I kissed her playfully, for we were often happy like that; simply happy, by being together. Together. What that meant to me, I never quite knew, happy as I was. Our enjoyment of one another was so uncomplicated that it never struck me how it could be with her gone.
Then we passed through that fog of subatomic particles that float beyond the orbit of Firstmoon, and though they did not register on the tank, they were there and they were here and gone. Leaving in their wake a million tiny invisible holes in the hull of the ship. The holes would not have leaked enough air in a month to cause my wife or myself any discomfort, but they had pierced the drive chamber, also. The particles were not rock, but something else, perhaps even contra–terrene, and what they did to the drive chambers I will never know. For the ship lost power and slewed off toward this, my world, and miles above the surface they exploded.
My wife died, then, and I saw her body as I was whirled away in the safety section of the cab. I was safe, with great tanks of oxygen strapped to my hutch, and my wife was still there in the companionway between the metal walls. In the companionway between the galley and the cab, where she had gone to prepare me coffee.
She was still there, her arms outstretched to me, her skin quite blue — excuse me, it, it hurts still — as I was whirled away and down. I saw her that once.
My world is a harsh world. No clouds fleece its twelve–month black skies. No water runs across its surface. But then, water is no problem for me. I have the circulator, which takes my refuse, and turns it into drinkable water. There is a strong iron taste to the recirculated water, but that doesn’t bother me too much.
It’s the air that I have trouble getting. At least that was the case before I discovered the Fluhs had what I needed. I’ll tell you about it, and about what has happened to my face; I’m frightened.
Of course I had to live.
Not at all because I wanted to live; when you have been a space bum as long as me, and nothing to moor you to one rock, and then along comes a woman who dips up life in her eyes and hands and does it all for you — and then she is taken away so quickly . . .
But I had to live. Simply because I had air in the cab, and a pressure–suit and food and the circulator. I could subsist on these for quite a while.
So I lived on Hell.
I woke and went through enough hours of nothingness to make me weary, and then I slept again, and woke when my dreams grew too crimson and too loud, repeating the tracks of the “day” before. Soon I grew bored with my life in the cab, close and solitary as it was, and decided to take a walk on the surface of this world.
I slipped into my air–suit, not bothering to put on the pressure shell. There was barely enough gravity on the planet to keep me comfortable, though occasionally I got stiff pains in my chest. And with the heating circuits pressed into the material of the air–suit, I was in no real danger. I strapped the oxygen unit to my back, and slipped the bubble onto the yoke, dogging it down over my head with ease. Then I inserted the hose between oxygen unit and bubble and sealed it tightly with a wrench, so I would lose no air from leakage.
Then I went out.
It was twilight, as the sky dimmed on Hell. I had had three months of light already, since I had landed in the safety hatch, and I assumed perhaps two months of light had passed before I came. That left me with a month, roughly, before Secondmoon slipped across the face of the tiny red sun which I had not named. Even now, Secondmoon was coming across the horizon, and I knew it would be darkness for a full six months by that moon, then another six from Firstmoon, then light again for a brief six.
It had not been difficult to chart orbits and eclipse periods during the past three months. What else had I to do?
I started walking. It wasn’t difficult, and I found that by taking long hops, I could cover distances three times as quickly as if I had been on Earth.
The planet was nearly barren. No great forests, no streams or oceans, no plains with grain standing in them, no birds, and no other life but mine and —
When I first saw them, I was certain they were trumpet flowers, for they had the characteristic bell–shaped perianth with delicate stamen projecting slightly from the cup. But as I drew nearer I realized nothing so Earth–like — even in outward appearance — could occur here. These were not flowers, and on the spot, in the muffled–breathing of my helmet, I called them Fluhs.
They were a brilliant orange on the outside of the bell, fading down into a bluish–orange and then a simple marine blue on the stem. Inside the cups they were not so orange as they seemed golden, and the blue of the pistils was topped by anthers of orange. Quite colorful they were, and pleasant to look upon.
There were perhaps a hundred of these plants, growing at the base of rock formations that were quite unnatural: tall and leaning at angles, and all smooth and sharp–edged, like spikes, flattened off at the tops. Not so much like rocks, but like the image of salt crystals or glass, under ultra–magnification. The entire area was covered with these formations, and with an instant’s loss of reality, I seemed to see myself as a microscopic being, surrounded by great flat–edged, flat–topped crystals that were in reality merely dust or micro–specks.
Then my perspective returned, and I stepped closer to the Fluhs, to examine them more closely, for this was the only other life that had managed to exist on Hell, apparently, drawing sustenance from the thin, nitrogen–laden atmosphere.
I leaned over to stare deeper into the trumpet–blossoms, resting on one of the slanting pillars of pseudo–rock for support. That was one of my first mistakes, nearly fatal, and intended to color my entire life on Hell.
The pillar crashed — it was a semi–porous volcanic formation, almost scoria–like in composition — and loosened other rocks that had rested on it. I fell forward, directly atop the Fluhs, and the last thing I felt was my oxygen helmet shattering about my head.
Then the blackness that was not as deep as space slid down over me.
I should have been dead. There was no reason why I should not have been dead. But I was living; I was . . . breathing! Can you understand that? I should have been with my wife, but I was alive.
My face was pressed into the Fluhs.
I was drawing oxygen from them.
I had stumbled and fallen and cracked open my helmet, and should have died, but because of strange plants that sucked the nitrogen from the thin atmosphere, circulated it and cast it back out as oxygen, I was still alive. I cursed the Fluhs for depriving me of quick, unknowing surcease. I had come so close to joining her, and had lost the chance. I wanted to stagger away from the Fluhs — out into the open where they could not give me life — and gasp away my stolen life. But something stopped me. I was never a religious man, and I am not now. But there seemed to be something greater in what had happened. I can’t explain it. I just knew there was a Chance that had thrown me down into that patch of Fluhs.
I lay there, breathing deeply.
There was a soft membrane around the base of the pistils, what must have held in the oxygen, allowing it to sift out slowly. They were intricate and wonderful plants.
… and there was the smell of midnight.
I can’t describe it any more clearly. It was not a sweet smell, nor was it a sour smell. It was a tender, almost fragile odor that reminded me of one midnight when I had first married her, and we were living in Minnesota. Crisp, and pure and uplifting that midnight had been, when our love had transcended even the restrictions of marriage, when we first realized we were more in love than in love with love itself. Does that sound foolish or confused? No, to me it was perfectly clear. And so was the smell of midnight from the Fluhs.
It was that smell perhaps, that made me go on living.
That, and the fact that my face had begun to drain.
As I lay there, I had time to think about what this meant: the bottleneck in oxygen lack is the brain. After five mi
nutes of oxygen starvation, the brain is irreversibly damaged. But with these Fluhs, I could wander about my planet without a helmet — were I able to find them everywhere in such abundance.
As I lay there thinking, gathering strength for the run back to the ship, I felt my face draining. It was as though I had a great boil or pus–bag on my left cheek, and it was sucking blood down down into it. I felt my cheek, and yes, even through the glove I could feel a swelling. I grew terrified then, and plucking a handful of Fluhs — close to the bottom of their stems — I thrust my face into them, and ran frantically back to the ship.
Once inside, the Fluhs wilted and, falling down over my fist, they shriveled. Their brilliant colors faded, and they turned gray as brain matter. I threw them from me and they lay on the deckplate for a few minutes before — they crumbled to a fine ash.
I pulled off my air–suit and my gloves, and ran to the circulator, for it was constructed of burnished plasteel, and my reflection lived there clearly. My left cheek was terribly inflamed. I gave a short, sharp squeal of terror and pawed at my face, but unlike a pimple or boil, there was no soreness, no pain. Just the constant draining feeling.
What was there to do? I waited.
In a week, the sac had taken shape almost completely. My face was like no human face, drawn down and puffed out on the left side so that my left eye had been pulled into a mere slit of light shining through. It was like a gigantic goiter, but a goiter that was not on the neck, but my face. The sac ended just at the jawbone, and it did not impair my breathing a bit. But my mouth had been dragged down with it, and when I opened it, I found I had a great cavernous maw instead of the firm lips I had once known. Otherwise, my face was completely normal. I was a half–beast. My right side was normal, and my left was grotesquely pulled into a drooping, rubbery parody of humanity. I could not bear to look on myself for more than an instant or two, each “day.” The flaming redness of it had gone away, as had the draining, and I did not understand it for many weeks.
Until I ventured once more onto the surface of Hell.
The helmet could not be repaired, of course, so I used the one that my wife had used when she was with me. That set me thinking again, and later, when I had steadied myself, and stopped crying, I went out.
It was inevitable that I should return to the spot where my deformity had first occurred. I made the spikes, as I had now named the rock formations, without event, and sat down among a patch of Fluhs. If I had drawn off their life–giving oxygen, they seemed no worse for it, for they had continued to grow in brilliance and were, if anything, even more beautiful.
I stared at them for a long time, trying to apply what smattering of knowledge I had about the physics and chemistry of life to what had happened. One thing at least, was obvious, I had undergone a fantastic mutation.
A mutation that was essentially impossible from what Man knew of life and its construction. What might, under exaggerated conditions, have become a permanent mutation, through generations of special breeding, had happened to me almost overnight. I tried to reason it out:
Even on a molecular scale, structure is inextricably related to function. I considered the structure of proteins, for in that direction, I felt, lay at least a partial answer to my deformity.
Finally, I removed the helmet, and bent down to the Fluhs once more. I sucked air from them, and this time felt a great light–headedness. I continued drawing, first from one flower and then the next, till I knew. My sac was full. It all became reasonably clear to me, then. The smell of midnight. There was more than just odor there. I had assimilated bacteria from the Fluhs; bacteria that had attacked the stablizing enzymes in my breathing system. Viruses perhaps, or even rickettsia, that had — for want of a clearer term — softened my proteins and reshaped them to best allow me to make use of these Fluhs.
To allow me to oxygen–suck, as I had been doing, developing a bigger chest or larger lungs would have done me no good. But a balloon–like organ, capable of storing oxygen under pressure . . . that was something else again. When I sucked from the plants, oxygen bled slowly from the blood haemoglobin into the storage sac, and after a while I would be oxygen–full.
I could then proceed without air for long periods, even as a camel can go without water for periods of great duration. Of course I would have to have an occasional suck to restore what I had used up in between; in an emergency, I could go without for a long while, but then I would need a long suck to replace completely.
How it had occurred, down in the nucleoprotein level, I was not that much of a biochemist to understand. What I knew I knew by hypno–courses I had taken many years before in the Deimos University required courses. I knew these things, but had never studied enough to be able to analyze them. Given time and sufficient references, I was sure I could unravel the mystery; for unlike Earth scientists, who discounted almost–instantaneous mutation as a fantasy, I had to believe . . . for it had happened to me. I had only to feel my face, my puffed and now ballooned face to know it was true. So I had more to work with than they did.
At that moment, I realized I had been standing erect for some minutes, my face nowhere near the Fluhs. Yet I was breathing comfortably.
Yes, I had something to work with, where they did not, for I was living the nightmare fantasy they said was impossible.
That was six months ago. Now it is well into night, and judging from the way the Fluhs are dying, there will be nothing when light comes. Nothing left to breathe. Nothing for my noon meal.
It was so dark. The stars were too far off to care about Hell or what lived there. I should have known, of course. In the eternal darkness of twelve months’ night, the Fluhs die. They don’t gray–ash as the ones I first picked did. No, instead they retreat into the ground. They grow smaller and smaller, as though they were a motion picture, being run backward. They get tinier and finally disappear entirely. Whether they encyst themselves, or just die completely, I’ll never know, for the ground is much too hard to dig in, and what little I’ve been able to scrape away, where the scoria–like formations extend into the ground, reveal nothing but small holes where the blossoms descended.
My head was starting to hurt again, and my sac was emptying out all the faster, for my breathing — which I had learned to make shallow — was deepening with the effort. I started back toward the ship.
It was many miles around the planet. For I had been living in caves and subsisting on the rations brought with me, for the past three “days.” I had been trying to track down a thriving patch of Fluhs, not only to get oxygen to replenish my emptying sac, but to further study their strange metabolism. For my oxygen supply in the hutch was fast diminishing; something had gone broke in the system when I landed . . . or perhaps the same particles that had caused the ship’s reactors to explode had caused invisible damage in the oxygen recirculator. I didn’t know. But I did know I had to learn to live on what Hell could give me . . . or die.
It had been a difficult decision. I had wanted very much to die.
I was standing in the open, with the heated cowl of my air–suit grotesquely drawn about my head and sac, when I saw the flickering in the deep. It burned steadily for an instant, then continued to flicker, as it fell toward the tiny planet.
I realized almost at once that it was a ship. Unbelievable, unbelievable, but somehow, in some manner I could never understand, God had sent a ship to take me from this place. I started running, back toward my hutch, what was left of my ship.
I stumbled once, and fell, only to scramble along on all fours till I could get my balance. I continued running, and by the time I had reached the hutch, my sac was nearly empty, and my head was splitting. I got inside and dogged the lock, then leaned against it in exhaustion, drawing deeply deeply for the air inside.
I turned toward the radio gear, even before the ache was gone from my head, and threw myself roughly into the plot–seat. I had almost forgotten how va
luable the set could be; lost out here, so far over the Edge, I had never even given serious consideration to the possibility of being found. Actually, had I stopped to consider, it was not so peculiar after all; my ship had not exploded that far off the trade routes. True, I was far out, but any number of circumstances could combine to bring another ship my way.
And they had.
And it had.
And it was.
I flipped on the beacon signal, and set it to all–bands, hearing the bdeep–bdeep–bdeep of it in the hutch, going out, I knew, to that ship circling the planet. That done, I turned slowly in the plot chair, hands on my knees —
— only to catch sight of myself in the burnished wall of the recirculator. I saw my sac, grotesque, monstrous, hideous, covered with a week’s stubble of spikey beard growth, my mouth drawn down in a gash. I was hardly human any longer.
When they came, I would not open the lock for them.
Finally, I allowed them in. There were three of them, young, clean–limbed, trying to hide their horror at what I had become. They came in and stripped out of their bulky pressure suits. The hatch was crowded, but the girl and one of the men squatted on the floor and the other man perched on the plot tank’s edge.
“My name — ” I didn’t know whether to say “is” or “was” so I slurred it easily, “Tom Van Horne. I’ve been here about four or five months, I’m not sure which.”
One of the young men — he was staring at me frankly, he could not take his eyes off me, in fact — replied, “We belong to the Human Research Foundation. Expedition to evaluate some of the worlds out past the Edge for colonization. We — we — saw the other half of your ship. There was a wom — ”
I stopped him. “I know. My wife.” They stared at the port, the deckplate, the bulkhead.
We talked for some time, and I could see they were interested in my theories of near–instantaneous mutation. It was their field, and soon the girl said, “Mr. Van Horne, you have stumbled on something terribly vital to us all. You must come back with us and help us get to the heart of — of — your, uh, your change.” She blushed, and it reminded me a little of my wife.