KILLER

by James E. Gunn

Illustrated by Freas

He came to me from the stars, spewed out from his own world by his hates. I found him, I gave him all he could ask for, and I made him mine. But in the end, there was still his hate, and the killer drive within him....

He was a killer. He came to me from a distance so great that it was meaningless. He descended to me riding on a tail of flame. We loved—how could we help it? But I knew him too well, and he did not know me well enough. And that is the stuff of tragedy.

Green, was his first thought, pleased and incredulous. Beautiful, beautiful green!

It was implausibility and wonder. It was the impossible happy ending to the long chase and the longer hopelessness. It was the haven after the fleeing into space with metal bloodhounds hot on a trail of fading ions in the empty vaults, after the hurried Jump and the fantastic mechanical failure which turned an alien universe into a hungry mouth, snapped shut, after the expectoration into sane space like a rejected seed. It began with death and ended with life.

For green is the color of life. Green is the color of growing things, of energy becoming useful, of plants doing the countless things that make life possible for animals. Green is the color of Earth.

Another chance, he thought. Unless this is dream or delusion or a cosmic jest—another chance. I’m black-and-blue from pinching myself—I don’t feel crazy—though after a week of Nowhere who can be sure? Unless some vital little thing is out of balance down there—A jewel like that? Twin sister to Earth. Surely fate would not go this far and then leave out some little essential....

The green world turned lazily in the yellow light of the Go-type sun.

“What are you waiting for, Sam,” he said aloud, “an invitation? Kick her down and find out!”

There was only enough fuel for one landing. The Jumper had eaten up a lot when it went crazy, and the yacht had only a quarter fuel load when he took it. It was here or nothing.

I’d rather die with my feet on the ground. If I’m lucky—maybe something alive I can communicate with in time. I thought I’d die in there with no one to talk to. Just to be with something else alive—

And that was rather strange, because it was murder that brought him here.

Sam Newman had been a commercial pilot. It was a good job, but contrary to public opinion, pilots are not fabulously overpaid. What with automatics and navigational tapes and such, the skill of the early pilots is no longer essential. The computers do the work, and pilots are mostly supernumeraries. But the glamor has not yet vanished, and competition is keen.

Yet, that Sam had got as far as he had was something of a triumph. His appointment to the Academy had been due to a political concession which established a quota for poor children. Sam had worked for it, and his eventual position as pilot of a passenger liner was proof of how hard he worked.

Then had come Fran and love—the two together, inseparable. Sam had had a long time to think about it. But still he couldn’t decide whether they had really been in love or only in love with the feeling of being in love. What had attracted him to Fran was obvious: her dark-haired beauty, her slim, curved figure, and her casual acceptance of things he had always coveted, like position, security, luxury. For Fran had been wealthy.

What had attracted her to him was, in a sense, the same things. He had been called handsome; he was tall and well-built and blond. He was everything that Fran was not—ambitious, imaginative, intense like the keen, shining edge of a knife.

Differences had attracted them, and differences split them apart when marriage threw them into constant companionship. His pride rebelled at the use of her money, and she could not understand. He was ill-at-ease in her world, and she seemed condescending in his. What had seemed entrancingly different under the silver light of romance became ugly and irritating under the merciless, glaring sun of living together. And finally came the quarrels and the arguments and the jealousy—on his part, anyway. Fran was casual in other things—why not in morals? God knows, she had opportunity enough when he was away.

And whispers reached his ears and nasty rumors and Fran only shrugged her slim shoulders and looked down at him from an unassailable pinnacle of sophistication. Innocence of inherited position or excuse for license? She was spoiled, he knew, spoiled with liberty that did not understand “I shouldn’t.”

Then the blind, red day when the crewmen had snickered as he passed on his way down the ramp, when he had learned what everyone seemed to know—that she was divorcing him, when he had faced her with his suspicions and accusations and she had laughed, laughed as his face grew hot and red and heavy and his hands reached for her throat and squeezed, squeezed until the laughter was all gone, and the beauty and the life....

He took the yacht down by hand. He did not trust the automatics, and besides, it was the last time, the last trip, and he wanted to do it himself. The way the ship responded to the light pressure of his fingers on the keys gave him an acute feeling of pleasure. He brought it down only a mile or so from the ocean, where a broad river emptied into it; rivers and seas are natural places of habitation. He brought it down lightly, gently, on its tail absorbers so that the ship hesitated for a moment and then sagged as the power cut off, and everything was quiet. He sat there with his hands on the keys for a moment, and he would have liked to have taken her up again and landed it once more, but the needle of the fuel gauge flickered at empty. There was only enough to provide light and heat for a few months. Fran’s yacht had come to her last port.

Sam sighed and lifted his hands from the keys and dropped them into his lap. The hands clutched each other for a moment, and then relaxed. They were good hands for piloting a ship and bad hands for loving. They were killers, but now there was to be no use for either function any more.

Sam got up and walked to the port. He hesitated and then punched the button. There was no use testing the air. If it was poisonous he might as well find it out now; the air regenerators in the ship would not last long.

The heavy disc swung outward, slowly, with a slight squeal. The air came in. It was warm, fresh with the odor of green, growing things. Sam breathed deeply once and again. It was good air, life-giving air. He let down the ladder and climbed down its tubular metal rungs. He stood on the soil of this alien planet and filled his lungs once more as he looked around.

The grass beneath his feet was short and springy, more like well-cared-for lawn than wild meadow. Here and there flowers sprang up. They seemed familiar, but he was no botanist. The trees nearby—weren’t they elms? Overhead the sky was blue, the soft, mild blue of summer, with small, drifting white clouds.

Sam felt strangely uneasy, as if he had walked into a room expecting it to be unfamiliar and found he knew it almost by heart. Parallel evolution? Nowhere had the explorations found anything so much like Earth—or, rather, like Earth should look like. If so, then perhaps there were—men. Sam longed for someone to talk to. Anyone. He shrugged. He had been lucky so far; he should not press it.

He took out a pocket compass. The needle trembled and then swung into a fixed position. There was his north, and the ocean lay to the east of him, the river to the northeast and farther away. Sam struck out toward the ocean.

There was something wrong. Sam sensed it and then knew it without being able to pin it down. A moment later it came to him. It was so quiet; there was no life, no sound except the lazy rustle of leaves in the light breeze. There should be birds, he thought, and bees. A few steps farther on he caught sight of both. They must have been frightened by the landing of the ship.

He had been walking among the trees for several minutes. It was easy to keep moving steadily in the direction he had set for himself; the trees were well spaced, and there was no brush or debris of dead leaves and branches—only the crisp green turf beneath his feet. Fragmentary thoughts skipped through his mind.

No signs of inhabitants ... nothing artificial ... unless this impossibly perfect turf ... or the trees ... Sam had the uneasy feeling that something was watching him—perhaps with an emotion stronger than curiosity. He walked on a few steps and spun around. There was nothing but the trees and the turf and the birds and the bees. Slowly his hand let the gun slide back into the holster at his hip. Nerves? But surely there should be some animal life.

Sam started. He had turned back toward the ocean, and scarcely twenty-five feet away a half-grown fawn, spotted white and brown, lifted its head from the turf it had been cropping daintily. He walked toward it, and the fawn held its ground, looking at him without fear. He put his hand on the fawn’s neck, and the fawn nestled toward him and its coat was silky.

Wonderingly, Sam rubbed its neck and shoulders gently, and the fawn looked at him with brown eyes, big and trustful. Sam gave it a final pat and walked on. Behind him the fawn hesitated for a moment and then started to trot along behind.

After a few minutes Sam reached the coast. It was as peaceful and beautiful as a South Sea island. The trees stopped and a little farther on the grass stopped and white sand stretched down to a gently foaming surf and blue water. Sam stood looking at it for a long time, his hand resting on the fawn’s head.

He sat down and took off his shoes. He walked through the warm sand to the edge of the water. He knelt and put his hand into the surf. It was just cool enough to be invigorating. Sam stood up abruptly and sprinted through the surf down the gently shelving beach until the water was deep enough to swim in. It was foolhardy. Even around South Sea islands there are sharks. But somehow Sam couldn’t distrust this world. He swam and floated in the water for half an hour. Finally he waded toward the shore again. The fawn was curled up on the sand, sleeping peacefully in the sun beside his pile of discarded clothing.

When Sam came out of the surf, dripping, the fawn awakened and slowly got to its feet. The sun and breeze dried Sam’s body quickly, and he began to put his clothing back on.

“Well, boy,” Sam said softly, “this is something, eh? All we need now is another castaway. Maybe a beautiful blonde, huh?”

The fawn lifted its head and snuffled through velvet nostrils. Then it turned its head toward the line of trees. Sam looked too. Out from the trees came the beautiful blonde. And she was perfect. The light breeze lifted her long ashen hair and pulled it back from the clean-cut lines of her face. Her blue eyes were clear and friendly, and the corners of her generous mouth were quirked up a little. The thin summer dress she wore clung to the planes and curves of her body.

Sam stared and swallowed.

“Hello,” I said, as if we had met on an Earth beach which was countless millions of parsecs away.

“He—hello,” Sam said, and swallowed again. “You speak English!”

I smiled. “I should. I came from Earth.”

“But how—” he stammered. “I can’t believe—it’s—”

“I started my Jump just outside the orbit of Mars exactly ten days ago,” I said. “But the Jumper failed or something. I came out here and landed. I’ve been here three days.”

“The same thing happened to me,” Sam said. “Then it couldn’t have been mechanical failure—I’ve heard theorists talk about space warps....”

“We might as well introduce ourselves. My name is Louise.” I held out a hand to him.

He took it. His hand was hot and strong. “Sam—Sam Newman. That was my mother’s name.”

“Sam?” I asked. “Or Newman.”

“Newman—I mean Louise.”

I laughed. “I’m glad we’ve got that straightened out.”

“Last name?”

I shrugged. “What does it matter?”

“But your ship,” Sam said. “Where is it?”

“Back there.” I waved a hand toward the trees. “Miles. I thought of the advantages of the ocean too late.”

“Any fuel?”

I shook my head. “That’s why I left. I thought I might find some inhabitants here, if anywhere, so I started out. Then, today, I saw your ship land.”

Sam’s jaw dropped. “You saw me land? But why—?”

“I wanted a little time to think, to make up my mind,” I said. “I’ve been watching, trying to decide. If you had been some men I’ve seen—or even some I’ve known—well, a planet is a pretty big place. And loneliness is preferable to a lot of things.”

Sam shuddered. “God!” he said. “You might have—” The thought that he had been on trial struck him with a sudden sickness. “You might have decided to go away....”

“Would that have been a tragedy?” I made it light.

“Louise”—Sam’s voice was husky and low—“trite as it seems, you were the answer to a prayer. Just before you stepped out from the trees, I thought that just one thing was needed to make this paradise complete. You.”

“But you didn’t know me,” I objected.

Sam’s voice was so soft I could scarcely hear it. “I’ve known you all my life.”

I knew how he felt. I felt the same way. I knew what it was to be alone, completely alone, waiting throughout eternity for one personality to shatter your loneliness and bring life into an aching void.

“You said you’d been watching me,” Sam said. “I thought I felt eyes on me back there in the trees.”

I nodded, smiling. “I know. I thought you were going to shoot me.”

Sam’s jaw tightened and the muscles rippled. “The second shot would have been for me.” He looked down at his feet. He noticed that his feet were bare and his shirt was open. He closed the shirt hastily and looked up at me. “You’ve been watching. Then you saw—” He turned red.

“That’s when I made up my mind,” I said, laughing. “I decided that no man who loved swimming and animals could be altogether bad.”

Sam looked down. The fawn was rubbing against his leg, looking at Louise. Sam knelt. “Louise,” he said, “this is Bambi. Bambi, this is Louise.”

“Hello, Bambi,” I said.

Then, for a little while, we didn’t say anything. We stood there in the silence and it wasn’t embarrassed but somehow thoughtful and peaceful with the only sound the soft surf breaking against the silver shore. For one person is all the loneliness there can ever be, but two persons—a man and a woman—is loneliness shared, which isn’t loneliness at all but a world, entire and complete.

Sam looked up finally. “No inhabitants?”

I shook my head. “Only us. We’re the inhabitants.”

Sam got to his feet and held out his hand to me. I took it and we turned and walked to where the grass met the sand. We sat down and Sam put on his shoes and we looked at the sea and the surf and the sky.

“We’re all alone,” I said. “Forever and ever.”

We talked and fell silent, but we never said anything more important than that and the things we said were unimportant because we were both thinking the same thing and we were both hoping it would be tender and sweet and wonderful and lasting. And it was.

The sun went down and the stars came out and the night was just a little cooler than the day but not uncomfortable. Neither of us thought of food. When it got very dark we lay warm beside each other looking up at the stars. Sam couldn’t recognize any of the constellations or any of the stars.

“No one will ever find us.” He said it with a kind of joy, trying to hide it from me that he was glad, as if he could ever hide anything from me. He rolled over on his side to look at me. “Louise—were you—married or anything?”

I shook my head. “Not married or anything.”

I put a finger over his lips. “It doesn’t matter,” I said softly. “Nothing matters that happened before. I don’t want to know. We were born again here, and all the past is gone—so far away that we could never find it if we searched a million lifetimes. It never happened. There’s just—us.”

He kissed me and there was no passion in it—only wonder and happiness. “Louise—” His voice was almost lost in his throat. “I love you, Louise.”

“I love you, Sam.”

But when he slept, the name he muttered was “Fran.”

In the morning life begins again. In the morning we walked back to his ship. Food was no problem. Fruits and berries were plentiful—apples and peaches and pears and plums and cherries—every day we discovered something new but familiar. From the ship’s stores we got canned meats and vegetables—we never saw any other animals than Bambi, although Sam insisted that obviously there must be others. Bambi wandered in and out of camp, but he was always there when Sam wanted him. Sam liked to play with him, and Bambi enjoyed it.

The first day Sam built a shelter—a bower was what he called it—at the edge of the clearing where the ship was, under the trees. I didn’t want to sleep in the ship or even go inside it.

“That’s the past,” I told Sam. “It’s as dead and meaningless as a monument. The sooner we forget what it is and what it stands for the happier we’ll be.”

Sam agreed with me. The next time he went to the ship for food he returned without his gun. He built the bower, and he took a long time at it, lacing limbs together and thatching it with leaves to keep off the occasional showers. He was good with his hands, and he liked to keep busy.

That night he slept peacefully.

The second day we explored a little and looked over our supplies. We had the ship’s stores and fruit was plentiful, but there was nothing growing that would keep. Sam worried about it.

“If it gets colder we might be in for something,” he said. “We could weather one winter in the ship, I suppose, but the next—”

I shook my head. “I don’t think it will get any colder. I think it will always be like this.”

He talked about wobbles and ecliptics and temperate zones, but it didn’t mean anything. The weather wasn’t changing, and it wasn’t going to. I was sure of that.

He stirred a little in his sleep that night.

The morning of the third day we went to look for my ship. I tried to talk Sam out of it, but I knew it wasn’t any use. There might be fuel left, he said, maybe even enough to make an exploratory trip, and we could use the supplies. Maybe we could even locate some inhabitants.

All that day we walked away from the ocean, and we saw nothing new—nothing at all. Trees identical with those that grew around our camp, spaced out on soft green turf. No animals. We walked slowly but steadily, eating fruit picked on our way. Sam began to get restless. Sometimes he would peer far ahead or swing around and stare back the way we had come.

Toward evening we were walking up the side of a low hill. Suddenly Sam stopped. He looked toward me, his eyes vague and thoughtful.

“You know,” he said, his voice low and tense-sounding in the quietness, “I have a strange feeling that maybe we’ll come to a place where all this ends, where it stops being and there’s nothing. Like maybe we’ll climb to the top of this hill and we’ll look down and there won’t be any trees and turf or anything. Like it’s being created before us, rolled out like a green carpet, and just beyond where we can see, it’s something else entirely, something unimaginable.”

“You and all the other horizon-chasing explorers.”

I smiled and a moment later he smiled and shook his head and took my hand and we climbed to the top of the hill. As far as we could see there were the same trees and turf.

We slept under the sky that night, and Sam muttered but it never turned into words.

The next day we reached a point farther than the distance Sam estimated I could have walked, and we searched in circles the rest of that day and the next. In the middle of one I finally stopped and shook my head bewilderedly.

“They all look the same,” I said. “I don’t know where I put it down. Let’s give it up, Sam. It isn’t important now. Later we can map this area with landmarks and things and search for it, but I want to get back to our—home. Funny, isn’t it? We’ve only been here a week, and already there’s a place I think of as home.”

Sam argued. He really wanted to search some more, but he finally gave in. We started back.

At our camp, life fell into a regular pattern. We woke. We ate. We swam in the impossibly blue sea by the silver sands. We fished. We ate and talked. We made love. We slept. It should have been paradise, and it was. But Sam was restless. He needed something to do, and here there was nothing that needed doing. He began to talk about building a sailboat, and he did work at it now and then, but he never seemed to get very far with it. And in the night he had begun to moan and say one name over and over again.

One evening we were sitting together after our meal. The sun was still shining through the trees and I knew it was building up in him and there was nothing I could do but hope.

“Fran,” he said, “I think we should search—” He stopped. Fran, he thought. What a stupid thing to say. What a horrible thing to say. He glanced at me to see if I had noticed, and I sat there with the sun on me, not moving, not looking at him, feeling his eyes. And yet, he thought, there is a resemblance. The dark hair, the mouth ... The dark hair! He cast his mind back and I saw myself in his mind as he had seen me when I stepped forth from the trees with blue eyes and a generous mouth and ash-blonde hair. And it was something I couldn’t help because he wanted it so hard.

He moved away from me a little. His thoughts churned. Dark hair! He looked around him slowly and suddenly scrambled to his feet and ran to the ship and climbed up the ladder. I knew what he had gone for and I waited for him to come back and I hoped. Because there was nothing left but hope.

When he came back he had his gun hanging at his hip again.

“Stand up,” he said harshly. He towered above me, his feet spread apart, his face dark and angry.

I stood up. “What are you?” he said.

“I—”

“I’ll tell you what you aren’t. Human, for instance. You aren’t human!” His mouth curled as if he had tasted something disgusting and horrible. “No wonder we couldn’t find your ship. There wasn’t any ship. You belong here. You’re a native. You can change. You can change the color of your hair and the shape of your mouth. Maybe you can change more than that. And I’ve been making love to you and I’ve been in love with you and I didn’t know—What are you?”

His voice had been rising steadily. Now it cracked and broke in a thousand brittle pieces.

“You,” he said. “The most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen. And maybe you aren’t even female. Maybe they don’t have male and female here.”

“Oh, yes,” I said. “I’m female.”

He didn’t hear me.

“It’s all been a game—a horrible, deadly game. What’s real and what isn’t? You aren’t. I know that. Where are the rest of your kind? What kind of foul monster have I been making love to? What are you?”

His voice ended in a shriek. He pulled out his gun and whirled, peering into the woods, pointing it here and there, the fat barrel trembling.

“Come out!” he sobbed. “Come out, damn you! Come out!”

“There’s only me,” I said quietly. “I’m whatever you want me to be.”

He didn’t hear me. He didn’t understand me. Nothing could penetrate the thunder of blood pounding through his brain. But suddenly he swung around to face me again, suddenly aware that his back had been exposed to me.

“God!” he said. “God! And I thought this was paradise!”

He shook and the gun trembled and his finger tightened on the trigger. I knew what was coming, and I shrank back with horror. The trees trembled and the ground writhed.

“It was, Sam,” I whispered. “It was.”

“Change, damn you!” he shouted. “Change! I want to see you as you really are!”

His thoughts—mad, violent, powerful—wrenched at me, twisted me, tortured me. I changed. Hatred, terror, and horror were in his eyes as he stared at me and thought he saw me, and I could not tell him that he saw only what he had willed to see. I could not tell him that I did only what he willed me to do.

“God.” He whispered. “God.”

I came toward him, my clawed hands outstretched. His finger tightened convulsively on the trigger. A wave of heat crisped my body, but it was nothing to the pain in my mind. He could not stop me, of course. He could not stop me with his gun, and it was too late for anything else. I was close to him now, and my hands were reaching for his throat and squeezing, squeezing....

The last thing he ever heard—I know he heard it—was a low whisper that might only have been the wind sighing through the trees.

“I love you, Sam.”

He was dead. He was gone. And now that he was gone the reality that had been created for him—that he had created out of his desires—went back to another reality, no more real and perhaps not as much. With the fulfillment of his desire the trees melted back into the ground and the turf was no longer grass and I drew back into myself too the part of me Sam had called Louise and there was nothing but unending stretches of flat, featureless plain which from a great distance looked green.

One thing remained. Not far from where the blue sea lapped the edges of the plain stood a tall, slim spire, like a monument. Nearby was a mound, at one end of it a small, flat slab of stone. On the stone were three words:

SAM NEWMAN

Killer