Strange Relations by Philip Jose Farmer

This is a short story was lovingly taken from 'Strange Relations' by Philip Jose Farmer
. . . Mother

Chapter 1

"Look, mother. The clock is running backwards."
Eddie Fetts pointed to the hands on the pilot room dial.
Dr. Paula Fetts said, "The crash must have reversed it."
"How could it do that?"
"I can't tell you. I don't know everything, son."
"Oh!"
"Well, don't look at me so disappointedly. I'm a pathologist, not an electronician."
"Don't be so cross, mother. I can't stand it. Not now."
He walked out of the pilot room. Anxiously, she followed him. The burial of the crew and her fellow scientists had been very trying for him. Spilled blood had always made him dizzy and sick; he could scarcely control his hands enough to help her sack the scattered bones and entrails.
He had wanted to put the corpses in the nuclear furnace, but she had forbidden that. The Geigers amidships were ticking loudly, warning that there was invisible death in the stern.
The meteor that struck the moment the ship came out of Translation into normal space had probably wrecked the engine-room. So she had understood from the incoherent high-pitched phrases of a colleague before he fled to the pilot room. She had hurried to find Eddie. She feared his cabin door would still be locked, as he had been making a tape of the aria "Heavy Hangs the Albatross" from Gianelli's Ancient Mariner.
Fortunately, the emergency system had automatically thrown out the locking circuits. Entering, she had called out his name in fear he'd been hurt. He was lying half-unconscious on the floor, but it was not the accident that had thrown him there. The reason lay in the corner, released from his lax hand; a quart free-fall thermos, rubber-nippled. From Eddie's open mouth charged a breath of rye that not even Nodor pills had been able to conceal.
Sharply she had commanded him to get up and on to the bed. Her voice, the first he had ever heard, pierced through the phalanx of Old Red Star. He struggled up, and she, though smaller, had thrown every ounce of her weight into getting him up and on to the bed.
There she had lain down with him and strapped them both in. She understood that the lifeboat had been wrecked also, and it was up to the captain to bring the yacht down safely to the surface of this charted but unexplored planet, Baudelaire. Everybody else had gone to sit behind the captain, strapped in crashchairs, unable to help except with their silent backing.
Moral support had not been enough. The ship had come in on a shallow slant. Too fast. The wounded motors had not been able to hold her up. The prow had taken the brunt of the punishment. So had those seated in the nose.
Dr. Fetts had held her son's head on her bosom and prayed out loud to her God. Eddie had snored and muttered. Then there was a sound like the clashing of the gates of doom—a tremendous bong as if the ship were a clapper in a gargantuan bell tolling the most frightening message human ears may hear—a blinding blast of light—and darkness and silence.
A few moments later Eddie began crying out in a childish voice, "Don't leave me to die, mother! Come back! Come back!"
Mother was unconscious by his side, but he did not know that. He wept for a while, then he lapsed back into his rye-fogged stupor—if he had ever been out of it—and slept. Again, darkness and silence.

It was the second day since the crash, if "day" could describe that twilight state on Baudelaire. Dr. Fetts followed her son wherever he went. She knew he was very sensitive and easily upset. All his life she had known it and had tried to get between him and anything that would cause trouble. She had succeeded, she thought, fairly well until three months ago when Eddie had eloped.
The girl was Polina Fameux, the ash-blonde, long-legged actress whose tridi image, taped, had been shipped to frontier stars where a small acting talent meant little and a large and shapely bosom much. Since Eddie was a well-known Metro tenor, the marriage made a big splash whose ripples ran around the civilized Galaxy.
Dr. Fetts had felt very bad about the elopement, but she had, she hoped, hidden her grief very well beneath a smiling mask. She didn't regret having to give him up; after all, he was a full-grown man, no longer her little boy. But, really, aside from the seasons at the Met and his tours, he had not been parted from her since he was eight.
That was when she went on a honeymoon with her second husband. And then she and Eddie had not been separated long, for Eddie had got very sick, and she'd had to hurry back and take care of him, as he had insisted she was the only one who could make him well.
Moreover, you couldn't count his days at the opera as a total loss, for he vised her every noon and they had a long talk—no matter how high the vise bills ran.
The ripples caused by her son's marriage were scarcely a week old before they were followed by even bigger ones. They bore the news of the separation of Eddie and his wife. A fortnight later, Polina applied for divorce on grounds of incompatibility. Eddie was handed the papers in his mother's apartment. He had come back to her the day he and Polina had agreed they "couldn't make a go of it," or, as he phrased it to his mother, "couldn't get together."
Dr. Fetts was, of course, very curious about the reason for their parting, but, as she explained to her friends, she "respected" his silence. What she didn't say was that she had told herself the time would come when he would tell her all.
Eddie's "nervous breakdown" started shortly afterwards. He had been very irritable, moody, and depressed, but he got worse the day a so-called friend told Eddie that whenever Polina heard his name mentioned, she laughed loud and long. The friend added that Polina had promised to tell someday the true story of their brief merger.
That night his mother had to call in a doctor.
In the days that followed, she thought of giving up her position as research pathologist at De Kruif and taking all her time to help him "get back on his feet." It was a sign of the struggle going on in her mind that she had not been able to decide within a week's time. Ordinarily given to swift consideration and resolution of a problem, she could not agree to surrender her beloved quest into tissue regeneration.
Just as she was on the verge of doing what was for her the incredible and the shameful, tossing a coin, she had been vised by her superior. He told her she had been chosen to go with a group of biologists on a research cruise to ten preselected planetary systems.
Joyfully, she had thrown away the papers that would turn Eddie over to a sanatorium. And, since he was quite famous, she had used her influence to get the government to allow him to go along. Ostensibly, he was to make a survey of the development of opera on planets colonized by Terrans. That the yacht was not visiting any colonized globes seemed to have been missed by the bureaus concerned. But it was not the first time in the history of a government that its left hand knew not what its right was doing.
Actually, he was to be "rebuilt" by his mother, who thought herself much more capable of curing him than any of the prevalent A, F, J, R, S, K, or H therapies. True, some of her friends reported amazing results with some of the symbol-chasing techniques. On the other hand, two of her close companions had tried them all and had got no benefits from any of them. She was his mother; she could do more for him than any of those "alphabatties;" he was flesh of her flesh, blood of her blood. Besides, he wasn't so sick. He just got awfully blue sometimes and made theatrical but insincere threats of suicide or else just sat and stared into space. But she could handle him.

Chapter 2


So now it was that she followed him from the backward-running clock to his room. And saw him step inside, look for a second, and then turn to her with a twisted face. "Neddie is ruined, mother. Absolutely ruined." She glanced at the piano. It had torn loose from the wallracks at the moment of impact and smashed itself against the opposite wall. To Eddie it wasn't just a piano; it was Neddie. He had a pet name for everything he contacted for more than a brief time. It was as if he hopped from one appellation to the next, like an ancient sailor who felt lost unless he was close to title familiar and designated points of the shoreline. Otherwise, Eddie seemed to be drifting helplessly in a chaotic ocean, one that was anonymous and amorphous.
Or, analogy more typical of him, he was like the night-clubber who feels submerged, drowning, unless he hops from table to table, going from one well-known group of faces to the next, avoiding the featureless and unnamed dummies at the strangers' tables.
He did not cry over Neddie. She wished he would. He had been so apathetic during the voyage. Nothing, not even the unparalleled splendour of the naked stars nor the inexpressible alienness of strange planets had seemed to lift him very long. If he would only weep or laugh loudly or display some sign that he was reacting violently to what was happening. She would even have welcomed his striking her in anger or calling her "bad" names.
But no, not even during the gathering of the mangled corpses, when he looked for a while as if he were going to vomit, would he give way to his body's demand for expression. She understood that if he were to throw up, he would be much better for it, would have got rid of much of the psychic disturbance along with the physical.
He would not. He had kept on raking flesh and bones into the large plastic bags and kept a fixed look of resentment and sullenness.
She hoped now that the loss of his piano would bring tears and shaking shoulders. Then she could take him in her arms and give him sympathy. He would be her little boy again, afraid of the dark, afraid of the dog killed by a car, seeking her arms for the sure safety, the sure love.
"Never mind, baby," she said. "When we're rescued, we'll get you a new one."
"When—!"
He lifted his eyebrows and sat down on the bed's edge. "What do we do now?"
She became very brisk and efficient.
"The ultrad automatically started working the moment the meteor struck. If it's survived the crash, it's still sending SOS's. If not, then there's nothing we can do about it. Neither of us knows how to repair it.
"However, it's possible that in the last five years since this planet was located, other expeditions may have landed here. Not from Earth but from some of the colonies. Or from non-human globes. Who knows? It's worth taking a chance. Let's see."
A single glance was enough to wreck their hopes. The ultrad had been twisted and broken until it was no longer recognizable as the machine that sent swifter-than-light waves through the no-ether.
Dr. Fetts said with false cheeriness, "Well, that's that! So what? It makes things too easy. Let's go into the storeroom and see what we can see."
Eddie shrugged and followed her. There she insisted that each take a panrad. If they had to separate for any reason, they could always communicate and also, using the DF's—the built-in direction finders—locate each other. Having used them before, they knew the instruments' capabilities and how essential they were on scouting or camping trips.
The panrads were lightweight cylinders about two feet high and eight inches in diameter. Crampacked, they held the mechanisms of two dozen different utilities. Their batteries lasted a year without recharging, they were practically indestructible and worked under almost any conditions.
Keeping away from the inside of the ship that had the huge hole in it, they took the panrads outside. The long wave bands were searched by Eddie while his mother moved the dial that ranged up and down the shortwaves. Neither really expected to hear anything, but to search was better than doing nothing.
Finding the modulated wave-frequencies empty of any significant noises, he switched to the continuous waves. He was startled by a dot-dashing.
"Hey, mom! Something in the 100 kilocycles! Unmodulated!"
"Naturally, son," she said with some exasperation in the midst of her elation. "What would you expect from a radio-telegraphic signal?"
She found the band on her own cylinder. He looked blankly at her. "I know nothing about radio, but that's not Morse."
"What? You must be mistaken!"
"I—I don't think so."
"Is it or isn't it? Good God, son, can't you be certain of anything!"
She turned the amplifier up. As both of them had learned Galacto-Morse through sleeplearn techniques, she checked him at once.
"You're right. What do you make of it?"
His quick ear sorted out the pulses.
"No simple dot and dash. Four different time-lengths."
He listened some more.
They've got a certain rhythm, all right. I can make out definite groupings. Ah! That's the sixth time I've caught that particular one. And there's another. And another."

Dr. Fetts shook her ash-blonde head. She could make out nothing but a series of zzt-zzt-zzt's.
Eddie glanced at the DF needle.
"Coming from NE by E. Should we try to locate?"
"Naturally," she replied. "But we'd better eat first. We don't know how far away it is, or what we'll find there. While I fix a hot meal, you get our field trip stuff ready."
"O.K.," he said with more enthusiasm than he had shown for a long time.
When he came back he ate everything in the large dish his mother had prepared on the unwrecked galley stove.
"You always did make the best stew," he said.
"Thank you. I'm glad you're eating again, son. I am surprised. I thought you'd be sick about all this."
He waved vaguely but energetically.
"The challenge of the unknown. I have a sort of feeling this is going to turn out much better than we thought. Much better."
She came close and sniffed his breath. It was clean, innocent even of stew. That meant he'd taken Nodor, which probably meant he'd been sampling some hidden rye. Otherwise, how explain his reckless disregard of the possible dangers? It wasn't like him.
She said nothing, for she knew that if he tried to hide a bottle in his clothes or field sack while they were tracking down the radio signals, she would soon find it. And take it away. He wouldn't even protest, merely let her lift it from his limp hand while his lips swelled with resentment.

Chapter 3


They set out. Both wore knapsacks and carried the panrads. He carried a gun over his shoulder, and she had snapped on to her sack her small black bag of medical and lab supplies.
High noon of late autumn was topped by a weak red sun that barely managed to make itself seen through the eternal double layer of clouds. Its companion, an even smaller blob of lilac, was setting on the northwestern horizon. They walked in a sort of bright twilight, the best that Baudelaire ever achieved. Yet, despite the lack of light, the air was warm. It was a phenomenon common to certain planets behind the Horsehead—one being investigated but as yet unexplained.
The country was hilly, with many deep ravines. Here and there were prominences high enough and steep-sided enough to be called embryo mountains. Considering the roughness of the land, however, there was a surprising amount of vegetation. Pale green, red and yellow bushes, vines, and little trees clung to every bit of ground, horizontal or vertical. All had comparatively broad leaves that turned with the sun to catch the light.
From time to time, as the two Terrans strode noisily through the forest, small multicoloured insect-like and mammal-like creatures scuttled from hiding place to hiding place. Eddie decided to carry his gun in the crook of his arm. Then, after they were forced to scramble up and down ravines and hills and fight their way through thickets that became unexpectedly tangled, he put it back over his shoulder, where it hung from a strap.
Despite their exertions, they did not tire quickly. They weighed about twenty pounds less than they would have on Earth, and, though the air was thinner, it was richer in oxygen.
Dr. Fetts kept up with Eddie. Thirty years the senior of the twenty-three-year-old, she passed even at close inspection for his older sister. Longevity pills took care of that. However, he treated her with all the courtesy and chivalry that one gave one's mother and helped her up the steep inclines, even though the climbs did not appreciably cause her deep chest to demand more air.
They paused once by a creek bank to get their bearings.
"The signals have stopped," he said.
"Obviously," she replied.
At that moment the radar-detector built into the panrad began to ping. Both of them automatically looked upwards.
"There's no ship in the air."
"It can't be coming from either of those hills," she pointed out. "There's nothing but a boulder on top of each one. Tremendous rocks."
"Nevertheless, it's coming from there, I think. Oh! Oh! Did you see what I saw? Looked like a tall stalk of some kind being pulled down behind that big rock."
She peered through the dim light. "I think you were imagining things, son. I saw nothing."
Then, even as the pinging kept up, the zzting started again. After a burst of noise, both stopped.
"Let's go up and see what we shall see," she said.
"Something screwy," he commented. She did not answer.
They forded the creek and began the ascent. Half-way up, they stopped to sniff in puzzlement at a gust of some heavy odour coming downwind.
"Smells like a cageful of monkeys," he said.
"In heat," she added. If his were the keener ears, hers was the sharper nose.

They went on up. The RD began sounding its tiny hysterical gonging. Nonplussed, Eddied stopped. The DF indicated the radar pulses were not coming from the top of the hill they were climbing, as formerly, but from the other hill across the valley. Abruptly, the panrad fell silent.
"What do we do now?"
"Finish what we started. This hill. Then we go to the other one."
He shrugged and then hastened after her tall slim body in its long-legged coveralls. She was hot on the scent, literally, and nothing could stop her. Just before she reached the bungalow-sized boulder topping the hill, he caught up with her. She had stopped to gaze intently at the DF needle, which swung wildly before it stopped at neutral. The monkey-cage odour was very strong.
"Do you suppose it could be some sort of radio-generating mineral?" she asked, disappointedly.
"No. Those groupings were semantic. And that smell . . ."
"Then what—"
He didn't know whether to feel pleased or not that she had so obviously and suddenly thrust the burden of responsibility and action on him. Both pride and a curious shrinking affected him. But he did feel exhilarated. Almost, he thought, he felt as if he were on the verge of discovering what he had been looking for for a long time. What the object of his search had been, he could not say. But he was excited and not very much afraid.
He unslung his weapon, a two-barrelled combination shotgun and rifle. The panrad was still quiet.
"Maybe the boulder is camouflage for a spy outfit," he said. He sounded silly, even to himself.
Behind him, his mother gasped and screamed. He whirled and raised his gun, but there was nothing to shoot. She was pointing at the hilltop across the valley, shaking, and saying something incoherent.
He could make out a long slim antenna seemingly projecting from the monstrous boulder crouched there. At the same time, two thoughts struggled for the first place in his mind: one, that it was more than a coincidence that both hills had almost identical stone structures on their brows, and two, that the antenna must have been recently stuck out, for he was sure he had not seen it the last time he looked.
He never got to tell her his conclusions, for something thin and flexible and irresistible seized him from behind. Lifted into the air, he was borne backwards. He dropped the gun and tried to grab the bands or tentacles around him and tear them off with his bare hands. No use.
He caught one last glimpse of his mother running off down the hillside. Then a curtain snapped down, and he was in total darkness.

Chapter 4


Eddie sensed himself, still suspended, twirled around. He could not know for sure, of course, but he thought he was facing in exactly the opposite direction. Simultaneously, the tentacles binding his legs and arms were released. Only his waist was still gripped. It was pressed so tightly that he cried out with pain.
Then, boot-toes bumping on some resilient substances, he was carried forward. Halted, facing he knew not what horrible monster, he was suddenly assailed—not by a sharp beak or tooth or knife or some other cutting or mangling instrument—but by a dense cloud of that same monkey perfume.
In other circumstances, he might have vomited. Now his stomach was not given the time to consider whether it should clean house or not. The tentacle lifted him higher and thrust him against something soft and yielding—something fleshlike and womanly—almost breastlike in texture and smoothness and warmth and in its hint of gentle curving.
He put his hands and feet out to brace himself, for he thought for a moment he was going to sink in and be covered up—enfolded—ingested. The idea of a gargantuan amoeba-thing hiding within a hollow rock—or a rock-like shell—made him writhe and yell and shove at the protoplasmic substance.
But nothing of the kind happened. He was not plunged into a smothering and slimy jelly that would strip him of his skin and then his flesh and then dissolve his bones. He was merely shoved repeatedly against the soft swelling. Each time, he pushed or kicked or struck at it. After a dozen of these seemingly purposeless acts, he was held away, as if whatever was doing it was puzzled by his behaviour.
He had quit screaming. The only sounds were his harsh breathing and the zzzts and pings from the panrad. Even as he became aware of them, the zzzts changed tempo and settled into a recognizable pattern of bursts—three units that crackled out again and again.
"Who are you? Who are you?"
Of course, it could just as easily have been, "What are you?" or "What the hell!" or "Nor smoz ka pop?"
Or nothing—semantically speaking.
But he didn't think the latter. And when he was gently lowered to the floor, and the tentacle went off to only-God-knew-where in the dark, he was sure that the creature was communicating—or trying to—with him.
It was this thought that kept him from screaming and running around in the lightless and fetid chamber, brainlessly seeking an outlet. He mastered his panic and snapped open a little shutter in the panrad's side and thrust in his right-hand index finger. There he poised it above the key and in a moment, when the thing paused in transmitting, he sent back, as best he could, the pulses he had received. It was not necessary for him to turn on the light and spin the dial that would put him on the 1,000 kc. band. The instrument would automatically key that frequency in with the one he had just received.
The oddest part of the whole procedure was that his whole body was trembling almost uncontrollably—one part excepted. That was his index finger, his one unit that seemed to him to have a definite function in this otherwise meaningless situation. It was the section of him that was helping him to survive—the only part that knew how—at that moment. Even his brain seemed to have no connection with his finger. That digit was himself, and the rest just happened to be linked to it.
When he paused, the transmitter began again. This time the units were unrecognizable. There was a certain rhythm to them, but he could not know what they meant. Meanwhile, the RD was pinging. Something somewhere in the dark hole had a beam held tightly on him.
He pressed a button on the panrad's top, and the built-in flashlight illuminated the area just in front of him. He saw a wall of reddish-grey rubbery substance. On the wall was a roughly circular, light grey swelling about four feet in diameter. Around it, giving it a medusa appearance, were coiled twelve very long, very thin tentacles.
Though he was afraid that if he turned his back to them the tentacles would seize him once more, his curiosity forced him to wheel about and examine his surroundings with the bright beam. He was in an egg-shaped chamber about thirty feet long, twelve wide, and eight to ten high in the middle. It was formed of reddish-grey material, smooth except for irregular intervals of blue or red pipes. Veins and arteries?
A door-sized portion of the wall had a vertical slit running down it. Tentacles fringed it. He guessed it was a sort of iris and that it had opened to drag him inside. Starfish-shaped groupings of tentacles were scattered on the walls or hung from the ceiling. On the wall opposite the iris was a long and flexible stalk with a cartilaginous ruff around its free end. When Eddie moved, it moved, its blind point following him as a radar antenna tracks the thing it is locating. That was what it was. And unless he was wrong, the stalk was also a C.W. transmitter-receiver.
He shot the light around. When it reached the end farthest from him, he gasped. Ten creatures were huddled together facing him! About the size of half-grown pigs, they looked like nothing so much as unshelled snails; they were eyeless, and the stalk growing from the forehead of each was a tiny duplicate of that on the wall. They didn't look dangerous. Their open mouths were little and toothless, and their rate of locomotion must be slow, for they moved like snails, on a large pedestal of flesh—a foot-muscle.
Nevertheless, if he were to fall asleep they could overcome him by force of numbers, and those mouths might drip an acid to digest him, or they might carry a concealed poisonous sting.

His speculations were interrupted violently. He was seized, lifted, and passed on to another group of tentacles. He was carried beyond the antenna-stalk and towards the snail-beings. Just before he reached them, he was halted, facing the wall. An iris, hitherto invisible, opened. His light shone into it, but he could see nothing but convolutions of flesh.
His panrad gave off a new pattern of dit-dot-deet-dats. The iris widened until it was large enough to admit his body, if he were shoved in head first. Or feet first. It didn't matter. The convolutions straightened out and became a tunnel. Or a throat. From thousands of little pits emerged thousands of tiny, razor-sharp teeth. They flashed out and sank back in, and before they had disappeared thousands of other wicked little spears darted out and past the receding fangs.
Meat-grinder.
Beyond the murderous array, at the end of the throat, was a huge pouch of water. Steam came from it, and with it an odour like that of his mother's stew. Dark bits, presumably meat, and pieces of vegetables floated on the seething surface.
Then the iris closed, and he was turned around to face the slugs. Gently, but unmistakably, a tentacle spanked his buttocks. And the panrad zzzted a warning.
Eddie was not stupid. He knew now that the ten creatures were not dangerous unless he molested them. In which case he had just seen where he would go if he did not behave.
Again he was lifted and carried along the wall until he was shoved against the light grey spot. The monkey-cage odour, which had died out, became strong again. Eddie identified its source with a very small hole which appeared in the wall.
When he did not respond—he had no idea yet how he was supposed to act—the tentacles dropped him so unexpectedly that he fell on his back. Unhurt by the yielding flesh, he rose.
What was the next step? Exploration of his resources. Itemization: the panrad. A sleeping-bag, which he wouldn't need as long as the present too-warm temperature kept up. A bottle of Old Red Star capsules. A free-fall thermos with attached nipple. A box of A-2-Z rations. A Foldstove. Cartridges for his double-barrel, now lying outside the creature's boulderish shell. A roll of toilet paper. Toothbrush. Paste. Soap. Towel. Pills: Nodor, hormone, vitamin, longevity, reflex, and sleeping. And a thread-thin wire, a hundred feet long when uncoiled, that held prisoner in its molecular structure a hundred symphonies, eighty operas, a thousand different types of musical pieces, and two thousand great books ranging from Sophocles and Dostoyevsky to the latest bestseller. It could be played inside the panrad.
He inserted it, pushed, a button, and spoke "Eddie Fetts's recording of Puccini's Che gelida manina, please."
And while he listened approvingly to his own magnificent voice, he zipped open a can he had found in the bottom of the sack. His mother had put into it the stew left over from their last meal in the ship.
Not knowing what was happening, yet for some reason sure he was for the present safe, he munched meat and vegetables with a contented jaw. Transition from abhorrence to appetite sometimes came easily for Eddie.
He cleaned out the can and finished with some crackers and a chocolate bar. Rationing was out. As long as the food lasted, he would eat well. Then, if nothing turned up, he would . . . But then, he reassured himself as he licked his fingers, his mother, who was free, would find some way to get him out of his trouble.

Chapter 5


The panrad, silent for a while, began signalling. Eddie spotlighted the antenna and saw it was pointing at the snailbeings, which he had, in accordance with his custom, dubbed familiarly. Sluggos he called them.
The Sluggos crept towards the wall and stopped close to it. Their mouths, placed on the tops of their heads, gaped like so many hungry young birds. The iris opened, and two lips formed into a spout. Out of it streamed steaming-hot water and chunks of meat and vegetables. Stew! Stew that fell exactly into each waiting mouth.
That was how Eddie learned the second phrase of Mother Polyphema's language. The first message had been, "What are you?" This was, "Come and get it!"
He experimented. He tapped out a repetition of what he'd last heard. As one, the Sluggos—except the one then being fed—turned to him and crept a few feet before halting, puzzled.
Inasmuch as Eddie was broadcasting, the Sluggos must have had some sort of built-in DF. Otherwise they wouldn't have been able to distinguish between his pulses and their Mother's.
Immediately after, a tentacle smote Eddie across the shoulders and knocked him down. The panrad zzzted its third intelligible message: "Don't ever do that!"
And then a fourth, to which the ten young obeyed by wheeling and resuming their former positions.
"This way, children."
Yes, they were the offspring, living, eating, sleeping, playing, and learning to communicate in the womb of their Mother—the Mother. They were the mobile brood of this vast immobile entity that had scooped up Eddie as a frog scoops up a fly. This Mother. She who had once been just such a Sluggo until she had grown hog-size and had been pushed out of her Mother's womb. And who, rolled into a tight ball, had free-wheeled down her natal hill, straightened out at the bottom, inched her way up the next hill, rolled down, and so on. Until she found the empty shell of an adult who had died. Or, if she wanted to be a first class citizen in her society and not a prestigeless occupée, she found the bare top of a tall hill—any eminence that commanded a big sweep of territory—and there squatted.
And there she put out many thread-thin tendrils into the soil and into the cracks in the rocks, tendrils that drew sustenance from the fat of her body and grew and extended downwards and ramified into other tendrils. Deep underground the rootlets worked, the instinctive chemistry; searched for and found the water, the calcium, the iron, the copper, the nitrogen, the carbons, fondled earthworms and grubs and larvae, teasing them for the secrets of their fats and proteins; broke down the wanted substance into shadowy colloidal particles; sucked them up the thready pipes of the tendrils and back to the pale and slimming body crouched on a flat space atop a ridge, a hill, a peak.
There, using the blueprints stored in the molecules of the cerebellum, her body took the building blocks of elements and fashioned them into a very thin shell of the most available materials, a shield large enough so she could expand to fit it while her natural enemies—the keen and hungry predators that prowled twilighted Baudelaire—nosed and clawed it in vain.
Then, her evergrowing bulk cramped, she would resorb the hard covering. And if no sharp tooth found her during that process of a few days, she would cast another and a larger. And so on through a dozen or more.
Until she had become the monstrous and much reformed body of an adult and virgin female. Outside would be the stuff that so much resembled a boulder, that was, actually, rock; either granite, diorite, marble, basalt, or maybe just plain limestone. Or sometimes iron, glass, or cellulose.
Within was the centrally located brain, probably as large as a man's. Surrounding it, the tons of organs: the nervous system, the mighty heart, or hearts, the four stomachs, the microwave and longwave generators, the kidneys, bowels, tracheae, scent and taste organs, the perfume factory which made odours to attract animals and birds close enough to be seized, and the huge womb. And the antennae—the small one inside for teaching and scanning the young, and a long and powerful stalk on the outside, projecting from the shelltop, retractable if danger came.
The next step was from virgin to Mother, lower-case to upper-case as designated in her pulse-language by a longer pause before a word. Not until she was deflowered could she take a high place in her society. Immodest, unblushing, she herself made the advances, the proposals, and the surrender.
After which, she ate her mate.
The clock in the panrad told Eddie he was in his thirtieth day of imprisonment when he found out that little bit of information. He was shocked, not because it offended his ethics, but because he himself had been intended to be the mate. And the dinner.
His finger tapped, Tell me, Mother, what you mean."
He had not wondered before how a species that lacked males could reproduce. Now he found that, to the Mothers, all creatures except themselves were male. Mothers were immobile and female. Mobiles were male. Eddie had been mobile. He was, therefore, a male.
He had approached this particular Mother during the mating season, that is, midway through raising a litter of young. She had scanned him as he came along the creek-banks at the valley bottom. When he was at the foot of the hill, she had detected his odour. It was new to her. The closest she could come to it in her memory banks was that of a beast similar to him. From her description, he guessed it to be an ape. So she had released from her repertoire its rut stench. When he seemingly fell into the trap, she had caught him.
He was supposed to attack the conception-spot, that light grey swelling on the wall. After he had ripped and torn it enough to begin the mysterious workings of pregnancy, he would have been popped into her stomach-iris.
Fortunately, he had lacked the sharp beak, the fang, the claw. And she had received her own signals back from the panrad.
Eddie did not understand why it was necessary to use a mobile for mating. A Mother was intelligent enough to pick up a sharp stone and mangle the spot herself.
He was given to understand that conception would not start unless it was accompanied by a certain titillation of the nerves—a frenzy and its satisfaction. Why this emotional state was needed, Mother did not know.
Eddie tried to explain about such things as genes and chromosomes and why they had to be present in highly-developed species.
Mother did not understand.
Eddie wondered if the number of slashes and rips in the spot corresponded to the number of young. Or if there were a large number of potentialities in the heredity-ribbons spread out under the conception-skin. And if the haphazard irritation and consequent stimulation of the genes paralleled the chance combining of genes in human male-female mating. Thus resulting in offspring with traits that were combinations of their parents.
Or did the inevitable devouring of the mobile after the act indicate more than an emotional and nutritional reflex? Did it hint that the mobile caught up scattered gene-nodes, like hard seeds, along with the torn skin, in its claws and tusks, that these genes survived the boiling in the stew-stomach, and were later passed out in the faeces? Where animals and birds picked them up in beak, tooth, or foot, and then, seized by other Mothers in this oblique rape, transmitted the heredity-carrying agents to the conception-spots while attacking them, the nodules being scraped off and implanted in the skin and blood of the swelling even as others were harvested? Later, the mobiles were eaten, digested, and ejected in the obscure but ingenious and never-ending cycle? Thus ensuring the continual, if haphazard, recombining of genes, chances of variations in offspring, opportunities for mutations, and so on?
Mother pulsed that she was nonplussed.
Eddie gave up. He'd never know. After all, did it matter?
He decided not, and rose from his prone position to request water. She pursed up her iris and spouted a tepid quartful into his thermos. He dropped in a pill, swished it around till it dissolved, and drank a reasonable facsimile of Old Red Star. He preferred the harsh and powerful rye, though he could have afforded the smoothest. Quick results were what he wanted. Taste didn't matter, as he disliked all liquor tastes. Thus he drank what the Skid Row bums drank and shuddered even as they did, renaming it Old Rotten Tar and cursing the fate that had brought them so low they had to gag such stuff down.
The rye glowed in his belly and spread quickly through his limbs and up to his head, chilled only by the increasing scarcity of the capsules. When he ran out—then what? It was at times like this that he most missed his mother.
Thinking about her brought a few large tears. He snuffled and drank some more and when the biggest of the Sluggos nudged him for a back-scratching, he gave it instead a shot of Old Red Star. A slug for Sluggo. Idly, he wondered what effect a taste for rye would have on the future of the race when these virgins became Mothers.
At that moment he was shaken by what seemed a lifesaving idea. These creatures could suck up the required elements from the earth and with them duplicate quite complex molecular structures. Provided, of course, they had a sample of the desired substance to brood over in some cryptic organ.
Well, what easier to do than give her one of the cherished capsules? One could become any number. Those, plus the abundance of water pumped up through hollow underground tendrils from the nearby creek, would give enough to make a master-distiller green!
He smacked his lips and was about to key her his request when what she was transmitting penetrated his mind.
Rather cattily, she remarked that her neighbour across the valley was putting on airs because she, too, held prisoner a communicating mobile.

Chapter 6


The Mothers had a society as hierarchical as table-protocol in Washington or peck-order in a barnyard. Prestige was what counted, and prestige was determined by the broadcasting power, the height of the eminence on which the Mother sat, which governed the extent of her radar-territory, and the abundance and novelty and wittiness of her gossip. The creature that had snapped Eddie up was a queen. She had precedence over thirty-odd of her kind; they all had to let her broadcast first, and none dared start pulsing until she quit. Then, the next in order began, and so on down the line. Any of them could be interrupted at any time by Number One, and if any of the lower echelon had something interesting to transmit, she could break in on the one then speaking and get permission from the queen to tell her tale.
Eddie knew this, but he could not listen in directly to the hilltop-gabble. The thick pseudo-granite shell barred him from that and made him dependent upon her womb-stalk for relayed information.
Now and then Mother opened the door and allowed her young to crawl out. There they practiced beaming and broadcasting at the Sluggos of the Mother across the valley. Occasionally that Mother deigned herself to pulse the young, and Eddie's keeper reciprocated to her offspring.
Turnabout.
The first time the children had inched through the exit-iris, Eddie had tried, Ulysses-like, to pass himself off as one of them and crawl out in the midst of the flock. Eyeless, but no Polyphemus, Mother had picked him out with her tentacles and hauled him back in.
It was following that incident that he had named her Polyphema.
He knew she had increased her own already powerful prestige tremendously by possession of that unique thing—a transmitting mobile. So much had her importance grown that the Mothers on the fringes of her area passed on the news to others. Before he had learned her language, the entire continent was hooked-up. Polyphema had become a veritable gossip columnist; tens of thousands of hill crouchers listened in eagerly to her accounts of her dealings with the walking paradox: a semantic male.
That had been fine. Then, very recently, the Mother across the valley had captured a similar creature. And in one bound she had become Number Two in the area and would, at the slightest weakness on Polyphema's part, wrest the top position away.
Eddie became wildly excited at the news. He had often daydreamed about his mother and wondered what she was doing. Curiously enough, he ended many of his fantasies with lip-mutterings, reproaching her almost audibly for having left him and for making no try to rescue him. When he became aware of his attitude, he was ashamed. Nevertheless, the sense of desertion coloured his thoughts.
Now that he knew she was alive and had been caught, probably while trying to get him out, he rose from the lethargy that had lately been making him doze the clock around. He asked Polyphema if she would open the entrance so he could talk directly with the other captive. She said yes. Eager to listen in on a conversation between two mobiles, she was very co-operative. There would be a mountain of gossip in what they would have to say. The only thing that dented her joy was that the other Mother would also have access.
Then, remembering she was still Number One and would broadcast the details first, she trembled so with pride and ecstasy that Eddie felt the floor shaking.
Iris open, he walked through it and looked across the valley. The hillsides were still green, red, and yellow, as the plants on Baudelaire did not lose their leaves during the winter. But a few white patches showed that winter had begun. Eddie shivered from the bite of cold air on his naked skin. Long ago he had taken off his clothes. The womb-warmth had made garments too uncomfortable; moreover, Eddie, being human, had had to get rid of waste products. And Polyphema, being a Mother, had had periodically to flush out the dirt with warm water from one of her stomachs. Every time the tracheae-vents exploded streams that swept the undesirable elements out through her door-iris, Eddie had become soaked. When he abandoned dress, his clothes had gone floating out. Only by sitting on his pack did he keep it from a like fate.
Afterwards, he and the Sluggos had been dried off by warm air pumped through the same vents and originating from the mighty battery of lungs. Eddie was comfortable enough—he'd always liked showers—but the loss of his garments had been one more thing that kept him from escaping. He would soon freeze to death outside unless he found the yacht quickly. And he wasn't sure he remembered the path back.

So now, when he stepped outside, he retreated a pace or two and let the warm air from Polyphema flow like a cloak from his shoulders.
Then he peered across the half-mile that separated him from his mother, but he could not see her. The twilight state and the dark of the unit interior of her captor hid her.
He tapped in Morse, "Switch to the talkie, same frequency." Paula Fetts did so. She began asking him frantically if he were all right.
He replied he was fine.
"Have you missed me terribly, son?"
"Oh, very much."
Even as he said this he wondered vaguely why his voice sounded so hollow. Despair at never again being able to see her, probably.
"I've almost gone crazy, Eddie. When you were caught I ran away as fast as I could. I had no idea what horrible monster it was that was attacking us. And then, half-way down the hill, I fell and broke my leg . . . "
"Oh, no, mother!"
"Yes. But I managed to crawl back to the ship. And there, after I'd set it myself, I gave myself B.K. shots. Only, my system didn't react like it's supposed to. There are people that way, you know, and the healing took twice as long.
"But when I was able to walk, I got a gun and a box of dynamite. I was going to blow up what I thought was a kind of rock-fortress, an outpost for some kind of extee. I'd no idea of the true nature of these beasts. First, though, I decided to reconnoitre. I was going to spy on the boulder from across the valley. But I was trapped by this thing.
"Listen, son. Before I'm cut off, let me tell you not to give up hope. I'll be out of here before long and over to rescue you."
"How?"
"If you remember, my lab kit holds a number of carcinogens for field work. Well, you know that sometimes a Mother's conception-spot when it is torn up during mating, instead of begetting young, goes into cancer—the opposite of pregnancy. I've injected a carcinogen into the spot and a beautiful carcinoma has developed. She'll be dead in a few days."
"Mom! You'll be buried in that rotting mass!"
"No. This creature has told me that when one of her species dies, a reflex opens the labia. That's to permit their young—if any—to escape. Listen, I'll—"
A tentacle coiled about him and pulled him back through the iris, which shut.
When he switched back to C.W., he heard, "Why didn't you communicate? What were you doing? Tell me! Tell me!"
Eddie told her. There was a silence that could only be interpreted as astonishment. After Mother had recovered her wits, she said, "From now on, you will talk to the other male through me.'
Obviously she envied and hated his ability to change wavebands, and, perhaps, had a struggle to accept the idea.
"Please," he persisted, not knowing how dangerous were the waters he was wading in, "please let me talk to my mother di—"
For the first time, he heard her stutter.
"Wha-wha-what? Your Mo-Mo-Mother?"
"Yes. Of course."
The floor heaved violently beneath his feet. He cried out and braced himself to keep from falling and then flashed on the light. The walls were pulsating like shaken jelly, and the vascular columns had turned from red and blue to grey. The entrance-iris sagged open, like a lax mouth, and the air cooled. He could feel the drop in temperature in her flesh with the soles of his feet.
It was some time before he caught on.
Polyphema was in a state of shock.
What might have happened had she stayed in it, he never knew. She might have died and thus forced him out into the winter before his mother could escape. If so, and he couldn't find the ship, he would die. Huddled in the warmest corner of the egg-shaped chamber, Eddie contemplated that idea and shivered to a degree for which the outside air couldn't account.

Chapter 7


However, Polyphema had her own method of recovery. It consisted of spewing out the contents of her stew-stomach, which had doubtless become filled with the poisons draining out of her system from the blow. Her ejection of the stuff was the physical manifestation of the psychical catharsis. So furious was the flood that her foster son was almost swept out in the hot tide, but she, reacting instinctively, had coiled tentacles about him and the Sluggos. Then she followed the first upchucking by emptying her other three waterpouches, the second hot and the third lukewarm and the fourth, just filled, cold.
Eddie yelped as the icy water doused him.
Polyphema's irises closed again. The floor and walls gradually quit quaking; the temperature rose; and her veins and arteries regained their red and blue. She was well again. Or so she seemed.
But when, after waiting twenty-four hours he cautiously approached the subject, he found she not only would not talk about it, she refused to acknowledge the existence of the other mobile.
Eddie, giving up hope of conversation, thought for quite a while. The only conclusion he could come to, and he was sure he'd grasped enough of her psychology to make it valid, was that the concept of a mobile female was utterly unacceptable.
Her world was split into two: mobile and her kind, the immobile. Mobile meant food and mating. Mobile meant—male. The Mothers were—female.
How the mobiles reproduced had probably never entered the hillcrouchers' minds. Their science and philosophy were on the instinctive body-level. Whether they had some notion of spontaneous generation or amoeba-like fission being responsible for the continued population of mobiles, or they'd just taken for granted they "growed," like Topsy, Eddie never found out. To them, they were female and the rest of the protoplasmic cosmos was male.
That was that. Any other idea was more than foul and obscene and blasphemous. It was—unthinkable.
Polyphema had received a deep trauma from his words. And though she seemed to have recovered, somewhere in those tons of unimaginably complicated flesh, a bruise was buried. Like a hidden flower, dark purple, it bloomed, and the shadow it cast was one that cut off a certain memory, a certain tract, from the light of consciousness. That bruise-stained shadow covered that time and event which the Mother, for reasons unfathomable to the human being, found necessary to mark KEEP OFF.
Thus, though Eddie did not word it, he understood in the cells of his body, he felt and knew, as if his bones were prophesying and his brain did not hear, what came to pass.
Sixty-six hours later by the panrad clock, Polyphema's entrance-lips opened. Her tentacles darted out. They came back in, carrying his helpless and struggling mother.
Eddie, roused out of a doze, horrified, paralysed, saw her toss her lab kit at him and heard an inarticulate cry from her. And saw her plunged, headforemost, into the stomach-iris.
Polyphema had taken the one sure way of burying the evidence.

Eddie lay face down, nose mashed against the warm and faintly throbbing flesh of the floor. Now and then his hands clutched spasmodically as if he were reaching for something that someone kept putting just within his reach and then moving away.
How long he was there he didn't know, for he never again looked at the clock.
Finally, in the darkness, he sat up and giggled inanely, "Mother always did make good stew."
That set him off. He leaned back on his hands and threw his head back and howled like a wolf under a full moon.
Polyphema, of course, was dead-deaf, but she could radar his posture, and her keen nostrils deduced from his body-scent that he was in terrible fear and anguish.
A tentacle glided out and gently enfolded him.
"What is the matter?" zzted the panrad.
He stuck his finger in the keyhole.
"I have lost my mother!"
"?"
"She's gone away, and she'll never come back."
"I don't understand. Here I am."
Eddie quit weeping and cocked his head as if he were listening to some inner voice. He snuffled a few times and wiped away the tears, slowly disengaged the tentacle, patted it, walked over to his pack in a corner, and took out the bottle of Old Red Star capsules. One he popped into the thermos; the other he gave to her with the request she duplicate it, if possible. Then he stretched out on his side, propped on one elbow like a Roman in his sensualities, sucked the rye through the nipple, and listened to a medley of Beethoven, Moussorgsky, Verdi, Strauss, Porter, Feinstein, and Waxworth.
So the time—if there were such a thing there—flowed around Eddie. When he was tired of music or plays or books, he listened in on the area hookup. Hungry, he rose and walked—or often just crawled—to the stew-iris. Cans of rations lay in his pack; he had planned to eat those until he was sure that—what was it he was forbidden to eat? Poison? Something had been devoured by Polyphema and the Sluggos. But sometime during the music-rye orgy, he had forgotten. He now ate quite hungrily and with thought for nothing but the satisfaction of his wants.
Sometimes the door-iris opened, and Billy Greengrocer hopped in. Billy looked like a cross between a cricket and a kangaroo. He was the size of a collie, and he bore in a marsupialian pouch vegetables and fruit and nuts. These he extracted with shiny green, chitinous claws and gave to Mother in return for meals of stew. Happy symbiote, he chirruped merrily while his many-faceted eyes, revolving independently of each other, looked one at the Sluggos and the other at Eddie.
Eddie, on impulse, abandoned the 100 kc. band and roved the frequencies until he found that both Polyphema and Billy were emitting a 108 wave. That, apparently, was their natural signal.
When Billy had his groceries to deliver, he broadcast. Polyphema, in turn, when she needed them, sent back to him. There was nothing intelligent on Billy's part; it was just his instinct to transmit. And the Mother was, aside from the "semantic" frequency, limited to that one band. But it worked out fine.

Chapter 8


Everything was fine. What more could a man want? Free food, unlimited liquor, soft bed, air-conditioning, shower-baths, music, intellectual works (on the tape), interesting conversation (much of it was about him), privacy, and security.
If he had not already named her, he would have called her Mother Gratis.
Nor were creature comforts all. She had given him the answers to all his questions, all . . .
Except one.
That was never expressed vocally by him. Indeed, he would have been incapable of doing so. He was probably unaware that he had such a question.
But Polyphema voiced it one day when she asked him to do her a favour.
Eddie reacted as if outraged.
"One does not—! One does not—!"
He choked, and then he thought, how ridiculous. She is not—
And looked puzzled, and said, "But she is."
He rose and opened the lab kit. While he was looking for a scalpel, he came across the carcinogens. He threw them through the half-opened labia far out and down the hillside.
Then he turned and, scalpel in hand, leaped at the light grey swelling on the wall. And stopped, staring at it, while the instrument fell from his hand. And picked it up and stabbed feebly and did not even scratch the skin. And again let it drop.
"What is it? What is it?" crackled the panrad hanging from his wrist.
Suddenly, a heavy cloud of human odour—mansweat—was puffed in his face from a nearby vent
"????"
And he stood, bent in a half-crouch, seemingly paralysed. Until tentacles seized him in fury and dragged him towards the stomach-iris, yawning man-sized.
Eddie screamed and writhed and plunged his finger in the panrad and tapped, "All right! All right!"

And once back before the spot, he lunged with a sudden and wild joy; he slashed savagely; he yelled. "Take that! And that, P . . ." and the rest was lost in a mindless shout.
He did not stop cutting, and he might have gone on and on until he had quite excised the spot had not Polyphema interfered by dragging him towards her stomach-iris again. For ten seconds he hung there, helpless and sobbing with a mixture of fear and glory.
Polyphema's reflexes had almost overcome her brain. Fortunately, a cold spark of reason lit up a corner of the vast, dark, and hot chapel of her frenzy.
The convolutions leading to the steaming, meat-laden pouch closed and the foldings of flesh rearranged themselves. Eddie was suddenly hosed with warm water from what he called the "sanitation" stomach. The iris closed. He was put down. The scalpel was put back in the bag.
For a long time Mother seemed to be shaken by the thought of what she might have done to Eddie. She did not trust herself to transmit until her nerves were settled. When they were, she did not refer to his narrow escape. Nor did he.
He was happy. He felt as if a spring, tight-coiled against his bowels since he and his wife had parted, was now, for some reason, released. The dull vague pain of loss and discontent, the slight fever and cramp in his entrails, the apathy that sometimes afflicted him, were gone. He felt fine.
Meanwhile, something akin to deep affection had been lighted, like a tiny candle under the draughty and over-towering roof of a cathedral. Mother's shell housed more than Eddie; it now curved over an emotion new to her kind. This was evident by the next event that filled him with terror.
For the wounds in the spot healed and the swelling increased into a large bag. Then the bag burst and ten mouse-sized Sluggos struck the floor. The impact had the same effect as a doctor spanking a newborn baby's bottom; they drew in their first breath with shock and pain; their uncontrolled and feeble pulses filled the ether with shapeless SOS's.
When Eddie was not talking with Polyphema or listening in or drinking or sleeping or eating or bathing or running off the tape, he played with the Sluggos. He was, in a sense, their father. Indeed, as they grew to hog-size, it was hard for their female parent to distinguish him from her young. As he seldom walked any more, and was often to be found on hands and knees in their midst, she could not scan him too well. Moreover, something in the heavywet air or in the diet had caused every hair on his body to drop off. He grew very fat. Generally speaking, he was one with the pale, soft, round, and bald offspring. A family likeness.
There was one difference. When the time came for the virgins to be expelled, Eddie crept to one end, whimpering, and stayed there until he was sure Mother was not going to thrust him out into the cold, hard, and hungry world.
That final crisis over, he came back to the centre of the floor. The panic in his breast had died out, but his nerves were still quivering. He filled his thermos and then listened for a while to his own tenor singing the "Sea Things' aria from his favourite opera, Gianelli's Ancient Mariner. Suddenly, he burst out and accompanied himself, finding himself thrilled as never before by the concluding words.

And from my neck so free
The Albatross fell off, and sank
Like lead into the sea.

Afterwards, voice silent but heart singing, he switched off the wire and cut in on Polyphema's broadcast.
Mother was having trouble. She could not precisely describe to the continent-wide hook-up this new and almost inexpressible emotion she felt about the mobile. It was a concept her language was not prepared for. Nor was she helped any by the gallons of Old Star in her bloodstream.
Eddie sucked at the plastic nipple and nodded sympathetically and drowsily at her search for words. Presently the thermos rolled out of his hand.
He slept on his side, curled in a ball, knees on his chest and arms crossed, neck bent forward. Like the pilot room chronometer whose hands reversed after the crash, the clock of his body was ticking backwards, ticking backwards . . .
In the darkness, in the moistness, safe and warm, well fed, much loved.

(Note this is a second story based on the one above.)

. . . Daughter

CQ! CQ!
This is Mother Hardhead pulsing.
Keep quiet all you virgins and Mothers, while I communicate. Listen, listen, all you who are hooked into this broadcast. Listen, and I will tell you how I left my Mother, how my two sisters and I grew our shells, how I dealt with the olfway, and why I have become the Mother with the most prestige, the strongest shell, the most powerful broadcaster and beamer, and the pulser of a new language.
First, before I tell my story, I will reveal to all you who do not know it that my father was a mobile.
Do not be nervequivered. This is a so-story. It is not a not-so-story.
Father was a mobile.

Mother pulsed, "Get out!"
Then, to show she meant business, she opened her exit-iris.
That sobered us up and made us realize how serious she was. Before, when she snapped open her iris, she did it so we could practice pulsing at the other young crouched in the doorways to their Mothers' wombs, or else send a respectful message to the Mothers themselves, or even a quick one to Grandmother, far away on a mountainside. Not that she received, I think, because we young were too weak to transmit that far. Anyway, Grandmother never acknowledged receipt.
At times, when Mother was annoyed because we would all broadcast at once instead of asking her permission to speak one at a time or because we would crawl up the sides of her womb and then drop off the ceiling on to the floor with a thud, she would pulse at us to get out and build our own shells. She meant it, she said.
Then, according to our mood, we would either settle down or else get more boisterous. Mother would reach out with her tentacles and hold us down and spank us. If that did no good, she would threaten us with the olfway. That did the trick. That is, until she used him too many times. After a while, we got so we didn't believe there was an olfway. Mother, we thought, was creating a not-so-story. We should have known better, however, for Mother loathed not-so-stories.
Another thing that quivered her nerves was our conversation with Father in Orsemay. Although he had taught her his language, he refused to teach her Orsemay. When he wanted to send messages to us that he knew she wouldn't approve, he would pulse at us in our private language. That was another thing, I think, that finally made Mother so angry she cast us out despite Father's pleadings that we be allowed to remain four more seasons.
You must understand that we virgins had remained in the womb far longer than we should have. The cause for our overstay was Father.
He was the mobile.
Yes, I know what you're going to reply. All fathers, you will repeat, are mobiles.
But he was Father. He was the pulsing mobile.
Yes, he could too. He could pulse with the best of us. Or maybe he himself couldn't. Not directly. We pulse with organs in our body. But Father, if I understand him correctly, used a creature of some kind which was separate from his body. Or maybe it was an organ that wasn't attached to him.
Anyway, he had no internal organs or pulse-stalks growing from him to pulse with. He used this creature, this r-a-d-i-o, as he called it. And it worked just fine.
When he conversed with Mother, he did so in Mother-pulse or in his own language, mobilepulse. With us he used Orsemay. That's like mobilepulse, only a little different. Mother never did figure out the difference.
When I finish my story, dearie, I'll teach you Orsemay. I've been beamed that you've enough prestige to join our Highest Hill sorority and thus learn our secret of communication.
Mother declared Father had two means of pulsing. Besides his radio, which he used to communicate with us, he could pulse in another and totally different manner. He didn't use dotdeetditdashes, either. His pulses needed air to carry them, and he sent them with the same organ he ate with. Boils one's stomach to think of it, doesn't it?
Father was caught while passing by my Mother. She didn't know what mating-lust perfume to send downwind towards him so he would be lured within reach of her tentacles. She had never smelled a mobile like him before. But he did have an odour that was similar to that of another kind of mobile, so she wafted that towards him. It seemed to work, because he came close enough for her to seize him with her extra-uterine tentacles and pop him into her shell.

Later, after I was born, Father radioed me—in Orsemay, of course, so Mother wouldn't understand—that he had smelled the perfume and that it, among other things, had attracted him. But the odour had been that of a hairy tree-climbing mobile, and he had wondered what such creatures were doing on a bare hilltop. When he learned to converse with Mother, he was so surprised that she had identified him with that mobile.
Ah, well, he pulsed, it is not the first time a female has made a monkey of a man.
He also informed me that he had thought Mother was just an enormous boulder on top of the hill. Not until a section of the supposed rock opened out was he aware of anything out of the ordinary or that the boulder was her shell and held her body within. Mother, he radioed, is something like a dinosaur-sized snail, or jellyfish, equipped with organs that generate radar and radio waves and with an egg-shaped chamber big as the living room of a bungalow, a womb in which she bears and raises her young.
I didn't understand more than half of these terms, of course. Nor was Father able to explain them satisfactorily.
He did make me promise not to pulse Mother that he had thought she was just a big lump of mineral. Why, I don't know.
Father puzzled Mother. Though he fought her when she dragged him in, he had no claws or teeth sharp enough to tear her conception-spot. Mother tried to provoke him further, but he refused to react. When she realized that he was a pulse-sending mobile and released him to study him, he wandered around the womb. After a while he understood that Mother was beaming from her womb pulse-stalk. He learned how to talk with her by using his detachable organ which he termed a panrad. Eventually, he taught her his language, mobilepulse. When Mother learned that and informed other Mothers about it, her prestige became the highest in all the area. No Mother had ever thought of a new language. The idea stunned them.
Father said he was the only communicating mobile on this world. His s-p-a-c-e-s-h-i-p had crashed, and he would now remain forever with Mother.
Father learned the dinnerpulses when Mother summoned her young to eat. He radioed the proper message. Mother's nerves were quivered by the idea that he was semantic, but she opened her stew-iris and let him eat. Then Father held up fruit or other objects and let Mother beam at him with her wombstalk what the proper dotditdeetdashes were for each. Then he would repeat on his panrad the name of the object to verify it.
Mother's sense of smell helped her, of course. Sometimes it is hard to tell the difference between an apple and a peach just by pulsing it. Odors aid you.
She caught on fast. Father told her she was very intelligent—for a female. That quivered her nerves. She wouldn't pulse with him for several mealperiods after that.

One thing that Mother especially liked about Father was that when conception-time came, she could direct him what to do. She didn't have to depend on luring a non-semantic mobile into her shell with perfumes and then hold it to her conception-spot while it scratched and bit the spot to fight its way from the grip of her tentacles. Father had no claws, but he carried a detachable claw. He named it a s-c-a-l-p-e-l.
When I asked him why he had so many detachable organs, he replied that he was a man of parts.
Father was always talking nonsense.
But he had trouble understanding Mother, too.
Her reproductive processes amazed him.
"By G-o-d," he beamed, "who'd believe it? That a healing process in a wound would result in conception? Just the opposite of cancer."
When we were adolescents and about ready to be shoved out of Mother's shell, we received Mother asking Father to mangle her spot again. Father replied no. He wanted to wait another four seasons. He had said farewell to two broods of his young, and he wanted to keep us around longer so he could give us a real education and enjoy us instead of starting to raise another group of virgins.
This refusal quivered Mother's nerves and upset her stew-stomach so that our food was sour for several meals. But she didn't act against him. He gave her too much prestige. All the Mothers were dropping Motherpulse and learning mobile from Mother as fast as she could teach it.
I asked, "What's prestige?"
"When you send, the others have to receive. And they don't dare pulse back until you're through and you give your permission."
"Oh, I'd like prestige!"
Father interrupted, "Little Hardhead, if you want to get ahead, you tune in to me. I'll tell you a few things even your Mother can't. After all, I'm a mobile, and I've been around."
And he would outline what I had to expect once I left him and Mother and how, if I used my brain, I could survive and eventually get more prestige than even Grandmother had.
Why he called me Hardhead, I don't know. I was still a virgin and had not, of course, grown a shell. I was as soft-bodied as any of my sisters. But he told me he was f-o-n-d of me because I was so hard-headed. I accepted the statement without trying to grasp it.
Anyway, we got eight extra seasons in Mother because Father wanted it that way. We might have got some more, but when winter came again, Mother insisted Father mangle her spot. He replied he wasn't ready. He was just beginning to get acquainted with his children—he called us Sluggos—and, after we left, he'd have nobody but Mother to talk to until the next brood grew up.
Moreover, she was starting to repeat herself, and he didn't think she appreciated him like she should. Her stew was too often soured or else so overboiled that the meat was shredded into a neargoo.
That was enough for Mother.
"Get out!" she pulsed.
"Fine! And don't think you're throwing me out in the cold, either!" zzted back Father. "Yours is not the only shell in this world."
That made Mother's nerves quiver until her whole body shook. She put up her big outside stalk and beamed her sisters and aunts. The Mother across the valley confessed that, during one of the times Father had basked in the warmth of the s-u-n while lying just outside Mother's opened iris, she had asked him to come live with her.
Mother changed her mind. She realized that, with him gone, her prestige would die and that of the hussy across the valley would grow.
"Seems as if I'm here for the duration," radioed Father.
Then, "Whoever would think your Mother'd be j-e-a-l-o-u-s?'
Life with Father was full of those incomprehensible semantic groups. Too often he would not, or could not, explain.
For a long time Father brooded in one spot. He wouldn't answer us or Mother.
Finally, she became overquivered. We had grown so big and boisterous and sassy that she was one continual shudder. And she must have thought that as long as we were around to communicate with him, she had no chance to get him to rip up her spot.
So, out we went.
Before we passed forever from her shell, she warned, "Beware the olfway."

My sisters ignored her, but I was impressed. Father had described the beast and its terrible ways. Indeed, he used to dwell so much on it that we had dropped the old term for it and used Father's. It began when he reprimanded her for threatening us too often with the beast when we misbehaved.
"Don't `cry wolf.'"
He then beamed me the story of the origin of that puzzling phrase. He did it in Orsemay, of course, because Mother would lash him with her tentacles if she thought he was pulsing something that was not-so. The very idea of not-so strained her brain until she couldn't think straight.
I wasn't sure myself what not-so was, but I enjoyed his stories. And I, like the other virgins and Mother herself, began terming the killer "the olfway."
Anyway, after I'd beamed, "Good sending, Mother," I felt Father's strange stiff mobile-tentacles around me and something wet and warm falling from him on to me. He pulsed, "Good l-u-c-k, Hardhead. Send me a message via hook-up sometimes. And be sure to remember what I told you about dealing with the olfway."
I pulsed that I would. I left with the most indescribable feeling inside me. It was a nervequivering that was both good and bad, if you can imagine such a thing, dearie.
But I soon forgot it in the adventure of rolling down a hill, climbing slowly up the next one on my single foot, rolling down the other side, and so on. After about ten warm-periods, all my sisters but two had left me. They found hilltops on which to build their shells. But my two faithful sisters had listened to my ideas about how we should not be content with anything less than the highest hilltops.
"Once you've grown a shell, you stay where you are."
So they agreed to follow me.
But I led them a long, long way, and they would complain that they were tired and sore and getting afraid of running into some meat-eating mobile. They even wanted to move into the empty shells of Mothers who had been eaten by the olfway or died when cancer, instead of young, developed in the conception spots.
"Come on," I urged. "There's no prestige in moving into empties. Do you want to take bottom place in every community-pulsing just because you're too lazy to build your own covers?"
"But we'll resorb the empties and then grow our own later on."
"Yes? How many Mothers have declared that? And how many have done it? Come on, Sluggos."
We kept getting into higher country. Finally, I scanned the set-up I was searching for. It was a flat-topped mountain with many hills around it. I crept up it. When I was on top, I test-beamed. Its summit was higher than any of the eminences for as far as I could reach. And I guessed that when I became adult, and had much more power, I would be able to cover a tremendous area. Meanwhile, other virgins would sooner or later be moving in and occupying the lesser hills.
As Father would have expressed it, I was on top of the world.

It happened that my little mountain was rich. The search-tendrils I grew and then sunk into the soil found many varieties of minerals. I could build from them a huge shell. The bigger the shell, the larger the Mother. The larger the Mother, the more powerful the pulse.
Moreover, I detected many large flying mobiles. Eagles, Father termed them. They would make good mates. They had sharp beaks and tearing talons.
Below, in a valley, was a stream. I grew a hollow tendril under the soil and down the mountainside until it entered the water. Then I began pumping it up to fill my stomachs.
The valley soil was good. I did what no other of our kind had ever done, what Father had taught me. My far-groping tendrils picked up seeds dropped by trees, flowers, and birds and planted them. I spread an underground net of tendrils around an apple tree. But I didn't plan on passing the tree's fallen fruit from tendril-frond to frond and so on up the slope and into my iris. I had a different destination in mind for them.
Meanwhile, my sisters had topped two hills much lower than mine. When I found out what they were doing, my nerves quivered. Both had built shells! One was glass; the other, cellulose!
"What do you think you're doing? Aren't you afraid of the olfway?"
"Pulse away, old grouch. Nothing's the matter with us. We're just ready for winter and mating-heat, that's all. We'll be Mothers, then, and you'll still be growing your big old shell. Where'll your prestige be? The others won't even pulse with you 'cause you'll still be a virgin and a half-shelled one at that!"
"Brittlehead! Woodenhead!"
"Yah! Yah! Hardhead!"
They were right—in a way. I was still soft and naked and helpless, an evergrowing mass of quivering flesh, a ready prey to any meat-eating mobile that found me. I was a fool and a gambler. Nevertheless, I took my leisure and sunk my tendrils and located ore and sucked up iron particles in suspension and built an inner shell larger, I think, than Grandmother's. Then I laid a thick sheath of copper over that so the iron wouldn't rust. Over that I grew a layer of bone made out of calcium I'd extracted from limestone rocks. Nor did I bother, as my sisters had done, to resorb my virgin's stalk and grow an adult one. That could come later.
Just as fall was dying, I finished my shells. Body-changing and growing began. I ate from my crops, and I had much meat, too, because I'd put up little cellulose latticework shells in the valley and raised many mobiles from the young that my far-groping tendrils had plucked from their nests.
I planned my structure with an end in mind. I grew my stomach much broader and deeper than usual. It was not that I was overly hungry. It was for a purpose, which I shall transmit to you later, dearie.
My stew-stomach was also much closer to the top of my shell than it is in most of us. In fact, I intentionally shifted my brain from the top to one side and raised the stomach in its place. Father had informed me I should take advantage of my ability to partially direct the location of my adult organs. It took me time, but I did it just before winter came.
Cold weather arrived.
And the olfway.
He came as he always does, his long nose with its retractable antennae sniffing out the minute encrustations of pure minerals that we virgins leave on our trails. The olfway follows his nose to wherever it will take him. This time it led him to my sister who had built her shell of glass. I had suspected she would be the first to be contacted by an olfway. In fact, that was one of the reasons I had chosen a hilltop further up the line. The olfway always takes the nearest shell.
When sister Glasshead detected the terrible mobile, she sent out wild pulse after pulse.
"What will I do? Do? Do?"
"Sit tight, sister, and hope."
Such advice was like feeding on cold stew, but it was the best, and the only, that I could give. I did not remind her that she should have followed my example, built a triple shell, and not been so eager to have a good time by gossiping with others.
The olfway prowled about, tried to dig underneath her base, which was on solid rock, and failed. He did manage to knock off a chunk of glass as a sample. Ordinarily, he would then have swallowed the sample and gone off to pupate. That would have given my sister a season of rest before he returned to attack. In the meanwhile, she might have built another coating of some other material and frustrated the monster for another season.
It just so happened that that particular olfway had, unfortunately for sister, made his last meal on a Mother whose covering had also been of glass. He retained his special organs for dealing with such mixtures of silicates. One of them was a huge and hard ball of some material on the end of his very long tail. Another was an acid for weakening the glass. After he had dripped that over a certain area, he battered her shell with the ball. Not long before the first snowfall he broke through her shield and got to her flesh.
Her wildly alternating beams and broadcasts of panic and terror still bounce around in my nerves when I think of them. Yet I must admit my reaction was tinged with contempt. I do not think she had even taken the trouble to put boron oxide in her glass. If she had, she might . . .
What's that? How dare you interrupt? . . . Oh, very well, I accept your humble apologies. Don't let it happen again, dearie. As for what you wanted to know, I'll describe later the substances that Father termed silicates and boron oxides and such. After my story is done.
To continue: the killer, after finishing Glasshead off, followed his nose along her trail back down the hill to the junction. There he had his choice of my other sister's trail or of mine. He decided on hers. Again he went through his pattern of trying to dig under her, crawling over her, biting off her pulse-stalks, and then chewing a sample of shell.
Snow fell. He crept off, sluggishly scooped a hole, and crawled in for the winter.
Sister Woodenhead grew another stalk. She exulted, "He found my shell too thick! He'll never get me!"
Ah, sister, if only you had received from Father and not spent so much time playing with the other Sluggos. Then you would have remembered what he taught. You would have known that an olfway, like us, is different from most creatures. The majority of beings have functions that depend upon their structures. But the olfway, that nasty creature, has a structure that depends upon his functions.
I did not quiver her nerves by telling her that, now that he had secreted a sample of her cellulose-shell in his body, he was pupating around it. Father had informed me that some arthropods follow a life-stage that goes from egg to larva to pupa to adult. When a caterpillar pupates in its cocoon, for instance, practically its whole body dissolves, its tissues disintegrate. Then something reforms the pulpy whole into a structurally new creature with new functions, the butterfly.
The butterfly, however, never repupates. The olfway does. He parts company with his fellow arthropods in this peculiar ability. Thus, when he tackles a Mother, he chews off a tiny bit of the shell and goes to sleep with it. During a whole season, crouched in his den, he dreams around the sample—or his body does. His tissues melt and then coalesce. Only his nervous system remains intact, thus preserving the memory of his identity and what he has to do when he emerges from his hole.
So it happened. The olfway came out of his hole, nested on top of sister Woodenhead's dome, and inserted a modified ovipositor into the hole left by biting off her stalk. I could more or less follow his plan of attack, because the winds quite often blew my way, and I could sniff the chemicals he was dripping.
He pulped the cellulose with a solution of something or other, soaked it in some caustic stuff, and then poured on an evil-smelling fluid that boiled and bubbled. After that had ceased its violent action, he washed some more caustic on the enlarging depression and finished by blowing out the viscous solution through a tube. He repeated the process many times.
Though my sister, I suppose, desperately grew more cellulose, she was not fast enough. Relentlessly, the olfway widened the hole. When it was large enough, he slipped inside.
End of sister . . .

The whole affair of the olfway was lengthy. I was busy, and I gained time by something I had made even before I erected my dome. This was the false trail of encrustations that I had laid, one of the very things my sisters had mocked. They did not understand what I was doing when I then back-tracked, a process which took me several days, and concealed with dirt my real track. But if they had lived, they would have comprehended. For the olfway turned off the genuine trail to my summit and followed the false.
Naturally, it led him to the edge of the cliff. Before he could check his swift pace, he fell off.
Somehow, he escaped serious injury and scrambled back up to the spurious path. Reversing, he found and dug up the cover over the actual tracks.
That counterfeit path was a good trick, one my Father taught me. Too bad it hadn't worked, for the monster came straight up the mountain, heading for me, his antennae ploughing up the loose dirt and branches which covered my encrustations.
However, I wasn't through. I had collected a number of large rocks and cemented them into one large boulder. The boulder itself was poised on the edge of the summit. Around its middle I had deposited a ring of iron, grooved to fit a rail of the same mineral. This rail led from the boulder to a point half-way down the slope. Thus, when the mobile reached that ridge of iron and followed it up the slope, I removed with my tentacles the little rocks that kept the boulder from toppling over the edge of the summit.
My weapon rolled down its track with terrific speed. I'm sure it would have crushed the olfway if he had not felt the rail vibrating with his nose. He sprawled aside. The boulder rushed by, just missing him.
Though disappointed, I did get another idea to deal with future olfways. If I deposited two rails half-way down the slope, one on each side of the main line, and sent three boulders down at the same time, the monster could leap aside from the centre, either way, and still get it on the nose!
He must have been frightened, for I didn't pip him for five warm-periods after that. Then he came back up the rail, not, as I had expected, up the opposite if much steeper side of the mountain. He was stupid, all right.
I want to pause here and explain that the boulder was my idea, not Father's. Yet I must add that it was Father, not Mother, who started me thinking original thoughts. I know it quivers all your nerves to think that a mere mobile, good for nothing but food and mating, could not only be semantic but could have a higher degree of semanticism.
I don't insist he had a higher quality. I think it was different, and that I got some of that difference from him.
To continue, there was nothing I could do while the olfway prowled about and sampled my shell. Nothing except hope. And hope, as I found out, isn't enough. The mobile bit off a piece of my shell's outer bone covering. I thought he'd be satisfied, and that, when he returned after pupating, he'd find the second sheath of copper. That would delay him until another season. Then he'd find the iron and have to retire again. By then he would be so frustrated he'd give up and go searching for easier prey.
I didn't know that an olfway never gives up and is very thorough. He spent days digging around my base and uncovered a place where I'd been careless in sheathing. All three elements of the shell could be detected. I knew the weak spot existed, but I hadn't thought he'd go that deep.

Away went the killer to pupate. When summer came, he crawled out of his hole. Before attacking me, however, he ate up my crops, upset my cage-shells and devoured the mobiles therein, dug up my tendrils and ate them, and broke off my waterpipe.
But when he picked up all the apples off my tree and consumed them, my nerves tingled. The summer before, I had transported, via my network of underground tendrils, an amount of a certain poisonous mineral to the tree. In so doing I killed the tendrils that did the work, but I succeeded in feeding to the roots minute amounts of the stuff—selenium, Father termed it. I grew more tendrils and carried more poison to the tree. Eventually, the plant was full of the potion, yet I had fed it so slowly that it had built up a kind of immunity. A kind of, I say, because it was actually a rather sickly tree.
I must admit I got the idea from one of Father's not-so-stories, tapped out in Orsemay so Mother wouldn't be vexed. It was about a mobile—a female, Father claimed, though I find the concept of a female mobile too nervequivering to dwell on—a mobile who was put into a long sleep by a poisoned apple.
The olfway seemed not to have heard of the story. All he did was retch. After he had recovered, he crawled up and perched on top of my dome. He broke off my big pulse-stalk and inserted his ovipositor in the hole and began dripping acid.
I was frightened. There is nothing more panic-striking, than being deprived of pulsing and not knowing at all what is going on in the world outside your shell. But, at the same time, his actions were what I had expected. So I tried to suppress my nervequiverings. After all, I knew the olfway would work on that spot. It was for that very reason that I had shifted my brain to one side and jacked up my oversize stomach closer to the top of my dome.
My sisters had scoffed because I'd taken so much trouble with my organs. They'd been satisfied with the normal procedure of growing into Mother-size. While I was still waiting for the water pumped up from the stream to fill my sac, my sisters had long before heated theirs and were eating nice warm stew. Meanwhile, I was consuming much fruit and uncooked meat, which sometimes made me sick. However, the rejected stuff was good for the crops, so I didn't suffer a complete loss.
As you know, once the stomach is full of water and well walled up, our body heat warms the fluid. As there is no leakage of heat except when we iris meat and vegetables in or out, the water comes to the boiling point.
Well, to pulse on with the story, when the mobile had scaled away the bone and copper and iron with his acids and made a hole large enough for his body, he dropped in for dinner.
I suppose he anticipated the usual helpless Mother or virgin, nerves numbed and waiting to be eaten.
If he did, his own nerves must have quivered. There was an iris on the upper part of my stomach, and it had been grown with the dimensions of a certain carnivorous mobile in mind.
But there was a period when I thought I hadn't fashioned the opening large enough. I had him half through, but I couldn't get his hindquarters past the lips. He was wedged in tight and clawing my flesh away in great gobbets. I was in such pain I shook my body back and forth and, I believe, actually rocked my shell on its base. Yet, despite my jerking nerves, I strained and struggled and gulped hard, oh, so hard. And finally, just when I was on the verge of vomiting him back up the hole through which he had come, which would have been the end of me, I gave a tremendous convulsive gulp and popped him in.
My iris closed. Nor, much as he bit and poured out searing acids, would I open it again. I was determined that I was going to keep this meat in my stew, the biggest piece any Mother had ever had.
Oh, he fought. But not for long. The boiling water pushed into his open mouth and drenched his breathing-sacs. He couldn't take a sample of that hot fluid and then crawl off to pupate around it.
He was through—and he was delicious.
Yes, I know that I am to be congratulated and that this information for dealing with the monster must be broadcast to everyone of us everywhere. But don't forget to pulse that a mobile was partly responsible for the victory over our ancient enemy. It may quiver your nerves to admit it, but he was.
Where did I get the idea of putting my stew-sac just below the hole the olfway always makes in the top of our shells? Well, it was like so many I had. I came from one of Father's not-so-stories, told in Orsemay. I'll pulse it sometime when I'm not so busy. After you, dearie, have learned our secret language.
I'll start your lessons now. First . . .
What's that? You're quivering with curiosity? Oh, very well, I'll give you some idea of the not-so-story, then I'll continue my lessons with this neophyte.
It's about eethay olfway and eethay eethray ittlelay igspay.