“What did you say, Chaim?” he asked.
The rabbi’s black Sephardic eyes sparkled. “You know very well what I said, Mule; and you’re stalling for time. Please indulge me. Our religious duties here are not so arduous as we might wish; and since you won’t play chess . . .”
“. . . and you,” said Father Malloy unexpectedly, “refuse to take any interest in diagraming football plays . . .”
“Touche. Or am I? Is it my fault that as an Israeli I fail to share the peculiar American delusion that football means something other than rugby and soccer? Whereas chess—” He looked at the priest reproachfully. “Mule,” he said, “you have led me into a digression.”
“It was a try. Like the time the whole Southern California line thought I had the ball for once and Leliwa walked over for the winning TD.”
“What,” Acosta repeated, “is man? Is it by definition a member of the genus H. sapiens inhabiting the planet Sol III and its colonies?”
“The next time we tried the play,” said Malloy resignedly, “Leliwa was smeared for a ten-yard loss.”
The two men met on the sands of Mars. It was an unexpected meeting, a meeting in itself uneventful, and yet one of the turning points in the history of men and their universe.
The man from the colony base was on a routine patrol—a patrol imposed by the captain for reasons of discipline and activity-for-activity’s-sake rather than from any need for protection in this uninhabited waste. He had seen, over beyond the next rise, what he would have sworn was the braking blaze of a landing rocket—if he hadn’t known that the next rocket wasn’t due for another week. Six and a half days, to be exact, or even more exactly, six days, eleven hours, and twenty-three minutes, Greenwich Interplanetary. He knew the time so exactly because he, along with half the garrison, Father Malloy, and those screwball Israelis, was due for rotation then. So no matter how much it looked like a rocket, it couldn’t be one; but it was something happening on his patrol, for the first time since he’d come to this God-forsaken hole, and he might as well look into it and get his name on a report.
The man from the spaceship also knew the boredom of the empty planet. Alone of his crew, he had been there before, on the first voyage when they took the samples and set up the observation autoposts. But did that make the captain even listen to him? Hell, no; the captain knew all about the planet from the sample analyses and had no time to listen to a guy who’d really been there. So all he got out of it was the privilege of making the first reconnaissance. Big deal! One fast look around reconnoitering a few googols of sand grains and then back to the ship. But there was some kind of glow over that rise there. It couldn’t be lights; theirs was the scout ship, none of the others had landed yet. Some kind of phosphorescent life they’d missed the first time round . . . ? Maybe now the captain would believe that the sample analyses didn’t tell him everything.
The two men met at the top of the rise.
One man saw the horror of seemingly numberless limbs, of a headless torso, of a creature so alien that it walked in its glittering bare flesh in this freezing cold and needed no apparatus to supplement the all but nonexistent air.
One man saw the horror of an unbelievably meager four limbs, of a torso topped with an ugly lump like some unnatural growth, of a creature so alien that it smothered itself with heavy clothing in this warm climate and cut itself off from this invigorating air.
And both men screamed and ran.
“There is an interesting doctrine,” said Rabbi Acosta, “advanced by one of your writers, C. S. Lewis . . .”
“He was an Episcopalian,” said Father Malloy sharply.
“I apologize.” Acosta refrained from pointing out that Anglo-Catholic would have been a more accurate term. “But I believe that many in your church have found his writings, from your point of view, doctrinally sound? He advances the doctrine of what he calls hnaus—intelligent beings with souls who are the children of God, whatever their physical shape or planet of origin.”
“Look, Chaim,” said Malloy with an effort toward patience. “Doctrine or no doctrine, there just plain aren’t any such beings. Not in this solar system anyway. And if you’re going to go interstellar on me, I’d just as soon read the men’s microcomics.”
“Interplanetary travel existed only in such literature once. But of course if you’d rather play chess . . .”
“My specialty,” said the man once known to sports writers as Mule Malloy, “was running interference. Against you I need somebody to run interference for.”
“Let us take the sixteenth psalm of David, which you call the fifteenth, having decided, for reasons known only to your God and mine, that psalms nine and ten are one. There is a phrase in there which, if you’ll forgive me, I’ll quote in Latin; your Saint Jerome is often more satisfactory than any English translator. Benedicam Dominum, qui tribuit mihi intellectum.”
“Blessed be the Lord, who schools me, ” murmured Malloy, in the standard Knox translation.
“But according to Saint Jerome: I shall bless the Lord, who bestows on me—just how should one render intellectum?—not merely intellect, but perception, comprehension . . . what Hamlet means when he says of man: In apprehension how like a god!”
Words change their meanings.
Apprehensively, one man reported to his captain. The captain first swore, then scoffed, then listened to the story again. Finally he said, “I’m sending a full squad back with you to the place where—maybe—you saw this thing. If it’s for real, these mother-dighting bug-eyed monsters are going to curse the day they ever set a
