Mind Webs - Desertion

Mine went.

Welcome to a half hour of mind went short stories from the world's expected fiction.

This is Michael Hansen with a mind web story from the big book of science fiction which

was edited by Graft Conquan.

This is Clifford Simex Desertion.

Four men, two by two, had gone into the howling maelstrom that was Jupiter and had not

returned.

They had walked into the keening gale, or rather they had looked, but he's low against

the ground, what sides gleaming in the rain.

For they did not go in the shape of men.

Now the fifth man stood before the desk who Kent Fowler, head of dome number three, Jovian

Survey Commission.

Under Fowler's desk, old houses scratched a flea, and then settled down to sleep again.

Harold Allen Fowler saw the sudden playing was young, too young.

They had the easy confidence of youth, the straight back and straight eyes, the face

of one who never had known fear, and that was strange.

For men in the domes of Jupiter did know fear, fear, and humility.

It was hard for man to reconcile his puny self with the mighty forces of the monstrous

planet.

Fowler said to him, you understand that you need not do this, you understand that you

need not go.

It was formula, of course.

The other four had been told the same thing, but they had gone.

This fifth one, Fowler knew it would go, too, but suddenly he felt a dull hope stir within

him that Allen wouldn't go.

When do I start?

Asked Allen.

There was a time when Fowler might have taken quiet pride in that answer, but not now,

in frown briefly.

Within the hour, he said, Allen stood waiting quietly.

More other men have gone out and have not returned, said Fowler.

You know that, of course.

We want you to return.

We don't want you going off on any heroic rescue expedition.

The main thing, the only thing is that you come back, that you prove man can live in

a Jovian form.

Go to the first surveys, take no farther than come back.

Don't take any chances.

Don't investigate anything just come back.

Allen nodded and said that he understood all that.

The Stanley will operate the converter, Fowler went on.

You need to have no fear on that particular point.

The other men were converted without Miss App.

They left the converter in the apparently perfect condition.

You will be in thoroughly competent hands.

The Stanley is the best qualified conversion operator in the solar system.

She had had experience on most of the other planets, and that's why she's here.

Allen grinned at the woman, and Fowler saw something flicker across the Stanley's face

or something that might have been pity or rage or just plain fear, but was gone again

and she was smiling back at the youth who stood before the desk.

Smiling in that print, school, teacher-ish way, she had of smiling almost as if she hated

herself for doing it.

Allen said, I'll be looking forward to my conversion, and the way he said it, he had made

it all a joke, a vast, ironic joke, but it was no joke.

It was serious business, deadly serious.

Upon these tests Fowler knew, depended the fate of man on Jupiter.

If the tests succeeded, the resources of the giant planet would be thrown open.

Man would take over Jupiter as he already had taken over the other smaller planets, and

if they failed, if they failed, man would continue to be chained and hampered by the terrific

pressure, the greater force of gravity, the weird chemistry of the planet.

He would continue to be shut within the domes, unable to set actual foot upon the planet,

unable to see it with direct, unated vision, forced to rely upon the awkward tractors

and the televisor, forced to work with clumsy tools and mechanisms or through the medium

of robots that themselves were clumsy.

For man, unprotected, and in his natural form would be blotted out by Jupiter's terrific

pressure of 15,000 pounds per square inch, pressure that made terrestrial sea-bottom

seam of vacuum by comparison.

Even the strongest metal Earthmen could devise could not exist under pressures such as that

under the pressure in the alkaline rains that forever swept the planet.

It grew brittle and flaky, crumbling like clay, or it ran away in little streams and puddles

of ammonia salts, only by stepping up the toughness and strength of that metal by increasing

its electronic tension could be made to withstand the weight of thousands of miles of swirling,

choking gases that made up the atmosphere.

And even when that was done, everything had to be coated with tough quartz to keep away

the rain, the bitter rain that was liquid ammonia.

Fowlers had listening to the engines in the subfloor of the dome, engines that ran on

endlessly.

The dome never quiet of them.

They had to run and keep on running.

For if they stopped, the power flowing into the metal walls of the dome would stop.

The electronic tension would ease up, and that would be the end of everything.

Towsary roused himself under Fowler's desk and scratched another flea as like fumping

hard against the floor.

Is there anything else?

Asked Alan.

Fowler shook his head.

Well, perhaps there's something you want to do, perhaps you, he had meant to say right

a letter, and he was glad he caught himself quick enough so he didn't say it.

Alan looked at his watch.

I'll be there on time, then he swung and headed for the door.

Fowler knew Miss Stanley was watching him, and he didn't want to turn and meet her

eyes.

He fumbled with a sheet of papers on the desk before him.

How long are you going to keep this up?

Miss Stanley and she bit off each word with a vicious snap.

You're going to keep on sentencing them to death, she said.

You're going to keep marching them out face to face with Jupiter.

You're going to sit in here safe and comfortable and send them out to die.

There's no room for sentimentality in Miss Stanley.

Fowler said, trying to keep a note of anger from his voice.

You know as well as I do why we're doing this, you realize that man in his own form simply

cannot cope with Jupiter.

The only answer is to turn men into the sort of things that can cope with it.

We've done it on the other planets.

If a few men die, but we finally succeed, the price is small.

Through the ages, men have thrown away their lives on foolish things for foolish reasons.

Why should we hesitate then at a little death, and the thing is great as this?

Miss Stanley sat stiff and straight hands folded in her lap.

The lights shining on her grain hair and Fowler watching her try to imagine what she might

feel, what she might be thinking.

He wasn't exactly afraid of her, but he didn't feel quite comfortable when she was around.

Though sharp blue eyes saw too much, her hands looked far too competent.

She should be somebody's aunt sitting in a rocking chair with her knitting needles, but

she wasn't.

She was the top notch conversion unit operator in the solar system, and she didn't like

the way he was doing things.

There is something wrong, Mr. Fowler.

Precisely.

A great Fowler.

Precisely, Miss Stanley.

That's why I'm sending Young Allen out alone.

He may find out what it is, and if he doesn't, I'll send someone else.

She rose slowly from her chair, started toward the door and then stopped before his desk.

Miss Stanley, Young Allen is going out soon.

Please be sure that your machine, my machine, is not to blame.

It operates along the coordinates of the biologist set up.

He sat hunched at his desk, listening to her footsteps, good on the corridor.

What she said was true, of course, the biologists had set up the coordinates, but the biologists

could be wrong.

Just a hair breadth of difference, one eye out of the aggression, and the converter would

be sending out something that wasn't the thing they meant to say.

A mutant might crack up, go haywire, come unstuck under some condition or stress of circumstance,

wholly unsuspected.

For man didn't know much about what was going on outside, only what his instruments

told him was going on, and the samplings of those happenings furnished by those instruments

and mechanisms had been no more than samplings.

For Jupiter was unbelievably large in the domes, very true.

In the work of the biologists and getting the data on the lopers, apparently the highest

form of Jovian life had involved more than three years of intensive study, and after that

two years of checking to make sure.

Work that could have been done on Earth in a week or two, but work that in this case

couldn't be done on Earth at all, for one couldn't take a Jovian life form to Earth.

The pressure here on Jupiter couldn't be duplicated outside of Jupiter, and at Earth pressure

and temperature, the lopers would simply have disappeared in a puff of gas.

It was worked that had to be done if man ever hoped to go about Jupiter in the life form

of the lopers, or before the converter could change a man to another life form, every

detailed physical characteristic of that life form must be known, surely and positively

with no chance of mistake.

Alan did not come back.

The tractors coming nearby to rain found no trace of him, unless the skulking thing reported

by one of the drivers had been the missing Earth man in the loper form.

The biologists sneered their most accomplished academic sneers when followers suggested

the coordinates might be wrong.

Carefully they pointed out the coordinates worked.

When a man was put into the converter in the switch was thrown, the man became a loper.

He left the machine and moved away out of sight into the super atmosphere.

Some quirk, Fowler, had suggested.

Some tiny deviation from the thing a loper should be, some minor defect.

If there were, the biologists said it would take years to find out, and Fowler knew

that they were right.

So there were five men now, instead of four, and Harold Alan had walked out into Jupiter

for nothing at all.

It was as if he'd never gone so far as knowledge was concerned.

Fowler reached across his desk and picked up the personal file as soon as he could pay

reasonably cut together.

It was a thing he dreaded, but a thing he had to do.

Somehow the reason for these strange disappearances must be found.

There was no other way than to send out more men.

He sat for a moment listening to the howling of the wind above the dome, the everlasting

thundering gale that swept across the planet and boiling, twisting wrath.

Was there some threat out there?

He asked himself.

In danger, they did not know about something that lay and wait and gobbled up the lopers,

making no distinction between lopers that were bonafide and the lopers that were men to

the goblers, of course, it would make no difference.

Or had there been a basic fault in selecting the lopers as the type of life best fitted

for existence on the surface of the planet?

The evident intelligence of the lopers he knew had been one factor in that determination.

Or if the thing man became, did not have capacity for intelligence, man could not for long

retain his own intelligence and such a guise.

Had the biologists let that one factor way too heavily, using it to offset some other factor

that might be unsatisfactory, even disastrous, it didn't seem likely, stiff-necked as they

might be the biologists knew their business.

There was the whole thing impossible doomed from the very start.

Conversion to other life forms had worked on other planets, but that did not necessarily

mean it would work on Jupiter.

Perhaps man's intelligence could not function correctly through the sensory apparatus provided

Jovian life.

Perhaps the lopers were so alien there was no common ground for human knowledge and the

Jovian conception of existence to meet and work together.

The fault might lie with man, be inherent with the race, some mental aberration which

coupled with what they found outside wouldn't let them come back.

Although it might not be an aberration not in the human sense, perhaps just one ordinary

human mental trait, except it is commonplace on earth would be so violently at odds with

Jovian existence that it would blast all human intelligence and sanity.

Tauzer rattled and clicked down the corridor, listening to them, Fowler smiled one way.

It was Tauzer coming back from the kitchen where he'd gone to see his friend, the cook.

Tauzer came into the room, carrying a bone.

He wagged his tailored Fowler and flopped down beside the desk bone between his paws.

For a long moment his roomy old eyes regarded as master and Fowler reached down a hand

to ruffle a ragged ear.

He still liked me Tauzer, Fowler asked and Tauzer thumped his tail.

He heard the only one said Fowler.

All through the dome they were cussing me, calling me a murderware more than likely.

He straightened, swung back to the desk.

His hand reached out and picked up the file.

Bennett?

Bennett had a girl waiting for him back on earth.

Andrews?

Andrews was planning on going back to Mars tech, just as soon as he earned enough to see

him through a year.

Olson?

Olson was nearing pension age, all the time telling the boys how he was going to settle

down and grow roses.

Carefully Fowler laid the file back on the desk.

Sentencing men to death, Miss Stanley had said that, her pale lips scarcely moving in

her parchment face, marching men out to die while he Fowler sat here safe and comfortable.

They were saying it all through the dome, no doubt, especially since Alan had failed

a return.

They wouldn't say it to his face, of course, even the man or man he called before his desk

and told they were the next to go wouldn't say it to him.

They would only say, when do we start?

For that was the formula, but he would see it in their eyes.

He picked up the file again, and Bennett, Andrews, Olson, there were others, but there

was no use in going on.

Kent Fowler knew that he couldn't do it, couldn't face them, couldn't send more men to die.

He leaned forward and flipped a toggle on the intercommunicator.

Yes, Mr. Fowler?

Miss Stanley, please.

He waited for Miss Stanley, listening to Towsard chewing half-heartedly on the bone Towsard's

teeth for getting bad.

Miss Stanley?

I said Miss Stanley's voice.

I just wanted to tell you, Miss Stanley, to get ready for two more.

Aren't you afraid that you run out of them, standing out one at a time, they'd last

longer, give you twice the satisfaction, Mr. Fowler?

One of them, this time, will be a dog.

A dog?

Yes, Towsard.

He heard the quick cold rage that iced her voice.

Your own dog.

He's been with you all these years.

That's the point, Miss Stanley.

Towsard would be unhappy if I left him behind.

It was not the Jupiter he had known through the televisor.

He had expected it to be different, but not like this.

He had expected a hell of ammonia rain and stinking fumes and the deafening thunder

bling tumult of the storm.

He had expected swirling clouds and fog in the snarling flicker of monstrous thunderbolts.

He had not expected the lashing down for it would be reduced to drifting purple mist that

move like fleeing shadows over a red and purple sword.

He had not even guessed the snaking bolts of lightning would be flares of pure ecstasy

across a painted sky.

Looking for Towsard, Fowler flexed the muscles of his body and maize at the smooth, sleek

strength he found.

Not a bad body, he decided, and Dremus said, remembering how he had pitted the loafers

when he glimpsed them through the television screen.

For it had been hard to imagine a living organism based upon ammonia and hydrogen rather

than upon water and oxygen.

Hard to believe that such a form of life could know the same quick thrill of life that

humankind could know.

Hard to conceive of life out of the soupy maelstrom that was juper, not knowing, of course,

the true jovian eyes.

It was no soupy maelstrom at all.

The wind brushed against him with what seen gentle fingers, and he remembered with a start

that by earth standards, the wind was a roaring gale, a two hundred mile an hour, holler,

laden with deadly gases.

Pleasant sense seeped into his body, and yet scarcely sense for it was not the sense

of smell, as he remembered it.

It was as if his whole being was soaking up the sensation of lavender, and yet not lavender.

It was something he knew for which he had no word, undoubtedly the first of many enigmas

in terminology.

For the words he knew, the thought symbols that served him as an earth man, would not

serve him as a jovian.

Suddenly he was aware of Tauzer, intensely aware of the bumbling eager friendliness of

the shaggy animal that had followed him from earth to many planets.

As if the thing that was Tauzer had reached out, and for a moment, sat within his brain.

And out of the bubbling welcome that he sensed, came the words.

Triapal, not words, really, better than words.

Thought symbols in his brain communicated thought symbols that had shades of meaning, words

that never have.

And he said, hey, a Tauzer, I feel good, said Tauzer, I feel good like I was a pup lately.

I've been feeling pretty punk.

Legs different enough on me and teeth wearing down to almost nothing hard to mumble a bone

with teeth like that.

Besides the fleas give me trouble.

Used to be, I never paid much attention to them, a couple of fleas, more or less, never

met much in my early days.

But Tauzer thought stumbled awkwardly.

Tauzer, you are talking to me.

Sure thing.

Yeah, I've always talked to you, but you couldn't hear me.

I tried to say things to you, but I couldn't make the grade.

I understood you sometimes, Tauzer.

Not very well.

You knew when I wanted food, when I wanted to drink, and when I wanted out, but that's

about all you ever managed.

I'm sorry about that.

Forget it.

Hey, I'll race you to the cliff.

For the first time, Fowler saw the cliff.

Apparently, many miles away, but with a strange, crystalline beauty that sparkled in the

shadow of the many colored clouds, Fowler hesitated.

Well, so long way off, Tauzer.

Oh, come on.

And then he started for the cliff.

Fowler followed, testing his legs, testing the strength and the new body of his, a bit doubtful

at first, amazed a moment later, and then running with a sheer joyousness that was

one with a red and purple sword, with a drifting smoke of the rain across the land.

As he ran, the consciousness of music came to him, a music that beat into his body that

surged throughout his being, wings of silver speed.

Music like bells might make from some steeple on a sunny, springtime hill.

As the cliff drew nearer, the music deepened and filled the universe with a spray of magic

sound, and he knew the music came from the tumbling waterfall that feathered down the

face of the shining cliff.

Only he knew it was no waterfall, but in ammonia fall, and the cliff was white because it

was oxygen solidified.

He skidded to a stop beside Tauzer with a waterfall broke into a glittering rainbow of

many hundred colors, literally many hundred.

For here he saw, was no shading of one primary to another as human beings saw, but a clear

cut selectivity that broke the prism down to its last ultimate classification.

The music said Tauzer, you know, what about it?

The music is vibrations, vibrations of water falling.

Atauzer, you don't know about vibrations.

Yes I do, yes it just popped into my head, just popped, and suddenly within his own head

he held a formula, the formula for a process that would make metal to withstand the pressure

of Jupiter.

He stared, astounded at the waterfall, and swiftly his mind took the many colors and

placed them in their exact sequence in the spectrum, just like that, just out of blue

sky, out of nothing for he knew nothing either of metals or of colors.

Tauzer, Tauzer, something's happening to us.

Yeah I know, Tauzer, it's our brains, we're using them, all of them down to the last

hidden corner, using them to figure out things we should have known all the time.

Maybe the brains of earth things naturally are slow and fronky, maybe we are the morons

of the universe Tauzer, maybe we're fixed so we have to do things a hard way.

And in the new sharp clarity of thought that seemed to grip him, he knew that it would

not only be the matter of colors in the waterfall or metals that would resist the pressure of

Jupiter.

He sensed other things, things not yet quite clear, a vague whispering that hinted of greater

things of mysteries beyond the pale of human thought, beyond even the pale of human imagination.

Mysteries, facts, logic built on reasoning, things that any brain should know if it used

all its reasoning power.

We're still mostly earth, we're just beginning to learn a few of the things we are

to know, Tauzer, a few of the things that were kept from us as human beings, perhaps

because we were human beings, because our human bodies were poor bodies, poorly equipped

for thinking, poorly equipped in certain senses that one has to have to know, perhaps even lacking

in certain senses that are necessary to true knowledge.

He stared back at the dome, a tiny black thing dwarfed by the distance.

Back there were men who couldn't see the beauty that was Jupiter, men who thought that swirling

clouds and lashing rain obscured the face of the planet, unseeing human eyes, poor eyes.

Eyes that could not see the beauty in the clouds, that could not see through the storms, bodies

that could not feel the thrill of twilling music stemming from the rush of broken water.

Men who walked alone and terrible lonely in this talking with their tongue like boy scouts

wigwagging out their messages, unable to reach out and touch one another's mind as he could

reach out and touch Tauzer's mind.

Men shot off forever from that personal intimate contact with other living things.

He, Fowler, had expected terror inspired by alien things out here on the surface, had

expected the coward before the threat of unknown things, had steeled himself against

disgust to the situation that was not of earth.

But instead, instead he had found something greater than man had ever known, a swifter,

sure body, a sense of exhilaration, a deeper sense of life, a sharp mind, a world of beauty

that even the dreamers of the earth had not yet imagined.

There was other five that felt a tool, it felt the urge to go and see, the compelling

sense that here lay a life of fullness and of knowledge, that he knew was why they had

not returned.

I won't go back, said Tauzer, but we can't let him down, Fowler.

Tauzer took a step or two back toward the dome, and he stopped.

Back to the dome, back to that aching, poison-laden body he had left.

It hadn't seemed aching before, but now he knew it was.

Back to the fuzzy brain, back to the muddled thinking, back to the flapping mouths that formed

signals others understood.

Back to eyes that now would be worse than no sight at all, back to squalor, back to crawling,

back to ignorance.

Hmm, perhaps, perhaps someday.

We got a lot to do and a lot to see, said Tauzer.

We got a lot to learn, we'll find things.

Yes, they could find things.

And perhaps civilizations that would make the civilization of man seen cuny by comparison,

beauty, and more important, and understanding of that beauty, and a comradeship no one had

ever known before, that no man, no dog had ever known before.

And life, the quickness of life after what seemed a drug existence, Tauzer said, I can't

go back, nor I, said Fowler.

They would turn me back into a dog, said Tauzer, and me, said Fowler, and me back into a man.

That was Clifford Simack's story, desertion, it appears in the big book of science fiction

edited by Graft Conklin.

I'm Michael Hanson, technical production for Mindwebs by Leslie Hilsenhoff.

Mindwebs comes to you from WHA Radio and Madison, a service of University of Wisconsin,

extension.