The Perfect Host (42 page)

Now they were—and were not—Gowry and Tilsa, even as any human, in seven years has completely replaced every cell of his body and is—and is not—the same. But the replacement in Gowry and Tilsa was an adjustment to another environment, even to a slightly different gravity. They were aliens on Earth now, as a ship is an
alien—a manufactured alien—when it lies completed and as yet dry in the launching ways.

Gowry sat up, swung his legs to the floor, and stood up, stretching. He felt the good muscles of his back and thighs. He flexed and watched his fingers. “I remember,” he said simply.

Tilsa shaped her mouth around words: “I—remember—too.”

“Alan, and—the ship, Tilsa—the ship!”

“Yes, it’s up there.” She pointed at the ceiling.

He laughed. “He did it—Alan did it!”

Tilsa rose, feeling air—the new kind of air—in her lungs, feeling the new way her body obeyed. “Wasn’t there a—something we had to do first?”

“I don’t remember,” he said. “Where’s the ship?”

He cast about him; there was a door with a great stainless-steel bar across it. He lifted against the bar, and immediately the flat-throated cone spoke:

“Have you read the book?”

“That was it—the thing I couldn’t remember!” Tilsa cried.

The book was on a shelf under the wall light. They pounced on it. Its opening words were in very simple language, as if written for the benefit of young children:
You, man, are Gowry. You, woman, are Tilsa. Read this book. Do not go out of this room until you have read this book
.

There were tests to be made on themselves, and on the air. There were solutions to be mixed from the racks of stores they found. There was much to be learned, but they learned it with increasing ease; they had learned it all once before, prior to their long sleep. It was an engrossing study, and they slept twice before they finished it. And then they opened the door.

Outside was a corridor to another closed door. On the wall hung two heavy suits, with transparent spherical helmets. Eagerly they climbed into them, inspected each other’s fastenings. Then they closed the door behind them and opened the one ahead.

The Earth’s air swirled in. They could see the water vapor in it with their new eyes; the air seemed turgid, misty. It frightened them a little, for they knew it was choking poison to them now.

They crossed a narrow gully to a place where two low mounds, rounded and covered with brush, stood against a rock wall. They looked at the mounds, appalled.

“They were pylons,” Gowry breathed. “Tall, square pylons—”

“How many years?” asked Tilsa, expecting no answer.

Shrugging off his sudden sadness, Gowry took a tool from his belt and pressed a stud on the side of it. Blue flame licked out and washed over the cliff between what was left of the pylons. The deposits of years crumbled away under the lash of flame, and suddenly a great square section cracked and toppled toward them. They jumped back as it crashed and broke. Gowry put away the tool.

Before them was still another door. Gowry pressed it with his gloved hands, kicked it once with a heavy boot, and it swung open, admitting them to a shaft. They switched on the lights built into their suits, their beams shooting forward and upward.

A stainless-steel ladder took them up perhaps fifty feet to a room built off the side of the shaft. At this point the shaft was roofed by the banked tubes of the ship, and the room gave access to the ship’s side. The ship seemed to fit in the shaft like a piston in its cylinder.

They entered the open port and, by means of the controls inside, swung it shut. There was the distant hum of machinery as the air in the lock was replaced with the atmosphere they had been readied for. Gowry’s gloved hand touched Tilsa’s and, suddenly overawed, he grasped it. It was such a long way they had come—and yet the journey was only beginning—

A green light flashed on, and the inner door swung open. They stepped into the ship. “It’s all right,” said Gowry, nodding toward the green light, and began to remove his suit.

They hung the suits carefully on the clips which had been built for them. For a moment they clung together, trembling. Then they mounted to the control room in the ship’s nose, and found another book, a thick one.

“Remember?”

“Yes,” she nodded. “Fuel, food, water, air; jet tests, star sights, course computations—We are going to be busy.”

Gowry looked around the compact control room with learning, re-learning eyes. “Let’s get to it,” he said.

Two days later they had learned their ship and themselves, and had tested themselves and their ship. With every small step of progress they felt an increasing awe of Alan, and of the thing he had built. They remembered his words:
“Mankind is accursed everywhere. It must start anew, in a place which it has not burned over and ruined.”

His words awed them, but even more the nature of his work awed them, for he did it knowing that he would never see the result, for a purpose transcending the two lives he was saving—saving and recreating. He had done it as an act of faith in a creature which had violated every faith ever put in it.…

A rock-fall had damaged the great winch designed to raise the ship up through its tunnel until it could break through the surface of the mesa above them. They worked shoulder to shoulder to repair it, and at last had their craft with its nose to the outer air. They took their star sights, and found that in just four days they could blast off, hurl themselves free of Earth’s gravity, and run out to intersect the orbit of their new world.

They used the time to examine a tired planet and its graves, and the horrors that were worse than graves—mankind’s living dead. With a tight-beam scanner they ranged the surface, throwing on a screen pictures of places near them, and of places far away.

“It’s a sunny place,” Tilsa observed, watching the screen. It seemed they had seen so little of the sun; they had been very young when they first came to the mesa.

“Look!” tore from Gowry’s throat.

They saw a cliff, cave openings. Creatures squatted around a fire at the foot of the cliff. They were short and broad, their torsos as long and thick as Gowry’s, but their legs seeming to have no thighs—short, stiff, thick, ending in enormous, flat, toeless feet. Some of them moved about slowly, their feet in a grotesque, shuffling dance; one or two, approaching faster from a distance, vaulted along on their knuckles, making crutches of their arms.

Burning and sputtering on the coals of the fire was—one of their
own. They tore off handfuls of the hot, half-raw meat, gnawing at it with yellow fangs.

Gowry’s throat was thick with nausea. “Humanity’s children,” he whispered, and spun the control to blank the screen. “What the world must have gone through while we slept,” he mused, “to have such things fit to survive here.”

“Look some more,” said Tilsa. Her face was rapt, half-hypnotized with revulsion. “We should know—we should find out everything we can—”

Reluctantly Gowry turned to the controls again, scanning the Earth. He stopped briefly here and there. A ruined, grave-quiet city. A road, beautiful in its narrowing course, but with its surface crumbled and overgrown. Deserts where crawling giant weeds had choked out all life, including their own. Then came the picture they were never to forget.

“Tilsa—a different kind!”

They saw a house, seemingly of metal, in rolling country near wooded mountains. It was hexagonal, quite low, with a shining, peaked roof. There were creatures near it—two of them.

They were tall, slender, blue-hued, with long heads and curved, muscular tails. They ran out into the sun in great, graceful leaps. They stopped, hand in hand, brought their free hands to touch too, and their tails curved up over their heads until they touched each other. They stood there in this curious contact for a long moment.

“Why—how beautiful!” cried Tilsa.

Then, from the foot of the meadow in which they stood, like a spilling over of some foul container, came a mass of the short-legged humanoids. The crutch-like sweep of their long arms advanced them with terrifying speed as they crowded up the slope—

“Look out! Run!” Gowry shouted at the screen, uselessly.

The blue creatures stood, oblivious of their danger, until the leaders of the horde were on them. They did not appear to resist. There was a swirl of motion, a piling up of the ravening humanoids, and it was over. One by one, they crept away from the snarling mob, bearing grisly blue fragments which they tore to bits with their teeth—and spat out.

“No more,” Tilsa said faintly. “No more—”

Gowry turned off the set and sank down beside her. “What for?” he said, as if to himself. “What did they do it for?”

“They saw a difference,” she said, her eyes agonized. “Mankind has always pulled down and destroyed anything that is different. Even if the differences are slight, they will be sought out. Alan used to say that if there was just one human left on earth he would kill himself because of the differences he would find in his own thought.”

“It won’t be that way with us,” he said quietly.

“No, it can’t be—it can’t.”

Their time came. The automatic machinery clicked and hummed and purred about its many tasks. Gowry fed a punched card into the course integrator and switched it on; the ship would blast off at the precise instant for which it was set.

They strapped themselves into the acceleration chairs, side by side. Moving his hand spiderwise against the restraining fabric, Gowry edged it over until it touched Tilsa’s. To his surprise, she pulled away.

“Don’t,” she said. “You make me think of those blue ones—”

The jets thundered and they hurtled away; the great shaft fell in on itself under the battering thrust of the flames.

They both blacked out. When Gowry came to he was aware first of his laboring heart and the great pressure which lay upon him. At seven gravities, his limbs weighed hundreds of pounds; his eyeballs ached and his heart all but groaned its protest. He forced his eyelids open and looked ahead, and his heart began to beat more strongly, exultantly—before him was the majesty of interstellar space, a bejeweled purple curtain.

Eight and a half hours later the acceleration cut down to a more comfortable two and a third gravities. Breathing was easier, and they could talk. But they said little, instead lying in the chairs, drinking in the wonder before them.

The days fled, marked only by the clock, by hunger and sleep. Once Tilsa spoke of the blue beings: “I wish I had never seen them. I wish I didn’t know about the part of humanity that kills for nothing.”

“Think of this ship,” he told her, “of that part of humanity that made Alan do this work.”

“Waste,” she murmured. “That’s the sin of it—the waste. Oh, the songs men have sung, the fine and beautiful things written and painted and built—all come to ruination—” She wept. “Oh, the waste—”

“Humanity’s trademark,” he said bitterly. “Stamped, sooner or later, on all of man’s works.”

She stroked the edge of the instrument panel. “Not all,” she pleaded; “not all—”

They made their planetfall with Gowry at the manual controls. Round and round the cloudy globe they went, the braking rockets roaring, until at last the outer skin of the ship trembled to a high screaming—atmosphere. They plunged through it and out again, letting it check their speed but not taking enough to burn them, meteor-like. He threw out blast after blast from the forward jets and they entered the atmosphere again, lost it, took it, held it—and began to spiral in.

He kicked in the six gyro-controlled supporting jets, which blasted down and outward. They settled, until they were in the white sea of cloud around the planet. Blinded by it, they turned on the scanner and coupled the supporting jets to the radar altimeter. They passed a mountain range, and another, and a long series of foothills, and a great sea. And at last, in the radarscope, they saw a coast.

Gowry slid the ship in toward it. He touched the water; the ship porpoised with a grinding wrench, settled and skipped again, rode the surface until it slowed enough to displace some of its weight. Huge sheets of spray whipped out, and the ship floated. Gowry kicked it forward with the jets, driving it confidently up onto the beach, where it stopped and rolled a little to the right, to lie still like some great sea animal.

“Beautifully done, darling!”

“Thanks,” he said proudly. “It wasn’t anything you could work up to—had to be done right the first time. Are you running the atmosphere tests?”

“All done, while you were piloting in.” She held up a phial of purple fluid. “It reacts perfectly—and Alan’s gravity, magnetic-density, and radio-active indices all check. Let’s go out!” she caroled.

“The suits—”

“Damn the suits, darling—we’re
home!
”

Laughing, they ran to the airlock, waited impatiently for the outside door to open. As it rolled back, Gowry caught her wrist.

“No, you don’t,” he said, checking her as she was about to leap. “We go into Our House like this,” and he swept her into his arms and stepped through the port, dropping easily to the ground beneath.

“Put me down!” she commanded. “I want to run!”

He let her go and she was off like a deer, into the mist. Shouting delightedly, he sprinted after her. He caught her on a knoll, a little hummocky island of ground in the surrounding mist. He pressed her to him, capturing her laughing mouth with his lips.…

There was something near them in the fog. He raised his head, holding her tight, and saw it settle down through the air a little way off—something big, angular, metallic—

A house—a hexagonal house
, he wondered mutely;
like the blue people’s house—but this is a ship—and
their
house was a ship, then; and they—

Out of the hexagonal ship tumbled scores of them: blue people—but blue people dwarfed and transformed, with knotty little tails and shambling limbs, without the leaping grace, their beauty warped and gone—

It was over in seconds. One by one the blue mutants crawled away, spitting out the torn, bloody fragments.