The Best of Sci-Fi-5

“I know,” said the other, sympathetically. “It’s something none of us have ever had to conceive of before. The whole notion of locking up a fellow-being is an abominable one, I’ll admit But for that matter, consider the creature itself!”

“It wouldn’t do for him to be loose.”

“Wouldn’t do! Why, it would be quite impossible. He actually murders . He killed three of our fellow-beings before we were able to subdue him.”

The second Althean shuddered more violently than before, and it appeared for a moment as though he was about to become physically ill. “But why ? What type of being is he, for goodness sake? Where does he come from? What’s he doing here?”

“Ah,” said the first, “now you’ve hit upon it. You see, there’s no way of knowing any of those answers. One morning he was discovered by a party of ten. They attempted to speak to him, and what do you think his rejoinder was?”

“He struck out at them, the way I heard it.”

“Precisely! Utterly unprovoked assault, with three of their number dead as a result. The first case of murder on record here in thirty generations. Incredible!”

“And since then …”

“He’s been a prisoner. No communication, no new insights, nothing. He eats whatever we feed him—he sleeps when the darkness comes and wakes when it goes. We have learned nothing about him, but I can tell you this for a fact. He is dangerous.”

“Yes,” said the second Althean.

“Very dangerous. He must be kept locked up. Of course, we wish him no harm—so we’ve made his prison as secure as possible, while keeping it as comfortable as possible. I daresay we’ve done a good job.”

“Look,” said the second, “perhaps I’m squeamish. I don’t know. But are you sure he can never escape?”

“Positive.”

“How can you be sure?”

The first Althean sighed. “The tower is one hundred thirty feet high. A drop from that distance is obviously fatal. Right?”

“Right.”

“The prisoner’s quarters are at the top of the tower, and the top is wider than the base—that is, the sides slope inward. And the sides are very, very smooth—so climbing down is quite impossible.”

“Couldn’t he come down the same way he’ll go up? It only stands to reason.”

“Again, quite impossible. He’ll be placed in his quarters by means of a pneumatic tube, and the same tube will be used to send him his food. The entire tower is so designed that it can be entered via the tube, and can only be left by leaping from the top. The food that he doesn’t eat, as well as any articles which he tires of, may be thrown over the side.”

The second Althean hesitated. “It seems safe.”

“It should. It is safe.”

“I suppose so. I suppose it’s safe, and I suppose it’s not cruel, but somehow…Well, when will the prisoner be placed in the tower? Is it all ready for his occupancy?”

“It’s ready, all right. And, as a matter of fact, we’re taking him there in just a few minutes. Would you care to come along?”

“It might be interesting, at that.”

“Then come along.”

The two walked in silence to the first Althean’s motor car and drove in silence to the tower. The tower was, indeed, a striking structure, both in terms of size and of design. They stepped out of the motor car and waited, and a large motor truck drew up shortly, pulling to a stop at the base of the tower. Three Althean guards stepped out of the truck, followed by the prisoner. His limbs were securely shackled.

“See?” demanded the first Althean. “He’ll be placed in the tube like that, and he’ll discover the key to his shackles in his quarters.”

“Clever.”

“We’ve worked it out carefully,” the first explained. “I don’t mean to sound boastful, but we’ve figured out all the angles.”

The prisoner was placed in the tube, the aperture of which was located at the very base of the tower. Once inside, it was closed securely and bolted shut. The three Althean guards hesitated for several moments until a red light at the base indicated that the prisoner had entered his quarters. Then they returned to the motor truck and drove off down the road.

“We could go now,” said the first. “I’d like to wait and see if he’ll throw down the shackles, though. If you don’t mind.”

“Not at all. I’m rather interested now, you know. It’s not something you see every day.”

They waited. After several minutes, a pair of shackles plummeted through the air and dropped to the ground about twenty yards from the two Altheans.

“Ah,” said the first. “He’s found the key.”

Moments later, the second pair of shackles followed the first, and the key followed soon thereafter. Then the prisoner walked to the edge of the tower and leaned over the railing, gazing down at them.

“Awesome,” said the second Althean. “I’m glad he can’t escape.”

The prisoner regarded them thoughtfully for several seconds. Then he mounted the railing, flapped his wings, and soared off into the sky.

It is just about ten years now, since Mark Clifton hit the science fiction world like a cloudburst, pouring out a seemingly inexhaustible flood of provocative, exciting, irritating, and informative thinking. I know of no contemporary author, with the possible exception of Robert Heinlein ten years earlier, who has exercised so much developmental influence, not just on the readers, but in the basic thinking of other writers in the field. There was a short spell, I recall, when some disgruntled souls referred to Astounding (now, Analog) as The Clifton House Organ.

For the past almost five years, other work has kept him too busy to leave much time for s-f. Now it would seem the spring floods are back, or so one hopes, on the basis of this story and the new Doubleday novel, Eight Keys to Eden.

The mystery of what made the goonie tick tormented me for twenty years.

Why, when that first party of big game hunters came to Libo, why didn’t the goonies run away and hide, or fight back? Why did they instantly, immediately, almost seem to say, “You want us to die, Man? For you we will do it gladly!” Didn’t they have any sense of survival at all? How could a species survive if it lacked that sense?

“Even when one of the hunters, furious at being denied the thrill of the chase, turned a machine gun on the drove of them,” I said to Paul Tyler, “they just stood there and let him mow them down.”

Paul started to say something in quick protest, then simply looked sick.

“Oh, yes,” I assured him. “One of them did just that. There was a hassle over it. Somebody reminded him that the machine gun was designed just to kill human beings, that it wasn’t sporting to turn it on game. The hassle sort of took the edge off their fun, so they piled into their space yacht and took off for some other place where they could count on a chase before the kill.”

I felt his sharp stare, but I pretended to be engrossed in measuring the height of Libo’s second sun above the mountain range in the west. Down below us, from where we sat and smoked on Sentinel Rock, down in my valley and along the sides of the river, we could see the goonie herds gathering under their groves of pal trees before night fell.

Paul didn’t take issue, or feed me that line about harvesting the game like crops, or this time even kid me about my contempt for Earthers. He was beginning to realize that all the old-timer Liboans felt as I did, and that there was reasonable justification for doing so. In fact, Paul was fast becoming Liboan himself. I probably wouldn’t have told him the yarn about that first hunting party if I hadn’t sensed it, seen the way he handled his own goonies, the affection he felt for them.