Gordon R. Dickson - Danger-Human.txt

DANGER – HUMAN

By Gordon R. Dickson

DANGER -- HUMAN, Astounding December 1957, (c) 1957 by Street & Smith Publications, Inc.




The spaceboat came down in the silence of perfect working Order--down through the cool, dark night of a New Hampshire lute spring. There was hardly any moon and the path emerg­ing from the clump of conifers and snaking its way across the dim pasture looked like a long strip of pale cloth, carelessly dropped and forgotten there.
	The two aliens checked the boat and stopped it, hovering, some fifty feet above the pasture, and all but invisible against the low-lying clouds. Then they set themselves to wait, their Woolly, bearlike forms settled on haunches, their uniform belts glinting a little in the shielded light from the instrument panel, talking now and then in desultory murmurs.
	"It's not a bad place," said the one of junior rank, looking down at the earth below.
	"Why should it be?" answered the senior.
	The junior did not answer. He shifted on his haunches.
	"The babies are due soon," he said. "I just got a message."
	"How many?" asked the senior.
	"Three--the doctor thinks. That's not bad for a first birthing."
	"My wife only had two."
	"I know. You told me."
	They fell silent for a few seconds. The spaceboat rocked almost imperceptibly in the waters of night.
	"Look--" said the junior, suddenly. "Here it comes, right on schedule."
	The senior glanced overside. Down below, a tall, dark form had emerged from the trees and was coming out along the path. A little beam of light shone before him, terminating in a blob of illumination that danced along the path ahead, lighting his way. The senior stiffened.
	"Take controls," he said. The casualness had gone out of his voice. It had become crisp, impersonal.
	"Controls," answered the other, in the same emotionless voice.
	"Take her down."
	"Down it is."
	The spaceboat dropped groundward. There was an odd sort of soundless, lightless explosion--it was as if concussive wave had passed, robbed of all effects but one. The figure dropped, the light rolling from its grasp and losing its glow in a tangle of short grass. The spaceboat landed and the two aliens got out.
	In the dark night they loomed furrily above the still figure. It was that of a lean, dark man in his early thirties, dressed in clean, much-washed corduroy pants and checkered wool lumber­jack shirt. He was unconscious, but breathing slowly, deeply and easily.
	"I'll take it up by the head, here," said the senior. "You take the other end. Got it? Lift! Now, carry it into the boat."
	The junior backed away, up through the spaceboat's open lock, grunting a little with the awkwardness of his burden.
	"It feels slimy," he said.
	"Nonsense!" said the senior. "That's your imagination."

	Eldridge Timothy Parker drifted in that dreamy limbo be­tween awakeness and full sleep. He found himself contemplat­ing his own name.
Eldridge Timothy Parker. Eldridgetimothyparker. Eldridge TIMOTHYparker. ELdrlDGEtiMOthyPARKer. . . .
	There was a hardness under his back, the back on which he was lying--and a coolness. His flaccid right hand turned flat, feeling. It felt like steel beneath him. Metal? He tried to sit up and bumped his forehead against a ceiling a few inches over­head. He blinked his eyes in the darkness--
	Darkness?
	He flung out his hands, searching, feeling terror leap up inside him. His knuckles bruised against walls to right and left. Frantic, his groping fingers felt out, around and about him. He was walled in, he was surrounded, he was enclosed.
	Completely.
	Like in a coffin.
	Buried--
	He began to scream. . . .

	Much later, when he awoke again, he was in a strange place that seemed to have no walls, but many instruments. He floated in the center of mechanisms that passed and repassed about him, touching, probing, turning. He felt touches of heat and Cold. Strange hums and notes of various pitches came and went. He felt voices questioning him.
	Who are you?
	"Eldridge Parker-Eldridge Timothy Parker-"
	What are you?
	"I'm Eldridge Parker-"
	Tell about yourself.
	"Tell what? What?"
	Tell about yourself.
	"What? What do you want to know? What-"
	Tell about. . . .
	"But I--"
	Tell. . . .

	. . . well, i suppose i was pretty much like any of the kids around our town . . . i was a pretty good shot and i won the fifth grade seventy-five yard dash . . . i played hockey, too . . . pretty cold weather up around our parts, you know, the air used to smell strange it was so cold winter mornings in January when you first stepped out of doors ... it is good, open country, new england, and there were lots of smells . . . there were pine smells and grass smells and i remember especially the kitchen smells . . . and then, too, there was the way the oak benches in church used to smell on Sunday when you knelt with your nose right next to the back of the pew ahead. . . .
	. . . the fishing up our parts is good too . . . i liked to fish but i never wasted time on weekdays ... we were presbyterians, you know, and my father had the farm, but he also had money invested in land around the country ... we have never been badly off but i would have liked a motor-scooter. . . .
	... no i did not never hate the germans, at least i did not think i ever did, of course though i was over in europe i never really had it bad, combat, i mean 	. . . i was in a motor pool with the raw smell of gasoline, i like to work with my hands, and it was not like being in the infantry. . . .
	. . . i have as good right to speak up to the town council as any man ... i do not believe in pushing but if they push me i am going to push right back . . . nor it isn't any man's busi­ness what i voted last election no more than my bank balance . . . but i have got as good as right to a say in town doings as if i was the biggest landholder among them. . . .
	. . . i did not go to college because it was not necessary . . . too much education can make a fool of any man, i told my father, and i know when i have had enough ... i am a fanner and will always be a farmer and i will do my own studying as things come up without taking out a pure waste of four years to hang a piece of paper on the wall. . . .
	... of course i know about the atom bomb, but i am no scientist and no need to be one, no more than i need to be a veterinarian . . . i elect the men that hire the men that need to know those things and the men that i elect will hear from me johnny-quick if things do not go to my liking. . . .
	... as to why i never married, that is none of your business ... as it happens, i was never at ease with women much, though there were a couple of times, and i still may if jeanie lind. . . .
	. . . i believe in god and the united states of america. . . .

	He woke up gradually. He was in a room that might have I been any office, except the furniture was different. That is, there was a box with doors on it that might have been a filing cabinet and a table that looked like a desk in spite of the single thin rod underneath the center that supported it. However, there were no chairs-only small, flat cushions, on which I three large woolly, bearlike creatures were sitting and watching him in silence.
	He himself, he found, was in a chair, though.
	As soon as they saw his eyes were open, they turned away I from him and began to talk among themselves. Eldridge Parker shook his head and blinked his eyes, and would have blinked his ears if that had been possible. For the sounds the creatures were making were like nothing he had ever heard before; and yet he understood everything they were saying. It was an odd sensation, like a double-image earwise, for he heard the strange mouth-noises just as they came out and then something in his head twisted them around and made them  into perfectly under­standable English.
	Nor was that all. For, as he sat listening to the creatures talk, he began to get the same double image in another way. That is, he still saw the bearlike creature behind the desk as the weird sort of animal he was, out of the sound of his voice, or from something else, there gradually built up in Eldridge's mind a picture of a thin, rather harassed-looking gray-haired man in something resembling a uniform, but at the same time not I quite a uniform. It was the sort of effect an army general might get if he wore his stars and a Sam Browne belt over a civilian double-breasted suit. Similarly, the other creature sitting facing the one behind the desk, at the desk's side, was a young and black-haired man with something of the laboratory about him, and the creature further back, seated almost against the wall, was neither soldier nor scientist, but a heavy older man with a sort of book-won wisdom in him.
	"You see, commander," the young one with the black-haired image was saying, "perfectly restored. At least on the physical and mental levels."	
	"Good, doctor, good," the outlandish syllables from the one behind the desk translated themselves in Eldridge's head. "And you say it ... he, I should say ... will be able to under­stand?"
	"Certainly, sir," said the doctor-psychologist-whatever-he-was. "Identification is absolute--"
	"But I mean comprehend-encompass--" The creature behind the desk moved one paw slightly. "Follow what we tell him-"
	The doctor turned his ursinoid head toward the third mem­ber of the group. This one spoke slowly, in a deeper voice.
	"The culture allows. Certainly."
	The one behind the desk bowed slightly to the oldest one.
	"Certainly, Academician, certainly."

	They then fell silent, all looking back at Eldridge, who re­turned their gaze with equivalent interest. There was something unnatural about the whole proceeding. Both sides were regard­ing the other with the completely blunt a...