Ellison Wonderland

for despite the utterly safe appearance of the planet, there was no question as to carrying weapons. Space was deep and angry at Man. Its creatures were varied and utterly unpredictable. So they never took a chance.

As they walked out across the featureless plain, their chest-consoles humming and gauging and studying, they moved in a tight triangle.

Calk, in the front, as the apex of the triangle, cast about warily, his triple-threader swinging in lazy arcs.

“Have you noticed the ground?” Kradter asked, his voice hushed and solemn as a man in a cathedral, transmitted over the intercom system.

Calk nodded, but Dembois put it into words.

“It’s spongey. Springy. Like the ‘giving’ floors back at SeekServ Central. What’s it made of?” “I don’t know,” Calk answered, and that was the final word any of them said.

There was a shivering in the planet. A soft trembling, like a bowl of jelly. It shivered and pulsed and seemed to deepen as they stopped.

Then, through their intercoms, they heard a distinct crunch and clang, and as one they spun around. Half a mile behind them the Circe was trembling, tottering, falling, and then The planet swallowed the ship.

They screamed. Each of them, and the pitch was the same. The meaning behind the screams was the same. They were lost, stranded out here, somewhere out in the nowhere, with only the oxygen in their tanks to sustain them, and their transportation gone!

Then…they realized the greater danger. The planet was carnivorous!

They realized it too late.

Beneath their feet, the ground swelled, like a bubble bursting, and abruptly opened with a wet, smacking sound…

Their screams were cut short as they fell fell fell—and the silver, featureless, spongey ground closed without a break. Without an indication that a ship of space and three men had been there.

In the syrup. Grey and all-consuming. Heaving, tumbling, dragged deeper and deeper, thrust into the maw of a force without form. The allness was about them; they were being…

EATEN ALIVE!!

The grey substance held them fu a rubbery grip. They could move but slightly. Grey and sparkling, coating their helmets. Breathing was clear, but seemed so oppressive. The planet of grey featurelessness was alive, the entire world was a creature, an entity, and they were in its gut. They turned over and over wishing knowing hoping not caring but knowing that this was all of it down to the bottom without end and without hope and hands out and legs out and their fingers spread and their eyes wide as their throats tensed and tore at the screams that rattled within their helmets…

Overhead, the Circe swam into view, was there a moment, no longer, and gone out out and out gone again in the silver nothingness that lived held would not release them goodbye.

The trembling was coming again. Suddenly. Then they felt the planet around them heaving, tremors starting low and roiling, spilling, sucking upward. They had no hope. In a few minutes the air must surely give out, for they had been down in the heart of this living world for eons, centuries, eternities, and when the air went, they would die. The pricklings at their skin told them the digestive fluids of the planet were even now trying to assimilate the fabric of the bulky pressure suits. But there was the heaving…

And they felt themselves rising, speeding as they rose, and the silver was growing lighter and lighter and with no warning they were

POP!

thrown up and out of the planet, like corks shooting to the surface of a lake, and they fell back to the sponged surface. They were free.

The planet trembled violently, agitated beyond belief. Like pebbles they were flipped and tossed and hurled and thrown, bouncing bouncing bouncing. The Circe emerged from the planet, two hundred feet away, lying on its side, being jostled and caromed as they were.

Without hesitation they scrambled madly for the ship, and threw themselves through the lock. Fighting the unending bouncing and jostling movement of the mad planet they got to the controls and the dampers went in and the fire chambers spurted The Circe blasted off without care of course, the men thanking God for their lives, thanking Providence for the inexplicable release from sure death.

Behind them, the silver planet settled slowly, and the trembling ceased. It was silent and solid once more. Kradter was still sheet-white.

“We’ve got to get back into contact with Earth!”

Dembois’s voice quavered. “That thing is a horror! A menace’ We’ve got to get Earth to burn it out of space!”

Calk’s laughter stopped them. They stared at him, for the first real signs of emotion were contorting the Captain’s face. His roars of mirth broke against the bulkheads and tinkled like dust motes about them. For a second they thought of hysteria and slapping him, but when Kradter took a step forward, Calk waved him away with a mirth-weakened hand.

Finally, he stopped, sucking in breath, and clutching his sides. “Oh, you two give me such a pain in the ass!” he laughed. Then his face went rigid again. His voice steadied and he looked at them. “Don’t you know even yet? Don’t you understand what’s happened?” They stared at him, uncomprehending.

“All the way out here,” he said, bitterness living in his words, “you’ve been telling me how great and wonderful man is. How he rules the universe, how it’s his job to show eetees the way, or destroy them. As though Man were the end-product of the life race, as though we were at the pinnacle of development. You never could have considered that there was a higher life-form than us.”

“What are you talking about,” Dembois snapped. “ Are you crazy?”

Calk’s face was angry, really angry, as he said: “You asses! You conceited, self-important asses. Don’t you understand what I’m saying? Homo superior, ha! That’s the joke of the century. You fools, can’t you see…