The Flat-Eyed Monster Read online

  The Flat-Eyed Monster

  William Tenn

  The Flat-Eyed Monster

  by William Tenn

  For the first few moments, Clyde Manship—who up to then had been an assistant professor of Comparative Literature at Kelly University—for the first few moments, Manship tried heroically to convince himself that he was merely having a bad dream. He shut his eyes and told himself chidingly, with a little superior smile playing about his lips, that things as ugly as this just did not occur in real life. No. Definitely a dream.

  He had himself half convinced, until he sneezed. It was too loud and wet a sneeze to be ignored. You didn’t sneeze like that in a dream—if you sneezed at all. He gave up. He’d have to open his eyes and take another look. At the thought, his neck muscles went rigid with spasm.

  A little while ago, he’d fallen asleep while reading an article he’d written for a scholarly journal. He’d fallen asleep in his own bed in his own apartment in Callahan Hall—“a charming and inexpensive residence for those members of the faculty who are bachelors and desire to live on campus.” He’d awakened with a slightly painful tingling sensation in every inch of his body. He felt as if he were being stretched, stretched interminably and—and loosened. Then, abruptly, he had floated off the bed and gone though the open window like a rapidly attenuating curl of smoke. He’d gone straight up to the star-drenched sky of night, dwindling in substance until he lost consciousness completely.

  And had come to on this enormous flat expanse of white tabletop, with a multivaulted ceiling above him and dank, barely breathable air in his lungs. Hanging from the ceiling were quantities and quantities of what was indubitably electronic equipment, but the kind of equipment the boys in the Physics Department might dream up, if the grant they’d just received from the government for military radiation research had been a million times larger than it was, and if Professor Bowles, the department head, had insisted that every gadget be carefully constructed to look substantially different from anything done in electronics to date.

  The equipment above him had been rattling and gurgling and whooshing, glowing and blinking and coruscating. Then it had stopped as if someone had been satisfied and had turned off a switch.

  So Clyde Manship had sat up to see who had turned it off.

  He had seen all right.

  He hadn’t seen so much who as he had seen what. And it hadn’t been a nice what. In fact, none of the whats he had glimpsed in that fast look around had been a bit nice. So he had shut his eyes fast and tried to find another mental way out of the situation.

  But now he had to have another look. It might not be so bad the second time. “It’s always darkest,” he told himself with determined triteness, “before the dawn.” And then found himself involuntarily adding, “except on days when there’s an eclipse.”

  But he opened his eyes anyway, wincingly, the way a child opens its mouth for the second spoonful of castor oil.

  Yes, they were all as he had remembered them. Pretty awful.

  The tabletop was an irregular sort of free-form shape, bordered by thick, round knobs a few inches apart. And perched on these knobs, about six feet to the right of him, were two creatures who looked like black leather suitcases. Instead of handles or straps, however, they sported a profusion of black tentacles, dozens and dozens of tentacles, every second or third one of which ended in a moist turquoise eye shielded by a pair of the sweepingest eyelashes Manship had ever seen outside of a mascara advertisement.

  Embedded in the suitcase proper, as if for additional decorative effect, were swarms of other sky-blue eyes, only these, without eyelashes, bulged out in multitudes of tiny, glittering facets like enormous gems. There was no sign of ear, nose or mouth anywhere on the bodies, but there was a kind of slime, a thick, grayish slime, that oozed out of the black bodies and dripped with a steady splash-splash-splash to the floor beneath.

  On his left, about fifteen feet away, where the tabletop extended a long peninsula, there was another one of the creatures. Its tentacles gripped a pulsating spheroid across the surface of which patches of light constantly appeared and disappeared.

  As near as Manship could tell, all the visible eyes of the three were watching him intently. He shivered and tried to pull his shoulders closer together.

  “Well, Professor,” someone asked suddenly, “what would you say?”

  “I’d say this was one hell of a way to wake up,” Manship burst out, feelingly. He was about to go on and develop this theme in more colorful detail when two things stopped him.

  The first was the problem of who had asked the question. He had seen no other human—no other living creature, in fact—besides the three tentacled suitcases anywhere in that tremendous, moisture-filled room.

  The second thing that stopped him was that someone else had begun to answer the question at the same time, cutting across Manship’s words and ignoring them completely.

  “Well, obviously,” this person said, “the experiment is a success. It has completely justified its expense and the long years of research behind it. You can see for yourself, Councilor Glomg, that one-way teleportation is an accomplished fact.”

  Manship realized that the voices were coming from his right. The wider of the two suitcases—evidently “the professor” to whom the original query had been addressed—was speaking to the narrower one, who had swung most of his stalked eyes away from Manship and had focused them on his companion. Only where in blazes were the voices coming from? Somewhere inside their bodies? There was no sign anywhere of vocal apparatus.

  AND HOW COME, Manship’s mind suddenly shrieked, THEY TALK ENGLISH?

  “I can see that,” Councilor Glomg admitted with a blunt honesty that became him well. “It’s an accomplished fact, all right, Professor Lirld. Only, what precisely has it accomplished?”

  Lirld raised some thirty or forty tentacles in what Manship realized fascinatedly was an elaborate and impatient shrug. “The teleportation of a living organism from astronomical unit 649-301-3 without the aid of transmitting apparatus on the planet of origin”

  The Councilor swept his eyes back to Manship. “You call that living?” he inquired doubtfully.

  “Oh, come now, Councilor,” Professor Lirld protested. “Let’s not have any flefnomorphism. It is obviously sentient, obviously motile, after a fashion—”

  “All right. It’s alive. I’ll grant that. But sentient? It doesn’t even seem to pmbff from where I stand. And those horrible lonely eyes! Just two of them—and so flat! That dry, dry skin without a trace of slime. I’ll admit that—”

  “You’re not exactly a thing of beauty and a joy forever yourself, you know,” Manship, deeply offended, couldn’t help throwing out indignantly.

  “—I tend to flemomorphism in my evaluation of alien life-forms,” the other went on as if he hadn’t spoken. “Well, I’m a flefnobe and proud of it. But after all, Professor Lirld, I have seen some impossible creatures from our neighboring planets that my son and other explorers have brought back. The very strangest of them, the most primitive ones, at least can pmbff! But this—this thing. Not the smallest, slightest trace of a pmb do I see on it! It’s eerie, that’s what it is—eerie!”

  “Not at all,” Lirld assured him. “It’s merely a scientific anomaly. Possibly in the outer reaches of the galaxy where animals of this sort are frequent, possibly conditions are such that pmbffing is unnecessary. A careful examination should tell us a good deal very quickly. Meanwhile, we’ve proved that life exists in other areas of the galaxy than its sun-packed core. And when the time comes for us to conduct exploratory voyages to these areas, intrepid adventurers like your son will go equipped with information. They will know what to expect.”

  “N
ow, listen,” Manship began shouting in desperation. “Can you or can you not hear me?”

  “You can shut off the power, Srin,” Professor Lirld commented. “No sense in wasting it. I believe we have as much of this creature as we need. If any more of it is due to materialize, it will arrive on the residual beam.”

  The flefnobe on Manship’s left rapidly spun the strange spheroid he was holding. A low hum, which had filled the building and had been hardly noticeable before, now died away. As Srin peered intently at the patches of light on the surface of the instrument, Manship suddenly guessed that they were meter readings. Yes, that’s exactly what they were—meter readings. Now, how did I know that? he wondered.

  Obvious. There was only one answer. If they couldn’t hear him no matter how loudly he shouted, if they gave no sign that they even knew he was shouting, and if, at the same time, they seemed to indulge in the rather improbable feat of talking his native language—they were obviously telepaths. Without anything that looked like ears or mouths.

  He listened carefully as Srin asked his superior a question. It seemed to sound in his ears as words, English words in a clear, resonant voice. But there was a difference. There was a quality missing, the kind of realistic bite that fresh fruit has and artificial fruit flavoring doesn’t. And behind Srin’s words there were low, murmuring bubbles of other words, unorganized sentence fragments which would occasionally become “audible” enough to clarify a subject that was not included in the “conversation.” That, Manship realized, was how he had learned that the shifting patches of light on the spheroid were meter readings.

  It was also evident that whenever they mentioned something for which no equivalent at all existed in English, his mind supplied him with a nonsense syllable.

  So far so good. He’d been plucked out of his warm bed in Callahan Hall by a telepathic suitcase named something like Lirld which was equipped with quantities of eyes and tentacles. He’d been sucked down to some planet in an entirely different system near the center of the galaxy, clad in nothing but apple-green pajamas.

  He was on a world of telepaths who couldn’t hear him at all, but upon whom he could eavesdrop with ease, his brain evidently being a sufficiently sensitive antenna. He was scheduled shortly to undergo a “careful examination,” a prospect he did not relish, the more so as he was evidently looked upon as a sort of monstrous laboratory animal. Finally, he was not thought much of, chiefly because he couldn’t pmbff worth a damn.

  All in all, Clyde Manship decided, it was about time that he made his presence felt. Let them know, so to speak, that he was definitely not a lower form of life, but one of the boys. That he belonged to the mind-over-matter club himself and came of a long line of IQ-fanciers on both sides of his family.

  Only how?

  Vague memories of adventure stories read as a boy drifted back to him. Explorers land on a strange island. Natives, armed with assorted spears, clubs and small boulders, gallop out of the jungle to meet them, their whoops an indisputable prelude to mayhem. Explorers, sweating a bit, as they do not know the language of this particular island, must act quickly. Naturally, they resort to—they resort to—the universal sign language! Sign language. Universal!

  Still in a sitting position, Clyde Manship raised arms straight up over his head. “Me friend,” he intoned. “Me come in peace.” He didn’t expect the dialogue to get across, but it seemed to him that voicing such words might help him psychologically and thus add more sincerity to the gesture.

  “—and you might as well turn off the recording apparatus, too,” Professor Lirld was instructing his assistant. “From here on out, we’ll take everything down on a double memory-fix.”

  Srin manipulated his spheroid again. “Think I should modulate the dampness, sir? The creature’s dry skin seems to argue a desert climate.”

  “Not at all. I strongly suspect it to be one of those primitive forms which can survive in a variety of environments. The specimen seems to be getting along admirably. I tell you, Srin, we can be very well satisfied with the results of the experiment up to this point.”

  “Me friend,” Manship went on desperately, raising and lowering his arms. “Me intelligent entity. Me have IQ of 140 on the Wechsler-Bellevue scale.”

  “You may be satisfied,” Glomg was saying, as Lirld left the table with a light jump and floated, like an oversized dandelion, to a mass of equipment overhead, “but I’m not. I don’t like this business one little bit.”

  “Me friendly and intelligent enti—” Manship began. He sneezed again. “Damn this wet air,” he muttered morosely.

  “What was that?” Glomg demanded.

  “Nothing very important, Councilor,” Srin assured him. “The creature did it before. It is evidently a low-order biological reaction that takes place periodically, possibly a primitive method of imbibing glrnk. Not by any stretch of the imagination a means of communication, however.”

  “I wasn’t thinking of communication,” Glomg observed testily. “I thought it might be a prelude to aggressive action.”

  The professor skimmed back to the table, carrying a skein of luminescent wires. “Hardly. What could a creature of this sort be aggressive with? I’m afraid you’re letting your mistrust of the unknown run away with you, Councilor Glomg.”

  Manship had crossed his arms across his chest and subsided into a helpless silence. There was evidently no way to make himself understood outside of telepathy. And how do you start transmitting telepathically for the first time? What do you use?

  If only his doctoral thesis had been in biology or physiology, he thought wistfully, instead of The Use of the Second Aorist in the First Three Books of the Iliad. Oh, well. He was a long way from home. Might as well try.

  He closed his eyes, having first ascertained that Professor Lirld did not intend to approach his person with the new piece of equipment. He wrinkled his forehead and leaned forward with an effort of extreme concentration.

  Testing, he thought as hard as he could, testing, testing. One, two, three, four—testing, testing. Can you hear me?

  “I just don’t like it,” Glomg announced again. “I don’t like what we’re doing here. Call it a presentiment, call it what you will, but I feel we are tampering with the infinite—and we shouldn’t.”

  I’m testing, Manship ideated frantically. Mary had a little lamb. Testing, testing. I’m the alien creature and I’m trying to communicate with you. Come in, please.

  “Now, Councilor,” Lirld protested irritably. “Let’s have none of that. This is a scientific experiment.”

  “That’s all very well. But I believe there are mysteries that flefnobe was never meant to examine. Monsters as awful-looking as this—no slime on the skin, only two eyes and both of them flat, unable or unwilling to pmbff, an almost complete absence of tentacles—a creature of this sort should have been left undisturbed on its own hellish planet. There are limits to science, my learned friend—or there should be. One should not seek to know the unknowable!”

  Cant you hear me? Manship begged. Alien entity to Srin, Lirld and Glomg: This is an attempt at a telepathic connection. Come in, please, someone. Anyone. He considered for a moment, then added: Roger. Over.

  “I don’t recognize such limitations, Councilor. My curiosity is as vast as the universe.”

  “That may be,” Glomg rejoined portentously. “But there are more things in Tiz and Tetzbah, Professor Lirld, than are dreamed of in your philosophy.”

  “My philosophy—” Lirld began, and broke off to announce—“Here’s your son. Why don’t you ask him? Without the benefit of half a dozen scientific investigations that people like you have wanted to call off time after time, none of his heroic achievements in interplanetary discovery would be possible.”

  Thoroughly defeated, but still curious, Manship opened his eyes in time to see an extremely narrow black suitcase swarm up to the tabletop in a spaghetti-cluster of tentacles.

  “What is—that?” the newcomer inquired, curling a bunch of s
upercilious eye-stalks over Manship’s head. “It looks like a yurd with a bad case of hipplestatch.” He considered for a moment, then added, “Galloping hipplestatch.”

  “It’s a creature from astronomical unit 649-301-3 that I’ve just succeeded in teleporting to our planet,” Lirld told him proudly. “Mind you, Rabd, without a transmitting outfit on the other end! I admit I don’t know why it worked this time and never before—but that’s a matter for further research. A beautiful specimen, though, Rabd. And as near as we can tell, in perfect condition. You can put it away now, Srin.”

  “Oh, no you don’t, Srin—” Manship had barely started to announce when a great rectangle of some pliable material fell from the ceiling and covered him. A moment later, the tabletop on which he’d been sitting seemed to drop away and the ends of the material were gathered in underneath him and fastened with a click by a scuttling individual whom he took to be the assistant. Then, before he had time to so much as wave his arms, the tabletop shot up with an abruptness that he found twice as painful as it was disconcerting.

  And there he was, packaged as thoroughly as a birthday present. All in all, things were not improving, he decided. Well, at least they seemed disposed to leave him alone now. And as yet they showed no tendency to shove him up on a laboratory shelf along with dusty jars of flefnobe fetuses pickled in alcohol.

  The fact that he was probably the first human being in history to make contact with an extraterrestrial race failed to cheer Clyde Manship in the slightest.

  First, he reflected, the contact had been on a distinctly minor key—the sort that an oddly colored moth makes with a collector’s bottle rather than a momentous meeting between the proud representatives of two different civilizations.

  Second, and much more important, this sort of hands-across-the-cosmos affair was more likely to enthuse an astronomer, a sociologist or even a physicist than an assistant professor of Comparative Literature.

  He’d had fantastic daydreams aplenty in his lifetime. But they concerned being present at the premiere of Macbeth, for example, and watching a sweating Shakespeare implore Burbage not to shout out the “Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow” speech in the last act: “For God’s sake, Dick, your wife just died and you’re about to lose your kingdom and your life—don’t let it sound like Meg at the Mermaid screaming for a dozen of ale. Philosophical, Dick, that’s the idea, slow, mournful and philosophical. And just a little bewildered.”