Short Fiction Robert Sheckley (best romantic books to read TXT) 📖

“It’s quite possible,” Professor Carver admitted.

“They did!” Fred shouted. “Look, the cut is changing color already!”

The edges of the wound had a blackened, septic look.

“Sulfa,” Carver said. “Penicillin, too. I wouldn’t worry much about it, Fred. Modern Terran drugs⁠—”

“⁠—might not even touch this stuff. Open one of those tubes!”

“But, Fred,” Carver objected, “we have so little of it. Besides⁠—”

“To hell with that,” Fred said. He took one of the tubes and uncorked it with his teeth.

“Wait, Fred!”

“Wait, nothing!”

Fred drained the contents of the tube and flung it down. Carver said testily, “I was merely going to point out that the serum should be tested before an Earthman uses it. We don’t know how it’ll react on a human. It was for your own good.”

“Sure it was,” Fred said mockingly. “Just look at how the stuff is reacting.”

The blackened wound had turned flesh-colored again and was sealing. Soon there was a line of white scar tissue. Then even that was gone, leaving firm pink flesh beneath.

“Pretty good, huh?” Fred gloated, with a slight touch of hysteria. “It works, Professor, it works! Drink one yourself, pal, live another sixty years. Do you suppose we can synthesize this stuff? Worth a million, worth ten million, worth a billion. And if we can’t, there’s always good old Loray. We can drop back every fifty years or so for a refill. The stuff even tastes good, Professor. Tastes like⁠—what’s wrong?”

Professor Carver was staring at Fred, his eyes wide with astonishment.

“What’s the matter?” Fred asked, grinning. “Ain’t my seams straight? What you staring at?”

Carver didn’t answer. His mouth trembled. Slowly he backed away.

“What the hell is wrong!” Fred glared at Carver. Then he ran to the spaceship’s head and looked in the mirror.

“What’s happened to me?”

Carver tried to speak, but no words came. He watched as Fred’s features slowly altered, smoothed, became blank, rudimentary, as though nature had drawn there a preliminary sketch of intelligent life. Strange knobs were coming out on Fred’s head. His complexion was changing slowly from pink to gray.

“I told you to wait,” Carver sighed.

“What’s happening?” asked Fred in a frightened whimper.

“Well,” Carver said, “it must all be residual in the sersee. The Lorayan birthrate is practically nonexistent, you know. Even with the sersee’s healing powers, the race should have died out long ago. Unless the serum had another purpose as well⁠—the ability to change lower animal forms into the Lorayan form.”

“That’s a wild guess!”

“A working hypothesis based upon Deg’s statement that sersee is the mother of the Lorayan people. I’m afraid that is the true meaning of the beast cults and the reason they are taboo. The various beasts must be the origins of certain portions of the Lorayan people, perhaps all the Lorayan people. Even the topic is taboo; there clearly is a deep-seated sense of inferiority about their recent step up from bestiality.”

Carver rubbed his forehead wearily. “The sersee juice has,” he continued, “we may hazard, a role-sharing in terms of the life of the race. We may theorize⁠—”

“To hell with theory,” Fred said, and was horrified to find that his voice had grown thick and guttural, like a Lorayan voice. “Professor, do something!”

“There’s nothing I can do.”

“Maybe Terran science⁠—”

“No, Fred,” Carver said quietly.

“What?”

“Fred, please try to understand. I can’t bring you back to Earth.”

“What do you mean? You must be crazy!”

“Not at all. How can I bring you back with such a fantastic story? They would consider the whole thing a gigantic hoax.”

“But⁠—”

“Listen to me. No one would believe! They would consider, rather, that you were an unusually intelligent Lorayan. Your very presence, Fred, would undermine the whole thesis of my book!”

“You can’t leave me,” Fred said. “You just can’t do that.”

Professor Carver still had both revolvers. He stuck one in his belt and leveled the other.

“I am not going to endanger the work of a lifetime. Get out, Fred.”

“No!”

“I mean it. Get out, Fred.”

“I won’t! You’ll have to shoot me!”

“I will if I must,” Carver assured him. “I’ll shoot you and throw you out.”

He took aim. Fred backed to the port, undogged it, opened it. The villagers were waiting quietly outside.

“What will they do to me?”

“I’m really sorry, Fred,” Carver said.

“I won’t go!” Fred shrieked, gripping the edges of the port with both hands.

Carver shoved him into the waiting hands of the crowd and threw the remaining tubes of sersee after him. Then, quickly, not wishing to see what was going to happen, he sealed the port.

Within an hour, he was leaving the planet’s atmospheric limits.

When he returned to Earth, his book, Underlying Causes of the Implicit Inferiority of Non-Terran Peoples, was hailed as a milestone in comparative anthropology. But he ran into some difficulty almost at once.

A space captain named Jones returned to Earth and maintained that, on the planet Loray, he had discovered a native who was in every significant way the equal of a Terran. And he had tape recordings and motion pictures to prove it.

Carver’s thesis seemed in doubt for some time, until Carver examined the evidence for himself. Then he pointed out, with merciless logic, that the so-called super-Lorayan, this paragon of Loray, this supposed equal of Terran humanity, occupied the lowest position in the Lorayan hierarchy, the position of Sweeper, clearly shown by the broad black stripe across his face.

The space captain admitted that this was true.

Why then, Carver thundered, was this Lorayan Superior not able, in spite of his so-called abilities, to reach any higher position in the debased society in which he dwelt?

The question silenced the space captain and his supporters, demolished the entire school, as a matter of fact. And the Carverian Doctrine of the Implicit Inferiority of Non-Terrans is now accepted by reasoning Terrans everywhere in the Galaxy.

The sandcar moved smoothly over the rolling dunes, its six fat wheels rising and falling like the ponderous rumps of tandem elephants. The hidden sun beat down from a dead-white sky, pouring heat into the canvas top, reflecting heat