Rillas and Other Science Fiction Stories. A. R. Morlan
just aren’t seeing it!” she replied with a sudden burst of fervor. “I’ve watched them, daily. They just-don’t-have-it. They haven’t displayed any skills beyond those of animals. You prove it to me that the ’lopes have even the slightest trace of intelligence!”
I love Reba when she gets flustered. “Let’s forget it,” I said, pulling her closer to me.
“Don’t patronize me, Scott Renay!” she shouted, then tore herself away from me and dashed off toward the ship. Sighing, I went over to the nearest husk-fruited tree and pulled off another brown pod, breaking it in half with a clean jerking motion (the dry rustling sound it made seemed startlingly loud) before sucking out the pulp, letting the sticky juices splatter my uniform front. When Jimmie and Elizabeth emerged from the ship, speaking aloud, I moved closer to the hidden place where the ’lopes had been grouped, staring at the deep ruts they’d left in their wake.
Behind me, Jimmie whispered, just loud enough for me to clearly hear, “Lovebirds have another fight?”
“Do ’lopes plow up dirt when they leap?” Elizabeth asked around a slurpy mouthful of fruit pulp. “Betcha I know who the fight was about—”
“What’s the matter? Never seen two redheads go head to head before?” the black-haired Irish doctor teased.
“Not ’less they’re both human.”
“Does he have any choice?”
“Well...Reba had a choice, when she asked him along,” Jimmie replied, as the two of them continued sucking pulp out of the husks the slurping sound somehow obscene; I barely heard Elizabeth’s reply over the sucking noises: “If he wasn’t here, the ’slop would’ve held out longer...not that this stuff isn’t good—”
It seems like she said something more to him, around her mouthful of food, but I just made out as if I hadn’t heard the conversation at all, as I watched the far horizon, looking for the ’lopes, and told myself, You two aren’t the only ones who wish I was somewhere else. But don’t blame me...ask the ship’s biologist why I’m here. If you even need to ask...you’re the readers, not me. You never had to say a word out loud.
Not when they were capable of thinking the entire conversation I’d just happened to overhear to each other....
No more right now, no more writing. I hear Reba knocking on the cabin door. Time to put this journal away. I think she wants to apologize....
Day 100:
It’s been long, so long; I hardly know how to use these words anymore. So long since I started this log. So much has gone on, so much. Have to pull myself out. Day 100...it’s an anniversary, isn’t it? Can’t forget...what was it?
Day 111:
I remember now.
“Ten months is just too long,” Reba had said to me, when we were still Earthside nearly seven months before the day our food ran out on the ’lope’s planet; wrapping her arms around me, she rubbed her forehead against my chest, murmuring, “Really, Scotty, I can’t face not seeing you, not being with you, for that long. The trip alone will take two months, with those jumps through hyperspace. I just don’t know how I’ll—”
“How you’ll stand it?” I asked, finishing Reba’s sentence for her, as if I were one of her kind, one of the new übermen, with a brain full of super-saturated neurons and sub-neurons, that tiny bit of extra structure that made her capable of esper communication. Angry, Reba walked away from me, and than threw herself onto the gold-flecked tweed couch near my apartment’s only decent-sized window, her freckled face strained, and her blue eyes darkened.
Reba knew why I was still wary of going; even for an esper such as her, traveling t-space was flat out terrifying. For a non-esper like me, it would be a nightmare. T-space didn’t care who you were, and it wasn’t about to change to suit the psychology of a few human travelers. It was simply a universe none of us ever grew up in. Perceptions were shifted in a subtle, disturbing way. The first travelers weren’t aware of what was happening as they spent solid months in t-space—they just didn’t know. When they came back, their minds were gone, lost in a maze of schizophrenic misperception. Then, for ever-after, they saw blues that were not blue, heard conversations that only happened in their heads, saw into places only they could see.
Espers gained a certain immunity to the effects when they had other espers along to back them—a strength in numbers, as it were, a cushion against madness. They became the explorers of this new realm. The rest of us non-espers had to be content to follow the trails they blazed in great ships where a drugged sleep hid our minds from the dangers of consciousness.
It didn’t help me that I was an astrophysicist. Not only did I have madness to fear; I knew what was waiting for me out there in t-space. Does this sound crazy now? I thought so then, and so I kept those petty fears buried. What’s the point now, what’s the point in hiding these things from myself? It’s not like anyone will ever be able to hold this diary against me.
But just to think...quantum gravity, eleven-dimensional space, black holes...these were only curious theories back in the days when man considered interstellar voyages wistful thinking. Then those same curious theories became reality, thanks to a lot of hard work and foresighted thinking; new words for mankind’s travel vocabulary came into common use—four dimensional space, graviton drives, time and space similarities, and those ubiquitous wormholes. Not that many travelers understand the inherent dangers—did frequent flyers truly understand the never-to-be-quite-overcome dangers of jet flight? Even the Challenger screw-up only put a temporary damper on NASA...
And who cared what happened to the drone crews of the test ships that made those first ship-sized incongruities caused by their engines-and flipped into a virtual void? Astrophysicists like me—I was one of the people who helped turn the theory of interstellar travel via wormholes into a reality, as part of my dissertation, in fact—cared, but we were relatively few in number, and the bulk of our work was not known to the public. All that mattered was that mankind was able to finally use wormholes as a means of getting from here to there with almost as much punctuality and accuracy (depending largely on angular velocity and correct alignment of gravitational vectors) as the airplane travel of my grandparent’s generation.
Only, in their time, the aftermath of an air disaster was something easily discovered, and dealt with, no matter how horrible the remains of the aircraft, no matter how much time it might take to discover the cause of the crash. There was pain, and suffering, but there was also the promise of healing, afterwards.
The shortsighted fools, with their secret drone ships, and “acceptable margin of loss.” If only they had known about the madness waiting for them out there.
Day 113:
Our new home had no name, and, as if in denial of the fact that it was in all probability to be our permanent home, no one bothered to suggest a name for it. Bad enough that the air was thin, high, high altitude thin, and took nearly a month to get used to. Nearly a month wasted while our bodies acclimated enough for us to venture more than ten yards away from the ship without feeling like our lungs were being crushed from within. Well, perhaps the first month wasn’t a total waste; we dug up samples of the soil, picked the available flora, and tested the water. The soil was crumbly and acidic, too much so to support earth plant life without the addition of alkaline fertilizers which just weren’t available to us. But the plant life was carbon based; right-handed sugars, and it didn’t kill the lab rats or reptiles. With boiling, the water was drinkable.
And in that first month, we saw the ’lopes. Jimmie named them; he was the crewmember who initially found them, or was found by them, whichever one chooses to believe.
“Out...out there, in...the trees...dozens...maybe, maybe more,” Jimmie had panted, as we led him into the ship after finding him lying in a gasping, sprawled heap near the hatch. The others clustered around Jimmie, heads bent toward him, shutting me out completely.
He had always struck me as over-excitable, ever since I met him. So, what if there were animals out there? Anyone with