Before They Were Giants (22 page)

<>

~ * ~

Out of Phase

by Joe Haldeman

rapped. From the waterfront bar to a crap game to a simpleminded ambush in a dead-end alley.

He didn’t blame them for being angry. His pockets were stuffed with their money, greasy crumpled fives and tens. Two thousand and twenty of their hard-earned dollars, if his memory served him right. And of course it did.

They had supplied three sets of dice—two loaded, one shaved. All three were childishly easy to manipulate. He let them win each throw at first, and then less and less often. Finally, he tested their credulity and emptied their pockets, with ten sevens in a row.

That much had been easy. But now he was in a difficult position. Under the transparent pretext of finding a bigger game, the leader of the gang had steered him into this blind alley, where five others were hiding in ambush.

And now the six were joined in a line, advancing on him, pushing him toward the tall Hurricane fence that blocked the end of the alley.

Jeff started pacing them, walking backwards. Thirty seconds, give or take a little, before he would back into the fence and be caught. Thirty seconds objective...

Jeff froze and did a little trick with his brain. All the energy his strange body produced, except for that fraction needed to maintain human form, was channeled into heightening his sensory perceptions, accelerating his mental processes. He had to find a way out of this dilemma, without exposing his true nature.

The murderous sextet slowed down in Jeff’s frozen eyes as the ratio of subjective to objective time flux increased arithmetically, geometrically, exponentially.

A drop of sweat rolled from the leader’s brow, fell two feet in a fraction of a second, a foot in the next second, an inch in the next, a millimeter, a micron...

Now.

~ * ~

A pity he couldn’t just kill them all, slowly, painfully. Terrible to have artistic responsibility stifled by practical obligations. Such a beautiful composition.

They were frozen in attitudes ranging from the leader’s leering, sadistic anticipation of pleasure (dilettante!), to the little one’s ill-concealed fear of pain, of inflicting pain, to Jimmy’s unthinking, color-blinded compulsion to take apart, destroy... ah, Jimmy, slave of entropy, servant of disorder and chaos, I will make of you an epic, a saga.

I
would,
that is. I
could.

But Llarvl said...

That snail. Insensitive brute.

Next time out I’ll get a supervisor who can
understand.

But next time out, I’ll be too old.

Even now I can feel it.

Damn that snail!

~ * ~

The ship hovered above a South American plantation. People looked at it and saw only the sky beyond. Radar would never detect it. Only a voodoo priest, in a mushroom trance, felt its presence. He tried to verbalize and died of a cerebral occlusion.

Too quick. Artless.

Llarvl was talking to him. “Bluntly, I wish we didn’t have to use you, Braxn.” His crude race communicated vocally, and the unmodulated, in-and-out-of-phase thought waves washed a gravelly ebb and flow of pain through Braxn’s organ of communication. He stored the pain, low intensity that it was, for contemplation at a more satisfactory time.

He repeated: “If only we had brought someone else of your sort, besides your father, of course. Shape-changers are not such a rarity.” He plucked out a cilium in frustration, but of course felt no pain. Braxn was too close; sucked it in.

“A G’drellian poet. A poet of pain. Of all the useless baggage to drag around on a survey expedition . . .” He sighed and ground his shell against the wall. “But we have no choice. Only two bipeds aboard the ship, and neither of them is even remotely mammalian. And the natives of this planet are acutely xenophobic. Hell, they’re
omni
phobic. Even harder to take than you, worthy poet.

“But this is the biggest find of the whole trip! The crucial period of transition—they may be on the brink of civilization; still animals, but rapidly advancing. Think of it! In ten or twenty generations they’ll be human, and seek us, as most do. We’ve met thousands of civilized races, more thousands of savage ones; but this is the first we’ve found in transition. Ethnology, alien psychology, everything”—he shuddered—”even your people’s excuse for art, will benefit immeasurably.”

Braxn made no comment. He hadn’t bothered to form a speech organ for the interview. He knew Llarvl would do all the talking anyway.

But he had been studying, under stasis, for several hours. Knowing exactly what needed to be done, he let half his body disintegrate into its component parts and started to remold them.

First the skeleton, bone by thousandth bone; the internal organs, in logical order, glistening, throbbing, functioning; wet-red muscle, fat, connective tissue, derma, epidermis; smooth and olive, fingernails, hair, small mole on the left cheek.

Vocal cords, virgin, throb contralto: “Mammalian enough?”

“Speak Galactic!”

“I said, ‘Mammalian enough?’ I mean, would you like them bigger,” she demonstrated, “or smaller?”

“How would I know?” snapped Llarvl, trying to hide his disgust. “Pick some sort of statistical mean.”

Braxn picked a statistical mean between the October and November Playmate of the Month.

With what he thought was detached objectivity, Llarvl said, “Ugly bunch of creatures, aren’t they?” About one hundred million years ago, Llarvl’s race had one natural enemy—a race of biped mammals.

With a silvery laugh, Braxn left to prepare for planetfall.

Braxn had studied the Earth and its people for some ten thousand hours, subjective time. She knew about clothes, she knew about sex, she knew about rape.

So she appeared on Earth, on a dirt road in South America, without a stitch. Without a blush. And her scholastic observations were confirmed, in the field, so to speak, in less than five minutes. She learned quite a bit the first time; less the second. The third time, well, she was merely bored.

She made him into a beautiful. . . poem?

She made him into a mouse-sized, shriveled brown husk, lying dead by the side of the road, his tiny features contorted with incredible agony.

She synthesized clothes, grey and dirty, and changed herself into an old, crippled hag. It was twenty minutes before she met another man, who . . .

Another dry husk.

Braxn was getting an interesting, if low, opinion of men, Bolivian farmers in particular; so she changed herself into one. The shoe on the other foot, she found, made things different, but not necessarily better. Well, she was gathering material. That’s what Llarvl wanted.

She waited for a car to come by, reverted to the original voluptuous pattern, disposed of the driver when he stopped to investigate, took his form and his car, and started on her world tour.

Braxn tried to do everything and be everyone.

“He” was, in turn, doctor, lawyer, fencing coach, prostitute, auto racer, mountain climber, golf pro. He ran a pornography shop in Dallas, a hot dog stand at Coney Island, a death-sleep house in Peking, a Vienese coffeehouse, the museum at Dachau. He peddled Bibles and amulets, Fuller brushes and heroin. He was a society deb, a Bohemian poet, a member of Parliament, a
cul-de-jatte
in Monaco.

For operating expenses, when he needed small sums, he wove baskets, sold his body, dived for pennies, cast horoscopes.

Hustled pool.

The sweat drop had moved a hundredth of an inch. Must stop wasting time, but it’s so hard to concentrate when it feels like you have all the time in the universe.

Braxn knew that he could remain in this state only a few more minutes (subjective) before he was stuck in it permanently. On the ship he could spend as much time as he wanted in mental acceleration, but here there was no apparatus to shock him out of it before trance set it. The trance would go on for more than a thousand years, such was his race’s span of life. But to the six hoods he would age and die in a few seconds, reverting to his original form for an invisible nanosecond before dissolving into a small grey mound of dust.

He was seeing in the far infrared now, and definition was very poor. He switched to field recognition. The dull animals confronting him had dim red psionic envelopes, except for the one in agony, whose aura was bordered with coruscating violet flashes.

Electromagnetic. The ion fog around the leader’s watch glowed pale blue. Leakage from the telephone and power lines made kaleidoscopic patterns in the sky. His back felt warm.

Warm?

He switched to visual again and searched the people’s eyes for reflections. There—the little scared one—his eyes mirrored the fence, the Hurricane fence. Spaced with ceramic insulators . . .

He started to slow down his mind, speed up the world. The drop inched, fell to the ground with slow purpose; struck and flowered into tiny droplets.

Sound welled up around him.

“—eezuz Christ, he must be scared stiff!”

Braxn stumbled back toward the electrified fence, manufacturing adrenaline to substitute for his spent strength. His stomach knotted and flamed with impossible hunger. He received the pain and cherished it.

The leader advanced for the kill, bold and cocky, switchblade in his right hand, his left swinging a bicycle chain like a stubby lariat.

Braxn secreted a flesh-colored, rubbery coating over his body and, on top of that, a thin layer of saline mucus.

“Come, Retiarius!” he croaked.

“Huh?” The leader faltered in his advance, too late.

Braxn grabbed the bicycle chain and the fence simultaneously. There was a low, sixty-cycle hum, and the hood crumpled to the ground. He looped the chain around the scared one’s neck and pulled him into the fence. Three to go.

The others had stopped, bewildered. Braxn, gaining strength at the expense of his temporary body, snatched the nearest one and hurled him into the fence. Another started to run, but Braxn used the chain as a bolo and brought him down. He dragged him screaming to the fence and shoved his face into it.

The only one left was Jimmy.

“Jimmy-baby!” The dim giant stood his ground, trying to understand what had happened, too sure of his own strength to be really afraid. He took a tentative step forward.

Now. The more fantastic, the better. He could do anything in front of this oaf.

Braxn kept the rubbery coating, but altered its reflective properties. Now it was flesh-colored to Jimmy. He kinked his hair, flattened his nose, broadened his lips, started to swell in height and breadth.

He was becoming a carbon copy of Jimmy—more true in the man’s eyes than any photograph could be, for the specifications were coming from his own dim brain.

Thus the biceps were a bit larger, the face a little meaner, than the lying mirror would reflect. The teeth were square and white, and instead of the ugly mole on his check there was an incredibly virile scar that lanced down to his chin, catching the corner of his mouth in a perpetual arrogant sneer. He laughed, deep and hollow, mirthless.

“Whassa matter, you? Y’seen me before?”

Jimmy stood transfixed, a bewildered smile decorating his vacant face.