Space Science Fiction Super Pack. Randall Garrett
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tasted good. And with his helmet off, with the wind on his face, and the woods around him whispering in his ears, it was a meal fit for the being they thought him to be.
He was a god. Possibly it was the space suit which made him one, especially the goggle-eyed helmet. He could take no chance of becoming an ordinary mortal, and that would mean that he would have to wear the space suit continually. Or at least the helmet. That, he decided, was what he would do. That would leave his body reasonably free, and at the same time impress them with the fact that he was different from them.
By manipulating the air valve he would be able to make the viewplates cloud and uncloud at will, thus giving dramatic expression to his feelings. It would be a pleasant game to play until he had learned something of their language. It would be safer than trying to make things clear to them with speech and gestures that they could not understand anyway.
He wondered how long it would be before Malevski would find the shattered lifeboat drifting in space, and then trace its course and decide where he had landed. That would be the end of his divinity. Meanwhile, until then—
Until then he was a god. Unregenerated. Permanently unregenerated. Holding his helmet, he threw back his head and laughed loud and long, and wondered what his mother would have thought.
*
For awhile he was being left alone. They were afraid of him, of course, fearful of intruding with their merely mortal affairs upon the meditations of so divine a being. Later, however, curiosity and perhaps a desire to show him off to newcomers might draw them back. In the interval, it would be well to find out what sort of place this was in which he had landed.
He looked around him. There were trees, with sharp green branches, sharp green twigs, sharp red leaves. He shuddered as he thought of what would have happened to him if he had fallen on the point of a branch. The trees seemed rigid and unbending in the wind that caressed his face. There were no birds that he could see. Small black objects bounded from one branch to another as if engaged in complicated games of tag. He wondered if the games were as serious as the one he had been playing with Malevski, with himself as It.
*
There were no ground animals in sight. If any showed up later, they couldn’t be too dangerous, not with the natives living here in such apparent peace and contentment. There probably wouldn’t be anything that his pocket gun, which he had taken the precaution to remove from the lifeboat before that shattered, wouldn’t be able to handle.
Near him was a strange spring, or little river, or whatever you might call it. It broke from the ground, ran along the hard rocky surface for a dozen feet, and then plunged underground again. There were other springs of a similar nature scattered here and there, and now he realized that their combined murmuring was the noise he had mistaken, on first removing his helmet, for the rustle of the wind in the woods.
He would have enough to drink. The natives would bring him food. What else could any reasonable man want?
It wasn’t the kind of life he had dreamed of. No Martian whiskey, no drugs, no night spots, no bigtime gamblers slapping him on the back and calling him “pal,” no brassy blondes giving him the eye. Still, it was better than the life he had actually lived, much better. It would do, it would have to do.
*
From what he had seen of the natives, he liked them—and feared them. For all their mistaken faith in him, they seemed to be no fools. How many times before had men from some supposedly superior civilization dropped in upon the people of a new world and made that first impression of divinity, only to have the original attitude of worship by the natives give way to disillusion and contempt? Who was that fellow they told about in the history books he had read as a kid? Cortez, way back on Earth, when that planet itself had offered unexplored territory. And later on it had happened on one of the moons of Jupiter, and on several planets outside the System. The explorers had been gods, until they had been found out. Then they had been savage murderers, plunderers, devils.
It would be too bad if he were found out. He was one against them all, he would never be able to fight off so many enemies. More than that, he was a stranger here, he needed friends. No, he mustn’t be found out.
“Better put on your helmet, dope,” he told himself savagely. “They’ll be coming back soon, and if they find you without it—” He put on his helmet, still muttering to himself. It wouldn’t make any difference if he were overheard. They didn’t know Earth language and would take his words for oracular utterances. He could talk to himself all he wanted, and from the looks of things, there would be no one to understand him. He hoped he didn’t grow crazy and eccentric, like those hermits who had been lost alone in space for too many years.
The helmet was the first nuisance. There would be others too. He couldn’t even talk in what had become his natural manner, with a whine in every word, a whine that came from being treated with contempt by police and fellow-criminals alike. A god had to speak with slow gravity, with dignity. A god had to walk like a god. A god had endless responsibilities here, it seemed.
He thought again of his mother. Ever since he could remember, it had been, “Georgie, wipe your nose!” and, “Georgie, keep your fingers out of the cake!” and Georgie do this and don’t do that. A fine way to speak to a god. Even after he had grown up, his mother had continued to treat him like a baby. She had never got over examining his face and his ears and his fingernails to make sure that he had cleaned them properly. He couldn’t so much as comb his hair to suit her; all through his abortive attempt at college, and later at a job, she had done it for him.
But she had been a lioness in his defense later on, when he had given way to that first irresistible impulse to dip his fingers in the till and get away with what he thought would be unnoticed petty cash. It had been her fault that the thing had happened, of course. She could have given him a decent amount of spending money, instead of doling it out to him from his own wages as if she were giving money for candy to a schoolboy. She could have treated him more like the man he was supposed to be.
Still, he couldn’t complain. She had stuck to him all the way through, whatever the charges against him. When that lug of a traveling salesman had accused her Georgie of picking his pockets, and that female refugee from a TV studio had charged poor harmless Georgie with slugging her, it was his mother who had stood up in court and denounced them, and solemnly told judge and jury what a sweet, kind, helplessly innocent lamb her Georgie was. It wasn’t her fault if no one had quite believed her.
Now he was on his own, without any possibility of help from her. And in what the ads called a “responsible position” that she had never so much as dreamed he could fill.
Unfortunately, now that he had reached so exalted a level, there seemed to be few possibilities of promotion. There appeared only the chance, on the one hand, that the natives would find him out and slaughter him, and on the other that Malevski would track him down and bring him back to Earth for the punishment he dreaded.
*
It was a good thing he had put on his helmet. Not far away, a group of the natives was approaching, laden with more food and flowers. It was larger than the previous group. Evidently, as he had anticipated, they were showing him off to newcomers.
He came to a stately halt and waited for them to approach. He could see the surprise on their faces as they noted his change of costume, and he watched nervously as they stopped to whisper among themselves. It would be too bad for him if they didn’t like it.
But they didn’t seem to mind. One of them, a very impressive old man with green hair flecked with red, stepped in front of the others and made a speech, a melodious speech full of liquid sounds that were neither quite vowels nor consonants. He didn’t have the slightest idea of what the individual words meant. But the significance of the speech as a whole was clear enough. As it came to an end, they presented him with more food and flowers.
Bradley cleared his throat. And then, with as deep and impressive a voice as he could manage, he said, “Ladies and gentlemen, it gives me great pleasure to accept your nomination. I promise you that if elected I shall keep none of my promises.”
It