough scraping he made with his own hairy leaves.
“Kindly keep to yourself,” she said in effect.
Her leaves had a high hissing note. He marveled that she had managed to retain the same unpleasant approach to life.
She was objectionable