Fantastic Stories Presents: Science Fiction Super Pack #2. Randall Garrett
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“I’ll be a great hunter,” she says.
“And when I’m full grown?”
“You’re the first of your kind.”
“What?”
“You’re not like the others, Pietor,” she says. “I’ve told you that. You’re born of Mohave, and you are an integral part of it. Everything born here is.”
“And what of the other people?” he says.
“We do want you here. All of you. You’ll tell the others at the colony about the lake and they will send to Earth for creatures to stock it. There will be fish in this water, and people will eat the fish. And we will eat the fish, too. And maybe the people as your civilization grows. You’ll help me, won’t you Pietor?”
“You want to eat us?” Pietor says.
“Not you, silly,” Marina says. She stands, so quickly Pietor could not have moved away if he had wanted to, then brushes a claw lightly across his temple. “You are my brother. I’d never hurt you.”
“Your brother?”
“Of course. We were born together, at the same time, of the same world. You breathe the same dreams in your mind that I breathe. That makes us siblings, as in tune with each other as twins born of the same mother.”
Pietor knows this is true, knows that his own feelings of longing for Marina are deeper than just a simple attraction of the flesh. There is mystery certainly, but more than that there is familiarity.
“I’ve known you my whole life,” Pietor says.
“You know everything about this place,” she says. “As it knows everything about you. Help me.”
Pietor knows, as he knows everything in his dreams, that there is no way he could ever refuse Marina. And he doesn’t want to refuse her because she is everything he thinks of as good in the world. She is more than just his sister. She is the other half of Pietor himself, the half who belongs only to the planet Mohave, not at all to the planet Earth. He fits with her.
“I will,” Pietor says. “But not everyone will know you as I do. Others will come to kill you.”
“Let them come,” Marina says. “The hunt is so much more enjoyable if there is a fight.”
“You’ll eat everyone?”
“No. Other children will be born to your people. And with them, others will be born to ours. Someday we’ll all be a family. Everyone else will be selected out. You call it evolution, but we select for the survival of the planet. Not all creatures are good for the planet.”
She stands on all fours, then arches her back, a shiver moving from tail to nose. Then she moves toward Pietor, rubs her body slowly along his arm, then goes around his back and around again. She moves in close toward the back of his head, and Pietor wonders once more if she will rip open the back of his skull and suck out his brains. He feels her breath, hot and strong on his neck, then his ear.
“As it is in dreams, so it shall be in life,” she says. Her tongue darts out to lick Pietor’s ear briefly, then she is gone into the trees.
Pietor scratches at the fine brown hairs pushing out of the skin of his groin, then lays down to bask in the warm rays of the sun.
*
The colony’s canary-yellow lander drops through the hole in the canopy and circles the smoldering wreckage of the Allen family buggy a few times, then sets down at the edge of the burned forest. Pietor sits cross-legged on a patch of burned underbrush, his eyes tracking the noisy craft as it crunches charred branches and plants beneath its weight.
The doors to the lander open and several armed men step out, cautiously walking toward Pietor. They reach the bodies of his mother and father and stand, looking toward him. Pietor knows the kinds of questions they will ask, and he knows how he has to answer if he doesn’t want the forest burnt to the ground. There will be time afterward to show them the lake, ripe for fish. Then, someday, the forest will grow its own biosphere, and it will expand to change the world. And people will be just one part of that grand system.
Pietor buttons his shirt up to cover the brown hair which has sprouted on his chest overnight. He walks toward the armed men. They relax a little when they see he appears unhurt.
“I have some things to show you,” Pietor says.
Now he wakes.
Stairway to the Stars
By Larry Shaw
Yes, Earth may be a sort of fenced-off area, so far as other intelligent races of the galaxy are concerned. But not for the grandiose reasons that some have imagined....
It was a stairway leading down, but it also led out into space—indirectly. And the situation had the aspects of a burlesque on Grand Hotel, but....
John Andrew Farmer scowled at the octopus that sprawled on his living-room couch, rubbed his stubbly jaw with a stubby fist, and said, “I love you.”
Farmer was uncomfortable. He was almost always uncomfortable, for various reasons; though it rarely if ever occurred to him, as he considered each individual irritant, that this was his normal state of existence. Right now he was acutely conscious of how ridiculous it must look for him to be making love to an octopus, but he was even more conscious of the very real pains of unrequited love.
It wasn’t even a respectable, ordinary-looking octopus. To be accurate, it would have to be called a nonapus; each of the nine tentacles had a lobsterish claw at its tip, and there were various other unusual appendages. It would be hard enough to explain an earthly octopus in his living-room if the necessity arose, Farmer reflected for the teenteenth time—but how in the name of Neptune could he ever explain this?
It had all started with Judge Ray. Ray had not been a real judge, obviously, but had used the title in lieu of any other first name. That was the first of the inexplicable things; Farmer would have expected the odd little old man to call himself a professor of something or other. But Ray insisted on Judge.
Ray had come to the office of the Stein, Fine, Bryans Publishing Co., where Farmer was working as an assistant editor, and announced that he was about to write the greatest book of the age. And yes, he wanted an advance against royalties—it didn’t have to be large; Ray lived simply—to tide him over while doing the actual writing, which shouldn’t take more than a very few weeks.
Now, Farmer wasn’t much of an editor, even as editors go. The one useful quality he had was a homespun, ingratiating air which put nervous young geniuses at their ease, so that they could give a reasonably coherent verbal picture of what their books were about. This often saved Stein, Fine & Bryans a lot of reading of unpublishable manuscripts. At least, that had been the theory when they gave Farmer the job; as it worked out, John Andrew was a person who found it virtually impossible to say “no”; he generally took the manuscripts in hand and, when he couldn’t stick some other member of the firm with the task, read them himself until the wee hours.
Farmer was not able to say no to Ray, but even he looked dubious at the small gray fellow’s voluble outpouring of pseudo-scientific jargon. Ray, made sensitive by years of open skepticism on the part of many listeners, caught the look and insisted on a demonstration of his fabulous invention.
So the oddly assorted pair—quick, foxlike little Ray and big, awkward, uncomfortable Farmer—sputtered out into Long Island Sound in an indescribable old motor launch, and the adventure was on.
*
Finally Ray shut off the racketing engine and let out the rusty anchor. He opened a large wooden case, which showed evidence of some really good cabinet-work, and took out a peculiar machine, which showed evidence of unarguably excellent machining. These details were the first things that made Farmer think Ray might not be a complete crackpot,