RON SMITH
Australian science fiction seems characterized by its uneasiness, its refusal to accept as valid many of the basic conceptions about relationships and individuality. We have few writers celebrating the joy of living or the eternal adaptability of man; even stories of action and adventure have in them a melancholy streak. “Strong Attraction”, though written by American-born Ron Smith, is very much in this style. His story of sexual complexities on an alien planet seems a suitable companion piece to Stephen Cook’s “Final Flower” and the irreverent cynicism of “All My Yesterdays”. One searches unsuccessfully in these stories for any illusion left intact, any dream unshuttered.
Ron Smith left the United States some years ago, abandoning a substantial reputation as a publisher of “little magazines” and a short story writer. Since arriving here, he has become a well-known editor and free-lance writer, and is currently an executive in a large Sydney publishing firm.
This story has not previously been published.
* * * *
I was tired, although the day was only half over. More than tired, I missed the things of Earth, and with this homesickness I had become thoughtful and weary of work. The mood had come over me out in the field that morning. I had decided then to walk home for lunch, and now I was following the road that cut through the evenly furrowed fields which stood ready for planting. Ahead of me the sun had burnished the land with the heat of its passing. I knew that I would be glad when the day was finished.
Perhaps I wasn’t cut out to be a colonist. The idea had occurred to me before. But then, who is? The work is hard and you have to adjust to conditions and routines that no one would put up with for a minute back on Earth. The only reason you agreed to do it was the promise of your own land, the freedom to move about, to look from your house and see empty space and mountains and green fields growing, when the time came and they did grow, in place of endless buildings and people everywhere. It seemed like reason enough when you were on Earth. And so you took the chance even though the promised income was less than half what you were making. Then later you walked home through the fields and sometimes wondered why.
I looked at the distant hills, red and ochre in the sunlight. There, among the rocks and beyond, down to the roaring sea, lived the landors—the landies we called them. They were the natives of the planet, but I didn’t know too much about them. Only what I had read in the “Initial Orientation Report” supplied to us by the Interstellar Colonial Office, which said that the Anthropological Survey Team had found them to be primitive, with a culture at the food-gathering stage. They didn’t kill anything for food except small animals and fish. Completely harmless. In fact, we were considered to be such a potential threat to their survival that all colonists were forbidden to go any further west than the edge of the mountains. So we rarely saw them, except for the few who did wander down, although there were more of them lately than there had been at first. We spoke their language fluently—that had been one of the requirements of our training—but there wasn’t much communication because they were a very simple, unsophisticated people. That is, if you could call them “people”.
They were built like humans, of course. Two arms, two legs, a head, and so on. They weren’t mammals though. Laid eggs and the young fed themselves from birth, so far as we knew. No one had actually seen any real young ones, nor had they seen any females, not even the Survey Team. I didn’t know why exactly. They were around somewhere, no doubting that. But the males and females didn’t live together, didn’t share their camps or their food or anything. The males hung together in packs, more or less, but there wasn’t anything you might call an integrated culture. They were odd, the landies, from our point of view.
And they were ugly by our standards, as well. I remembered a few weeks after we had landed, when the first one showed up in the settlement. Where I was working helping build Andrew Bradford’s house, a number of the women took fright when they saw the landie and actually ran off. They were used to them now, though, and didn’t mind talking to them. In fact, my wife had mentioned a few times that she occasionally had a few words with one that came around. I figured Barbara’s curiosity had been bound to win out over the landie’s looks in the long run. I hadn’t spoken to one myself for months.
But about how ugly they were. I suppose they looked a little like snakes. Their skin, that is. Scaly, with a bright shine like a snake has that looks like slime only isn’t. Then their faces were sort of tough and leathery and instead of cheeks there were thick layers of scarlet-coloured skin that looked like birthmark blotches. They didn’t have any hair at all and they gave off an odour that was extremely annoying. You could smell them distinctly about six feet off. They didn’t wear any clothes either, which we didn’t like, but the Colonial Office said to leave them strictly alone, so we had to.
There were sixty-seven dwellings in the settlement, since almost all of the 138 colonists were married couples entitled to their own home. There were no children—yet. They would come later, when the colony was stabilized and self-supporting. Our house was the seventh on the left going down the main and only street towards the mountains. It had a fence around it and a yard, but there wasn’t anything growing in the yard. The grass and the flowers hadn’t come up yet. All the other houses had fences and yards like ours. It couldn’t be helped. Individuality was too expensive everywhere these days.
The street was very quiet. Most of the women were at work too, in the nearby fields, in the hydroponics building or in the library where the tapes still hadn’t all been catalogued. We didn’t have any housewives. Barbara was a radio technician and she didn’t have much to do yet, but she was probably over in the radio room fooling around with the equipment. If she wasn’t home for lunch, I planned on dropping around there.
I didn’t knock. You don’t when you enter your own house. To get to the kitchen I had to pass the bedroom door. It was closed but I could smell him. It was faint but I noticed it because the sharp, irritating aroma was unlike anything anyone has ever smelled on Earth.
It still took a few seconds for me to accept the realization of what it was. It was the last thing I would have expected. A native, a landor, in my bedroom. Why? It simply didn’t make sense. Even then my mind sought a reasonable explanation. There wasn’t one but I stood in a kind of stupor, not wanting to think about the possibility that he was in there invited. Maybe I should have continued to disbelieve my senses, gone on in the kitchen and forgotten about it. Maybe. I opened the bedroom door instead.
The native heard me but Barbara didn’t seem to, not at first. He leaped to his feet at the sound I made and stood staring at me.
I stared back. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t think. My God, it wasn’t possible. Barbara lay on the bed looking at me with a dazed, half-conscious expression, as if she was forcing herself to see me. She was naked and she had been making love with him. There wasn’t any doubt about that. I had seen her. It wasn’t rape.
The landor moved quickly to the bedroom window and stepped out of it. Standing on the ground below he looked back at us, his large round lidless eyes studying me emotionlessly. I could see no remorse, no guilt in those eyes. But how could I? What would those emotions mean to him?
Then he turned and was gone. I could have stopped him, I suppose. I could have tried. But I wasn’t thinking, my mind wasn’t functioning. It simply couldn’t be true; that was all that was in my head.
But it was true. Barbara was looking at me with wide eyes and I could see the pain in them, but she didn’t look like she was going to cry. She was holding her hand over her mouth in what I thought even then was a melodramatic gesture.
“I’m sorry,” she said in a low voice. “Oh God, Jack, I’m sorry.”
It seemed funny somehow. That is probably what she would have said if I’d found her with Wilkes, the radio man, or some other Earthman. Under the circumstances, her saying that seemed ludicrous. Perhaps it was an emotional reaction on my part: I wanted to cry; I laughed instead.
She got up from the bed and started putting her clothes on. They were lying in a pile on the floor.
I turned without having said anything to her and walked to the back of the house. I stood in the kitchen looking out the back door, then I stepped outside and to my right I could look over the rocky ground that looked like a desert because the native plants were leafless and stood against the sky like thin white and grey tangles of string, and I could see the bright hills in the distance. That was where he would go.
I don’t know how long I stood looking at those hills. My mind was empty. All thought seemed to have been siphoned from it, but I realize that on a subconscious level I was planning. My emotions were tumbling around in the pit of my stomach and my mind was responding with a plan for relieving the pressure inside me. I wanted revenge. Some people might want to think of a better name for it, but when some thing you love is taken from you, along with your self-respect, it isn’t justice that you want.
Barbara came up behind me and whispered my name.
I turned and faced her.
“Can we talk about it?”
“Yes,” I said with effort. “Yes, you can talk about it.”
“Jack, you know me, don’t you? We’ve been married ten years, and you know me pretty well.”
“I guess I don’t.”
“Yes, you do. Look, darling, I’ve never been unfaithful to you. You know that. I never wanted to. I didn’t want to now. I’m happy with you, Jack, and all I ever wanted was our own place and then some kids and, Jack ...”
She started to cry after all. I thought about taking her in my arms, but to do so seemed to require too much effort. I couldn’t lift my arms. I couldn’t summon the will to lift them. I could only stand there and look at her sobbing and leaning her weight against the wall. Maybe she would fall down at my feet and sob for forgiveness and that would be worse. I wouldn’t be able to bend down and lift her up either. She seemed to exist in some other world, a strange being surrounded by a force field that I couldn’t penetrate.
“Remember Bill Myers, Jack?”
I nodded.
“And that drunken party we had and he wanted to make love to me and the only way you could cool him off was to dunk him in the bath? That was funny, wasn’t it?” Her voice pleaded with me to understand. I couldn’t even think what it was I was supposed to understand. “I could have gone to bed with him, Jack. I had to wake you up to help me, remember? I could have then. I could have lots of times. I never wanted to.”
She walked unsteadily back through the doorway. I saw her collapse into one of the tube chairs and lay her head on the kitchen table. When I followed, she lifted her head, her eyes clear and determined through the tears. “I don’t think I can explain it to you, Jack. I don’t understand myself, not really.” I noticed that even now, crying, with her long blonde hair all tangled, she was lovely, and I could remember, in an unreal haze dissociated from any sense of time, wanting her. “I could say he forced me or hypnotized me or something. I’m not saying that. To begin with he horrified me. When he first came around I had to force myself to sit and talk to him. And then after a while, just sitting and talking to him, having a simple conversation about his way of life, I began to feel attracted to him. I began to want him. I didn’t realize what was happening to me until . . . until it happened. And after the first time, after he left, I felt terrible. I hated myself. I thought of killing myself. I felt so disgusting and filthy I almost went out of my mind. But that has passed…Now, even when he is away, although I feel miserably guilty, I remember how I feel when he’s here ... Jack, it has something to do with his smell...”
I suppose if I hadn’t made a move then I might have hurt her. Maybe I realized it and that was why I left just then. I didn’t say anything to her. I simply walked out of the house. But in my mind I heard her voice, over and over, as if she hadn’t been a real person talking to me, only a record that had got stuck on a groove saying after the first time, after the first time, after the first time . . .
After the first time there was the second, and the third, and the fourth ... It wasn’t a mental aberration, she wasn’t crazy. The landor hadn’t forced her. My God, she had gone to bed with a dirty, stinking native lizard and she wasn’t even sorry any longer. She had wanted to spare my feelings, I suppose, but she hadn’t hidden the fact that she liked it.
I don’t remember walking the mile to where most of the men were working. I don’t remember thinking anything. But somehow I got there.
“Hey, you’re late,” Ralph Cannon called to me good-naturedly. “Don’t take you that long to eat your lunch, does it?”
I had to concentrate so that I wouldn’t walk up and hit him. I stood looking at them. Cal Brayson was driving the tractor, digging up the earth. A couple of dozen other men were spraying the first layer of chemical fertilizer. A few others were standing around. Altogether there were seventy men in the colony. Over half of them were here.
I had to force the words out. “I just found my wife in bed with someone,” I said.
They stared at me. Some of them were shocked, some embarrassed. Probably most of them felt I was a fool at that moment for saying what I’d said instead of forgetting about it and carrying on as if it hadn’t happened. Even in a colony where the men and women were about equal in number, jealousy was pretty foolish. All it could accomplish in the end was a lot of trouble. And of course, if it had been another man I would never have said anything about it.
“It was a native,” I said. “A landie.”
That got them. There was a chorus of gasps and exclamations and then they began dropping their equipment and gathering around me.
“A landie?”
“Jack, what are you------”
“It’s the heat. Jack, sit down.”
“I don’t believe it.”
“Not Barbara, fellow. What is it, you have a fall or something?”
“I saw them,” I said. “The two of them. It’s true.”
They quieted down and just stood there watching me, to see if I would somehow betray the fact that I’d gone off my head. I had to be crazy. I could see them thinking that.
I would have hoped for the same thing if I’d been them.
“All right,” Cal said at last. He was a tall man, with black hair and a taste for running things. “What are we going to do about this?”
“I’m going after him,” I said. “I feel I have to.”
One of the men shook his head. “If the Colonial Office finds out we’ve hurt one of them, we’ll be shipped home for sure.”
Cal looked at him, then back at me. “Doesn’t matter. Jack is right. God knows how it happened. I mean—Jack, I’m sorry —I don’t know how Barbara could have done it. I wouldn’t have thought an Earthwoman could be that low—it doesn’t figure, does it? But it isn’t going to happen again. And we’ve got to go get him and set an example and then we’ll know it won’t happen again.”
There was a general murmur of assent. “Right,” Cal said, in full command now. “We’ll get every man in the place. Joe, Randy, Reg, you go around and tell everybody, but keep it away from the women. We’ll meet outside the settlement, on the side towards the mountains. Won’t be able to miss each other on that flat country. Okay, get going.”
“The rest of us will go get the weapons at the armoury,” I said. “Come on.”
There were plenty of weapons, though most of them were only sonic stun-guns, good for killing small game but only enough to knock a full-grown man down. Still, that would do to stop the landie long enough to get him. We had about a dozen needle guns. They’d kill a dragon.
Out on the rocky plain we waited for the rest of the men. After a while we counted sixty-eight. Two were staying behind at the settlement. Reg had told a few of the women who had been inquisitive that a tribe of landies had trampled one of our fields and we were going to catch them and have it out about which territory was taboo.
It took us an hour to reach the foothills. Nobody did much talking. We marched across that wind-washed plain like a storm cloud, full of fury, resentment and hate, carrying our lightning and our thunder with us.
There were a few whispered conversations and I heard Barbara’s name mentioned a few times, but I didn’t pay any attention. I hadn’t thought about her at all, not consciously. I didn’t want to.
Once in a while someone would give a cry, like “Shoot the first one you see!” or “Don’t kill him right off!” That’s the way a group of men can work themselves up when they let their emotions grip them, when they feel threatened. I don’t think anyone knew it, but there was a lot of fear in us as we made our way towards those mountains.
The foothills were steep and covered with a thick brush. We had to push our way through masses of thin, spidery branches. A few of the smaller plants had rudimentary leaves, with more red in them than green, but the larger ones had no leaves at all. Their mass of white limbs shone in the sunlight because of the silicon in them which trapped energy from the sun.
We had to watch out for cliffs and gullies because the brush was deceiving. Since you could see through the branches you tended to assume you could detect with ease any change in the terrain, but the brush was too thick for that. The hills were cut by sharp ravines, up to fifty feet deep, and it would have been easy to step over the edge of one. It was too easy to do, in fact.
That was how we found the landie.
Jim Hawthorne was over to the left of me about two hundred feet. We were both pushing up the same hill. I was walking along the lip of a gully. You could hardly see it because the brush covered it completely, growing down both sides and along the bottom. I figured it went straight up the hill, but it didn’t. About three-quarters of the way it cut to the left, probably to avoid hard rock under the ground at that point. Anyway, Jim didn’t see it and he walked over the edge. It was about twenty feet deep, but the brush broke his fall. He made quite a racket tumbling down, though.
When I saw him disappear and heard what was happening, I ran over as quickly as I could. I got scratched doing it and my pants were torn up pretty badly.
I got to the edge where he had gone over and scrambled down. When I got to the bottom he was picking himself up and was staring back up the wall of the gully. For a minute I thought he was in shock. His eyes were round ovals and he seemed in a daze.
“Up there,” he said and pointed halfway up the side. “I saw one.”
I whirled around and looked but could see nothing.
Jim raised his gun and started up. “Come on,” he said. “There’s a cave. He’s hiding in it.”
I grasped my needle gun tightly and we went up together. You couldn’t see the hole very clearly. It was covered with brush. But Jim had rolled right over it and limbs were smashed flat a bit so we could just see into the dark interior.
There was a landie in there all right. We both raised our guns.
“Come out,” Jim growled in the landor language. We were both in such a keyed-up state it’s a wonder one of us didn’t shoot into the hole without stopping to think about it. Instead, I poked my head down at the opening and peered in. Couldn’t see much. The hole went back about five feet and the landie was cowering at the back of it. The hole was narrow. That made the native pretty small. Smaller than I’d ever seen one.
I turned to Jim. “Don’t shoot,” I said. “Get some of the others.”
He looked at me quizzically but didn’t say anything. He turned and started off, yelling and waving his gun. “Hey, hey! Over here! We got him! Over here!”
It wasn’t long before a dozen of us were clustered around the opening in the rock. “One of us has to go in,” I said.
“To hell with that,” Ralph said. “Stick a stun gun in and let him have a few blasts and he’ll come out soon enough.” He cupped his hands together and yelled into the hole. “Come out of there, you, or we hit you with our lightning.” The natives knew about lightning, but not about guns.
I turned to him and shook my head. “No,” I said. “I’ll go in. We can’t shoot it. It’s a female.”
There was a murmur and they stared at me disconcertedly.
Ralph and Jim stuck their heads inside the opening. A few seconds later they straightened up.
“By God, I guess you’re right.”
“Female all right.”
“This is the first one anybody’s seen,” someone else said.
“Why’s it hiding out in the cave?” Cal asked. “Couldn’t be hiding from us, could it?”
“Well,” I said. “We speak the language, don’t we? I’ll go in and get her and we’ll ask.”
There was general agreement, so I started crawling in. I hadn’t got very far when she began screaming. It was a loud, piercing screech, especially disturbing in that small place. When I crawled to the end and spoke to her again it didn’t have any effect. She didn’t try to scratch me or hit me or anything. She just screamed.
I grabbed her leg and she didn’t struggle. I looked into her eyes, which were oval and black and lidless. There was an opaque film that slid over them when the landies wanted to shut their eyes, but hers were wide open. I noticed for the first time that the smell was different. The odour should have been noticeable from outside, I realized, but even in those close quarters there wasn’t any smell, except a mild sort of earthy aroma that didn’t bother me particularly.
This was a female landor all right. She didn’t have breasts, of course, and, except for her size and lack of aroma, looked very much like the male. If she hadn’t been naked you could never have been sure.
When I had pulled her all the way out by the ankles, she still hadn’t stopped screaming.
She sat flat against the rock wall looking up at us. “It’s odd,” I said. “She’s scared to death, but all she does is yell. No resistance in her at all.”
“Ugly damned thing,” Ralph commented.
“Be still,” I commanded her. She stopped screaming, but she continued a wailing sort of whimper for a time. She was looking at us carefully, her eyes darting from man to man. I could tell by her expression she was confused. I don’t think her mind could cope with what she was seeing—a group of aliens standing around her, whose appearance and clothing and weapons were beyond her comprehension. She had never seen one of us before, so her confusion wasn’t surprising. But something else about her was. I had an idea she wasn’t screaming because we were aliens, something horrible that was beyond her experience. Watching her now, I felt there was something else frightening her. The whole of her behaviour seemed like a reflex, like a mouse standing hypnotized when cornered by a snake. Not resisting, not running, the fear becoming a sort of weird ecstasy, a sacrifice ...
“Are you afraid of us?” I asked.
“Hell of a question,” someone behind me murmured, but I paid no attention. I figured it would be hard to get through to her, yet I wanted to try. I spoke as softly as I could, using the alien language, a harsh-sounding vocal pattern with no subtleties of expression to make the job of communication easier. I looked directly into her eyes and she returned the stare. As long as I spoke, her gaze never wavered from mine and she seemed to calm down rapidly.
“We won’t hurt you,” I said. “Do you think we will hurt you?” There was no response, no reaction.
“What do you think we would do with you? Why did you scream?”
“Hurt,” she mumbled and the puzzled look on her face deepened. She was trying to work something out. She expected something to happen and it wasn’t happening. I felt sure that was it.
“But we won’t hurt you,” I said. “We are men from far away. We don’t hurt landor women.” She probably wouldn’t understand the concept of men from far away, I realized. The notion of far away meant nothing more in her language than something that wasn’t “here”.
She reached out a hand and touched the leg of my trousers. She looked closely at them and now her quizzical expression was undeniable. The trance-like state of fear seemed to have passed. Finally she looked back at my face, but she didn’t say anything.
How could I explain clothes to her? I tried to think. “Covering,” I said. “From the wind. The sun. The rain.”
“You not male?” she asked.
“Yes. We all are. Our clothes cover . ..” The fear suddenly brushed the curiosity from her face and she opened her mouth to scream.
But she didn’t. She thought of something else and she sniffed. Her nostrils were only openings in the skin, without external cartilage, but they quivered noticeably.
“No smell,” she said, then considered the problem a few moments longer. “Little smell. Different. No want you.”
Before we could stop her she had turned and scrambled back into the hole.
The men cried out and Ralph started in after her, but I stopped him.
I shook my head. “No point in it,” I said. “She’s not what we’re after. Anyway, didn’t you hear? She doesn’t want us.”
A couple of the men smiled at that. I hadn’t said it as a joke.
We spent the rest of the day climbing over rocks and pushing our way through bush that didn’t improve our temper any. Once we saw a landor male—at least, we assumed it was a male —up on the slope of the mountain, but he quickly disappeared down a canyon cut between two large outcroppings of rock that looked like purple sandstone but was as hard as granite.
He was miles away from us and there was no chance of catching him.
We raced the sun across the plain leading to the settlement. We lost. It was dark when we got back.
There weren’t any lights on except in the radio shed and the armoury. That was the first thing that made me nervous. The other was the noise. There wasn’t any. We walked down the street and the men started rushing into their houses, but I knew what had happened before they started running back out again yelling in angry, frightened voices down the silent village street.
“She’s gone. My wife is gone! The women! Where are the women?” The cry was an echo, repeating itself behind me as I walked down the street, as if it were a single cry that I myself was yelling into the emptiness.
Gone. They were gone. Ralph came running out of the building where we held our weekly meetings. I guess you would call it our town hall.
“Brad and Phil,” he yelled. “They’re in here!” His short, broad frame was shaking and his brown, heavy-featured face was creased with confusion. Ralph knew about farming, but he didn’t understand this. He turned and ran back into the building.
I turned and walked in after him. Others came hurrying past me. I didn’t have the energy to run. I was already beaten. We all were.
The two men had been knocked on the head and tied up. Then they had been dragged into the main building where they would be easily found.
“Those dirty, slimy . . .” Ralph was muttering as he untied them. “Tomorrow morning we’ll go after them. And we’ll slaughter the lot. Females too. Wipe them out.”
There were mumbled assents from the men standing around him.
“They didn’t do it,” I said and everyone looked at me.
“What the hell do you mean?” Cal shouted in my face, taking a stance that meant he was again assuming the position of leader-spokesman. “What are you saying?” He was close to pounding me in the face. They were all wishing for something, someone, to take their rage and frustration out on at that moment. I was past that.
Brad was conscious now and looking up at me curiously. “Ask him,” I said, pointing.
Everyone looked at the two men on the floor, one sitting up now rubbing his head. “My wife,” Brad said. “We were talking out on the street. A lot of the women were standing around. Betty pointed behind me and said there was a landie coming. I turned around and ... Where is she? Why did she do it?”
He studied the faces around him and then without saying any more got up and ran out the door. His house was empty too, but he had to have a look.
Everyone was watching me now. Their faces were grim and probably some of them would have cried if they had been alone.
“How do you know it wasn’t a pack of landies came in here and attacked Brad and Phil and made off with the women? That’s what I think.”
I smiled at him sadly. “A pack of landies came in and carried off sixty-eight civilized, armed women? Besides, you heard Brad.”
“Maybe he doesn’t remember it right. Maybe ...”
I shrugged.
“Maybe the landies killed them,” someone said. “Maybe the bodies . . .”
I shook my head. “The report, remember? The landors aren’t violent, they have no weapons except sticks. It would be completely against their nature to kill anyone.”
“What do you think happened?” Cal asked angrily.
“I think Barbara told the other women what happened— that I had caught her and the landie—and they figured that meant they had to make a choice—us or the landies.”
“You mean they were all…”
“You bastard,” Cal spat at me. He clenched his fists and moved unsteadily on his feet. I didn’t move. They were all yelling and cursing and I waited until they were quiet again.
“Listen,” I shouted. “The truth is simply the truth and you can’t get away from it.”
In the quiet I went on: “No man likes to admit that some other guy is more attractive to his woman than he is. He can sometimes rationalize himself into believing anything just to avoid seeing that simple fact, the fact that her glands, her body, her sexual appetite respond to someone else more fully than to himself, that she likes sex with someone else more than with him. And, of course, the fact that in this case the guy looks and smells like a snake makes it a thousand times worse. Admitting this about Barbara tears me up emotionally, and you know it does. I hate even to think about it—but I know it’s true.”
“How the hell do you know it’s that?” Pounding his right fist into the palm of his hand, Cal stood on the brink of the small speaker’s platform, as if he were about to leap off and rush me. “It could be hypnotism, drugs—something we don’t know about... anything.”
“It’s the smell,” I said. “Look, have you asked yourselves why that female we discovered yesterday acted the way she did?” I looked around at faces, and I could see some of them had, though I could see, too, that most of them hadn’t spent any time doing what you could really call thinking. I could understand that. “Assume for a moment that the landor females hate intercourse and run from it whenever possible, because it is extremely painful, painful enough to make them want to avoid it unless they are powerfully motivated to want it. Then you can go on to suppose that natural selection has worked to make the landor male unusually attractive to the female. Assuming this, and what evidence we have supports it—though perhaps we are hampered at the moment by the lack of a biologist, since our three fully qualified biologists were women —then obviously the female does all she can to avoid the male, but when cornered by one his smell triggers hormones in her body which bring about an overwhelming response. She becomes aroused and wants him—forgetting the pain, momentarily, in her ecstasy. And she gets pregnant, lays her eggs, and so it goes . . .
“That’s how it works, I think. Now, along come sixty-eight Earthwomen. Good, honest, moral women, and they meet these ugly lizard men. They don’t want to be near the repulsive creatures, but their sense of fairness and politeness persuades them otherwise. They talk to the landies and then it happens. They react to the body smell in a way similar to the way female landies react. What is probably involved is the stimulation of an equivalent hormone, or combination of hormones, to a degree that is, for our women, highly abnormal. It shouldn’t be too difficult for a biologist to work it out. Anyway, they are attracted and they eventually, probably quickly, give in to their desires. And what happens? They’ve never had it like that before. Intercourse with a landie doesn’t hurt them. Never before have they been so fully aroused, nor sensually so completely satisfied. Remember, sight, particularly in the female, is not as erotically stimulating as smell and touch. Not by a long shot.
“As for the landies... well, what would you do if you found a woman who was crazy for you, who wanted you all the time, and there were no other women on the planet who could ever possibly react to you that way?”
“What does a goddam soil conservationist know about it?” someone shouted. In the confusion that followed—dozens of voices shouting at once, Cal yelling for order loud enough to be heard over the din, some of the men moving around forming groups, small knots of humanity tied together by the ravelled strands of excited invective—I retired from the stage. As I went out the door a few angry glances were cast in my direction, but no one made a move. They weren’t angry at me. Frustrate any man and he’ll find an object to take it out on— another man, his wife, a bottle, something, and, always, himself. If I stayed out of it each would work things out in his own way, and if there was violence and if some of them spent a useless year or two refusing to give way to the inevitable, refusing to turn frustration into knowledge, there was nothing I could do anyway. I’d learned my lesson and when I left the hall, glancing at the dozen or so men sitting silently in their seats, I knew some others had learned too.
I walked on down the lone street. I wasn’t going back to the house. Just walking. I hadn’t much to think about at the moment, nor anything to do. And, worst of all, I suppose, no place to go.
* * * *
It was a month before the supply ship came. I hadn’t done much work while I’d been waiting. The first week I spent in the fields, thinking that would keep my mind occupied. But I gave it up and in the end just sat around brooding and waiting for my ticket home to come sliding down the bright blue sky.
I had packed long before, but I stayed in the house until the last minute, wandering from room to room, looking around as if there might be something I had left behind.
I sat on the bed and looked out the window. In the distance they were finishing unloading the ship. Nineteen men were leaving on it with me. The rest would stay. Cal was staying.
He probably would be the last to leave. Some men never understand that trying hard not to be a coward sometimes makes you a fool. How many soldiers, for instance, in the days of mankind’s wars, who never gave way, who fought to the death—how many were heroes, how many were fools?
I got up and went out into the sunlight. I walked towards the ship. As I got closer to it, and in my mind felt the planet receding from me, as if I were already in free fall, felt suddenly that it was true that even these memories would dim and fade with time, I began to feel better. Not good, but better.
Anyway, I had been homesick. And what better cure for that than a trip home?
* * * *
Barbara looked up from her plodding feet as she heard the wet, snuffling sound of Brandor sniffing the wind. “Ocean,” he said, pointing across the rocky, rutted, brush-swept valley. His elevated arm indicated a spot above the rise of the bare, purplish-blue mountain that slanted upwards into the red glow of the late afternoon sky. “When sun there,” he said. “One time.”
To Barbara it seemed impossible that they could climb that height and descend the other side to the sea in one day, but that was what Brandor was saying and she was sure he was right, although he probably hadn’t taken into account the growing exhaustion of some of the women.
Looking around her, she saw what had all the aspects of a guerilla band, dispirited and defeated, being led in their retreat to the sea by faithful native guides . . .
The image was not irrelevant. They were defeated. She herself was troubled by her conscience, her conditioned moral judgment, her innate, unshakeable feeling of having betrayed her commitments, her responsibilities, her love . . .
And yet there was no other way. A woman is, after she has considered all the moral rationalizations to which she is heir, still a woman. To have stayed in the colony would have been crueller, more destructive, than their leaving. They had decided that, and not one of them had voted to stay.
There was, quite simply, no way of cancelling out their husbands’ knowledge of what they had done, no way of dealing with or avoiding the ultimate estrangement which that knowledge would create between them, and finally ... no way of avoiding the repetition of that which began it.
Each time was a seduction, but like all complete, sensually awakening, self-surrendering seductions, each time was inevitable. If she had stayed and fought herself, fought her body, fought her senses, herself, her soul, she would have forever been a burden to Jack, no matter the outcome.
Barbara wondered how many of the women felt as she did. She had talked to some, but not all. It was not easy to discuss these feelings. One could not be certain, wholly certain, of the correctness of one’s thoughts, and ultimately they did not matter. Whatever each of them thought, in whatever way they intellectualized what had happened to them, the fact was that they were here, and beyond them there was the mountain and the sea and a new, crude, primitive, unknowable, unpromising way of life that came to them as a strange mixture of freedom, which is fulfilment, and captivity, which is the very basic fact of being human .. .
She tracked on wearily, several yards behind Brandor. Thoughtfully she looked at the round, rough, reddish dome of his hairless head, at the tall, horny-skinned body, whose muscles rippled beneath scaly hide and, faintly, despite the evidence of her eyes, there began to grow within her body an answering ripple, a sensation, an expectation and, finally, a desire .. .