One man's poison

By ROBERT SHECKLEY

 

They could eat a horse, only luckily there was none ... it might have eaten them first!

Hellman plucked the last radish out of the can with a pair of dividers. He held it up for Casker to admire, then laid it carefully on the workbench beside the razor.

 

"Hell of a meal for two grown men," Casker said, flopping down in one of the ship's padded crash chairs.

 

"If you'd like to give up your share—" Hellman started to suggest.

 

Casker shook his head quickly. Hellman smiled, picked up the razor and examined its edge critically.

 

"Don't make a production out of it," Casker said, glancing at the ship's instruments. They were approaching a red dwarf, the only planet-bearing sun in the vicinity. "We want to be through with supper before we get much closer."

 

Hellman made a practice incision in the radish, squinting along the top of the razor. Casker bent closer, his mouth open. Hellman poised the razor delicately and cut the radish cleanly in half.

 

"Will you say grace?" Hellman asked.

 

Casker growled something and popped a half in his mouth. Hellman chewed more slowly. The sharp taste seemed to explode along his disused tastebuds.

 

"Not much bulk value," Hellman said.

 

Casker didn't answer. He was busily studying the red dwarf.

As he swallowed the last of his radish, Hellman stifled a sigh. Their last meal had been three days ago ... if two biscuits and a cup of water could be called a meal. This radish, now resting in the vast emptiness of their stomachs, was the last gram of food on board ship.

 

"Two planets," Casker said. "One's burned to a crisp."

 

"Then we'll land on the other."

 

Casker nodded and punched a deceleration spiral into the ship's tape.

 

Hellman found himself wondering for the hundredth time where the fault had been. Could he have made out the food requisitions wrong, when they took on supplies at Calao station? After all, he had been devoting most of his attention to the mining equipment. Or had the ground crew just forgotten to load those last precious cases?

 

He drew his belt in to the fourth new notch he had punched.

 

Speculation was useless. Whatever the reason, they were in a jam. Ironically enough, they had more than enough fuel to take them back to Calao. But they would be a pair of singularly emaciated corpses by the time the ship reached there.

 

"We're coming in now," Casker said.

 

And to make matters worse, this unexplored region of space had few suns and fewer planets. Perhaps there was a slight possibility of replenishing their water supply, but the odds were enormous against finding anything they could eat.

 

"Look at that place," Casker growled.

 

Hellman shook himself out of his reverie.

 

The planet was like a round gray-brown porcupine. The spines of a million needle-sharp mountains glittered in the red dwarf's feeble light. And as they spiraled lower, circling the planet, the pointed mountains seemed to stretch out to meet them.

 

"It can't be all mountains," Hellman said.

 

"It's not."

 

Sure enough, there were oceans and lakes, out of which thrust jagged island-mountains. But no sign of level land, no hint of civilization, or even animal life.

 

"At least it's got an oxygen atmosphere," Casker said.

 

Their deceleration spiral swept them around the planet, cutting lower into the atmosphere, braking against it. And still there was nothing but mountains and lakes and oceans and more mountains.

 

On the eighth run, Hellman caught sight of a solitary building on a mountain top. Casker braked recklessly, and the hull glowed red hot. On the eleventh run, they made a landing approach.

 

"Stupid place to build," Casker muttered.

 

The building was doughnut-shaped, and fitted nicely over the top of the mountain. There was a wide, level lip around it, which Casker scorched as he landed the ship.

From the air, the building had merely seemed big. On the ground, it was enormous. Hellman and Casker walked up to it slowly. Hellman had his burner ready, but there was no sign of life.

 

"This planet must be abandoned," Hellman said almost in a whisper.

 

"Anyone in his right mind would abandon this place," Casker said. "There're enough good planets around, without anyone trying to live on a needle point."

 

They reached the door. Hellman tried to open it and found it locked. He looked back at the spectacular display of mountains.

 

"You know," he said, "when this planet was still in a molten state, it must have been affected by several gigantic moons that are now broken up. The strains, external and internal, wrenched it into its present spined appearance and—"

 

"Come off it," Casker said ungraciously. "You were a librarian before you decided to get rich on uranium."

 

Hellman shrugged his shoulders and burned a hole in the doorlock. They waited.

 

The only sound on the mountain top was the growling of their stomachs.

 

They entered.

 

The tremendous wedge-shaped room was evidently a warehouse of sorts. Goods were piled to the ceiling, scattered over the floor, stacked haphazardly against the walls. There were boxes and containers of all sizes and shapes, some big enough to hold an elephant, others the size of thimbles.

 

Near the door was a dusty pile of books. Immediately, Hellman bent down to examine them.

 

"Must be food somewhere in here," Casker said, his face lighting up for the first time in a week. He started to open the nearest box.

 

"This is interesting," Hellman said, discarding all the books except one.

 

"Let's eat first," Casker said, ripping the top off the box. Inside was a brownish dust. Casker looked at it, sniffed, and made a face.

 

"Very interesting indeed," Hellman said, leafing through the book.

 

Casker opened a small can, which contained a glittering green slime. He closed it and opened another. It contained a dull orange slime.

 

"Hmm," Hellman said, still reading.

 

"Hellman! Will you kindly drop that book and help me find some food?"

 

"Food?" Hellman repeated, looking up. "What makes you think there's anything to eat here? For all you know, this could be a paint factory."

 

"It's a warehouse!" Casker shouted.

 

He opened a kidney-shaped can and lifted out a soft purple stick. It hardened quickly and crumpled to dust as he tried to smell it. He scooped up a handful of the dust and brought it to his mouth.

 

"That might be extract of strychnine," Hellman said casually.

Casker abruptly dropped the dust and wiped his hands.

 

"After all," Hellman pointed out, "granted that this is a warehouse—a cache, if you wish—we don't know what the late inhabitants considered good fare. Paris green salad, perhaps, with sulphuric acid as dressing."

 

"All right," Casker said, "but we gotta eat. What're you going to do about all this?" He gestured at the hundreds of boxes, cans and bottles.

 

"The thing to do," Hellman said briskly, "is to make a qualitative analysis on four or five samples. We could start out with a simple titration, sublimate the chief ingredient, see if it forms a precipitate, work out its molecular makeup from—"

 

"Hellman, you don't know what you're talking about. You're a librarian, remember? And I'm a correspondence school pilot. We don't know anything about titrations and sublimations."

 

"I know," Hellman said, "but we should. It's the right way to go about it."

 

"Sure. In the meantime, though, just until a chemist drops in, what'll we do?"

 

"This might help us," Hellman said, holding up the book. "Do you know what it is?"

 

"No," Casker said, keeping a tight grip on his patience.

 

"It's a pocket dictionary and guide to the Helg language."

 

"Helg?"

 

"The planet we're on. The symbols match up with those on the boxes."

 

Casker raised an eyebrow. "Never heard of Helg."

 

"I don't believe the planet has ever had any contact with Earth," Hellman said. "This dictionary isn't Helg-English. It's Helg-Aloombrigian."

 

Casker remembered that Aloombrigia was the home planet of a small, adventurous reptilian race, out near the center of the Galaxy.

 

"How come you can read Aloombrigian?" Casker asked.

 

"Oh, being a librarian isn't a completely useless profession," Hellman said modestly. "In my spare time—"

 

"Yeah. Now how about—"

 

"Do you know," Hellman said, "the Aloombrigians probably helped the Helgans leave their planet and find another. They sell services like that. In which case, this building very likely is a food cache!"

 

"Suppose you start translating," Casker suggested wearily, "and maybe find us something to eat."

 

They opened boxes until they found a likely-looking substance. Laboriously, Hellman translated the symbols on it.

 

"Got it," he said. "It reads:—'Use Sniffners—The Better Abrasive.'"

 

"Doesn't sound edible," Casker said.

 

"I'm afraid not."

 

They found another, which read: vigroom! fill all your stomachs, and fill them right!

 

"What kind of animals do you suppose these Helgans were?" Casker asked.

 

Hellman shrugged his shoulders.

 

The next label took almost fifteen minutes to translate. It read: argosel makes your thudra all tizzy. contains thirty arps of ramstat pulz, for shell lubrication.

 

"There must be something here we can eat," Casker said with a note of desperation.

 

"I hope so," Hellman replied.

At the end of two hours, they were no closer. They had translated dozens of titles and sniffed so many substances that their olfactory senses had given up in disgust.

 

"Let's talk this over," Hellman said, sitting on a box marked: vormitish—good as it sounds!

 

"Sure," Casker said, sprawling out on the floor. "Talk."

 

"If we could deduce what kind of creatures inhabited this planet, we'd know what kind of food they ate, and whether it's likely to be edible for us."

 

"All we do know is that they wrote a lot of lousy advertising copy."

 

Hellman ignored that. "What kind of intelligent beings would evolve on a planet that is all mountains?"

 

"Stupid ones!" Casker said.

 

That was no help. But Hellman found that he couldn't draw any inferences from the mountains. It didn't tell him if the late Helgans ate silicates or proteins or iodine-base foods or anything.

 

"Now look," Hellman said, "we'll have to work this out by pure logic—Are you listening to me?"

 

"Sure," Casker said.

 

"Okay. There's an old proverb that covers our situation perfectly: 'One man's meat is another man's poison.'"

 

"Yeah," Casker said. He was positive his stomach had shrunk to approximately the size of a marble.

 

"We can assume, first, that their meat is our meat."

 

Casker wrenched himself away from a vision of five juicy roast beefs dancing tantalizingly before him. "What if their meat is our poison? What then?"

 

"Then," Hellman said, "we will assume that their poison is our meat."

 

"And what happens if their meat and their poison are our poison?"

 

"We starve."

 

"All right," Casker said, standing up. "Which assumption do we start with?"

 

"Well, there's no sense in asking for trouble. This is an oxygen planet, if that means anything. Let's assume that we can eat some basic food of theirs. If we can't we'll start on their poisons."

 

"If we live that long," Casker said.

 

Hellman began to translate labels. They discarded such brands as androgynites' delight and verbell—for longer, curlier, more sensitive antennae, until they found a small gray box, about six inches by three by three. It was called valkorin's universal taste treat, for all digestive capacities.

 

"This looks as good as any," Hellman said. He opened the box.

 

Casker leaned over and sniffed. "No odor."

Within the box they found a rectangular, rubbery red block. It quivered slightly, like jelly.

 

"Bite into it," Casker said.

 

"Me?" Hellman asked. "Why not you?"

 

"You picked it."

 

"I prefer just looking at it," Hellman said with dignity. "I'm not too hungry."

 

"I'm not either," Casker said.

 

They sat on the floor and stared at the jellylike block. After ten minutes, Hellman yawned, leaned back and closed his eyes.

 

"All right, coward," Casker said bitterly. "I'll try it. Just remember, though, if I'm poisoned, you'll never get off this planet. You don't know how to pilot."

 

"Just take a little bite, then," Hellman advised.

 

Casker leaned over and stared at the block. Then he prodded it with his thumb.

 

The rubbery red block giggled.

 

"Did you hear that?" Casker yelped, leaping back.

 

"I didn't hear anything," Hellman said, his hands shaking. "Go ahead."

 

Casker prodded the block again. It giggled louder, this time with a disgusting little simper.

 

"Okay," Casker said, "what do we try next?"

 

"Next? What's wrong with this?"

 

"I don't eat anything that giggles," Casker stated firmly.

 

"Now listen to me," Hellman said. "The creatures who manufactured this might have been trying to create an esthetic sound as well as a pleasant shape and color. That giggle is probably only for the amusement of the eater."

 

"Then bite into it yourself," Casker offered.

 

Hellman glared at him, but made no move toward the rubbery block. Finally he said, "Let's move it out of the way."

 

They pushed the block over to a corner. It lay there giggling softly to itself.

 

"Now what?" Casker said.

 

Hellman looked around at the jumbled stacks of incomprehensible alien goods. He noticed a door on either side of the room.

 

"Let's have a look in the other sections," he suggested.

 

Casker shrugged his shoulders apathetically.

 

Slowly they trudged to the door in the left wall. It was locked and Hellman burned it open with the ship's burner.

 

It was a wedge-shaped room, piled with incomprehensible alien goods.

 

The hike back across the room seemed like miles, but they made it only slightly out of wind. Hellman blew out the lock and they looked in.

 

It was a wedge-shaped room, piled with incomprehensible alien goods.

 

"All the same," Casker said sadly, and closed the door.

 

"Evidently there's a series of these rooms going completely around the building," Hellman said. "I wonder if we should explore them."

 

Casker calculated the distance around the building, compared it with his remaining strength, and sat down heavily on a long gray object.

 

"Why bother?" he asked.

Hellman tried to collect his thoughts. Certainly he should be able to find a key of some sort, a clue that would tell him what they could eat. But where was it?

 

He examined the object Casker was sitting on. It was about the size and shape of a large coffin, with a shallow depression on top. It was made of a hard, corrugated substance.

 

"What do you suppose this is?" Hellman asked.

 

"Does it matter?"

 

Hellman glanced at the symbols painted on the side of the object, then looked them up in his dictionary.

 

"Fascinating," he murmured, after a while.

 

"Is it something to eat?" Casker asked, with a faint glimmering of hope.

 

"No, You are sitting on something called the morog custom super transport for the discriminating helgan who desires the best in vertical transportation. It's a vehicle!"

 

"Oh," Casker said dully.

 

"This is important! Look at it! How does it work?"

 

Casker wearily climbed off the Morog Custom Super Transport and looked it over carefully. He traced four almost invisible separations on its four corners. "Retractable wheels, probably, but I don't see—"

 

Hellman read on. "It says to give it three amphus of high-gain Integor fuel, then a van of Tonder lubrication, and not to run it over three thousand Ruls for the first fifty mungus."

 

"Let's find something to eat," Casker said.

 

"Don't you see how important this is?" Hellman asked. "This could solve our problem. If we could deduce the alien logic inherent in constructing this vehicle, we might know the Helgan thought pattern. This, in turn, would give us an insight into their nervous systems, which would imply their biochemical makeup."

 

Casker stood still, trying to decide whether he had enough strength left to strangle Hellman.

 

"For example," Hellman said, "what kind of vehicle would be used in a place like this? Not one with wheels, since everything is up and down. Anti-gravity? Perhaps, but what kind of anti-gravity? And why did the inhabitants devise a boxlike form instead—"

 

Casker decided sadly that he didn't have enough strength to strangle Hellman, no matter how pleasant it might be. Very quietly, he said, "Kindly stop making like a scientist. Let's see if there isn't something we can gulp down."

 

"All right," Hellman said sulkily.

Casker watched his partner wander off among the cans, bottles and cases. He wondered vaguely where Hellman got the energy, and decided that he was just too cerebral to know when he was starving.

 

"Here's something," Hellman called out, standing in front of a large yellow vat.

 

"What does it say?" Casker asked.

 

"Little bit hard to translate. But rendered freely, it reads: morishille's voozy, with lacto-ecto added for a new taste sensation. everyone drinks voozy. good before and after meals, no unpleasant after-effects. good for children! the drink of the universe!"

 

"That sounds good," Casker admitted, thinking that Hellman might not be so stupid after all.

 

"This should tell us once and for all if their meat is our meat," Hellman said. "This Voozy seems to be the closest thing to a universal drink I've found yet."

 

"Maybe," Casker said hopefully, "maybe it's just plain water!"

 

"We'll see." Hellman pried open the lid with the edge of the burner.

 

Within the vat was a crystal-clear liquid.

 

"No odor," Casker said, bending over the vat.

 

The crystal liquid lifted to meet him.

 

Casker retreated so rapidly that he fell over a box. Hellman helped him to his feet, and they approached the vat again. As they came near, the liquid lifted itself three feet into the air and moved toward them.

 

"What've you done now?" Casker asked, moving back carefully. The liquid flowed slowly over the side of the vat. It began to flow toward him.

 

"Hellman!" Casker shrieked.

 

Hellman was standing to one side, perspiration pouring down his face, reading his dictionary with a preoccupied frown.

 

"Guess I bumbled the translation," he said.

 

"Do something!" Casker shouted. The liquid was trying to back him into a corner.

 

"Nothing I can do," Hellman said, reading on. "Ah, here's the error. It doesn't say 'Everyone drinks Voozy.' Wrong subject. 'Voozy drinks everyone.' That tells us something! The Helgans must have soaked liquid in through their pores. Naturally, they would prefer to be drunk, instead of to drink."

 

Casker tried to dodge around the liquid, but it cut him off with a merry gurgle. Desperately he picked up a small bale and threw it at the Voozy. The Voozy caught the bale and drank it. Then it discarded that and turned back to Casker.

 

Hellman tossed another box. The Voozy drank this one and a third and fourth that Casker threw in. Then, apparently exhausted, it flowed back into its vat.

 

Casker clapped down the lid and sat on it, trembling violently.

 

"Not so good," Hellman said. "We've been taking it for granted that the Helgans had eating habits like us. But, of course, it doesn't necessarily—"

 

"No, it doesn't. No, sir, it certainly doesn't. I guess we can see that it doesn't. Anyone can see that it doesn't—"

 

"Stop that," Hellman ordered sternly. "We've no time for hysteria."

 

"Sorry." Casker slowly moved away from the Voozy vat.

 

"I guess we'll have to assume that their meat is our poison," Hellman said thoughtfully. "So now we'll see if their poison is our meat."

 

Casker didn't say anything. He was wondering what would have happened if the Voozy had drunk him.

 

In the corner, the rubbery block was still giggling to itself.

Now here's a likely-looking poison," Hellman said, half an hour later.

 

Casker had recovered completely, except for an occasional twitch of the lips.

 

"What does it say?" he asked.

 

Hellman rolled a tiny tube in the palm of his hand. "It's called Pvastkin's Plugger. The label reads: warning! highly dangerous! pvastkin's plugger is designed to fill holes or cracks of not more than two cubic vims. however—the plugger is not to be eaten under any circumstances. the active ingredient, ramotol, which makes pvastkin's so excellent a plugger renders it highly dangerous when taken internally."

 

"Sounds great," Casker said. "It'll probably blow us sky-high."

 

"Do you have any other suggestions?" Hellman asked.

 

Casker thought for a moment. The food of Helg was obviously unpalatable for humans. So perhaps was their poison ... but wasn't starvation better than this sort of thing?

 

After a moment's communion with his stomach, he decided that starvation was not better.

 

"Go ahead," he said.

 

Hellman slipped the burner under his arm and unscrewed the top of the little bottle. He shook it.

 

Nothing happened.

 

"It's got a seal," Casker pointed out.

 

Hellman punctured the seal with his fingernail and set the bottle on the floor. An evil-smelling green froth began to bubble out.

 

Hellman looked dubiously at the froth. It was congealing into a glob and spreading over the floor.

 

"Yeast, perhaps," he said, gripping the burner tightly.

 

"Come, come. Faint heart never filled an empty stomach."

 

"I'm not holding you back," Hellman said.

 

The glob swelled to the size of a man's head.

 

"How long is that supposed to go on?" Casker asked.

 

"Well," Hellman said, "it's advertised as a Plugger. I suppose that's what it does—expands to plug up holes."

 

"Sure. But how much?"

 

"Unfortunately, I don't know how much two cubic vims are. But it can't go on much—"

 

Belatedly, they noticed that the Plugger had filled almost a quarter of the room and was showing no signs of stopping.

 

"We should have believed the label!" Casker yelled to him, across the spreading glob. "It is dangerous!"

 

As the Plugger produced more surface, it began to accelerate in its growth. A sticky edge touched Hellman, and he jumped back.

 

"Watch out!"

 

He couldn't reach Casker, on the other side of the gigantic sphere of blob. Hellman tried to run around, but the Plugger had spread, cutting the room in half. It began to swell toward the walls.

 

"Run for it!" Hellman yelled, and rushed to the door behind him.

He flung it open just as the expanding glob reached him. On the other side of the room, he heard a door slam shut. Hellman didn't wait any longer. He sprinted through and slammed the door behind him.

 

He stood for a moment, panting, the burner in his hand. He hadn't realized how weak he was. That sprint had cut his reserves of energy dangerously close to the collapsing point. At least Casker had made it, too, though.

 

But he was still in trouble.

 

The Plugger poured merrily through the blasted lock, into the room. Hellman tried a practice shot on it, but the Plugger was evidently impervious ... as, he realized, a good plugger should be.

 

It was showing no signs of fatigue.

 

Hellman hurried to the far wall. The door was locked, as the others had been, so he burned out the lock and went through.

 

How far could the glob expand? How much was two cubic vims? Two cubic miles, perhaps? For all he knew, the Plugger was used to repair faults in the crusts of planets.

 

In the next room, Hellman stopped to catch his breath. He remembered that the building was circular. He would burn his way through the remaining doors and join Casker. They would burn their way outside and....

 

Casker didn't have a burner!

 

Hellman turned white with shock. Casker had made it into the room on the right, because they had burned it open earlier. The Plugger was undoubtedly oozing into that room, through the shattered lock ... and Casker couldn't get out! The Plugger was on his left, a locked door on his right!

 

Rallying his remaining strength, Hellman began to run. Boxes seemed to get in his way purposefully, tripping him, slowing him down. He blasted the next door and hurried on to the next. And the next. And the next.

 

The Plugger couldn't expand completely into Casker's room!

 

Or could it?

 

The wedge-shaped rooms, each a segment of a circle, seemed to stretch before him forever, a jumbled montage of locked doors, alien goods, more doors, more goods. Hellman fell over a crate, got to his feet and fell again. He had reached the limit of his strength, and passed it. But Casker was his friend.

 

Besides, without a pilot, he'd never get off the place.

 

Hellman struggled through two more rooms on trembling legs and then collapsed in front of a third.

 

"Is that you, Hellman?" he heard Casker ask, from the other side of the door.

 

"You all right?" Hellman managed to gasp.

 

"Haven't much room in here," Casker said, "but the Plugger's stopped growing. Hellman, get me out of here!"

Hellman lay on the floor panting. "Moment," he said.

 

"Moment, hell!" Casker shouted. "Get me out. I've found water!"

 

"What? How?"

 

"Get me out of here!"

 

Hellman tried to stand up, but his legs weren't cooperating. "What happened?" he asked.

 

"When I saw that glob filling the room, I figured I'd try to start up the Super Custom Transport. Thought maybe it could knock down the door and get me out. So I pumped it full of high-gain Integor fuel."

 

"Yes?" Hellman said, still trying to get his legs under control.

 

"That Super Custom Transport is an animal, Hellman! And the Integor fuel is water! Now get me out!"

 

Hellman lay back with a contented sigh. If he had had a little more time, he would have worked out the whole thing himself, by pure logic. But it was all very apparent now. The most efficient machine to go over those vertical, razor-sharp mountains would be an animal, probably with retractable suckers. It was kept in hibernation between trips; and if it drank water, the other products designed for it would be palatable, too. Of course they still didn't know much about the late inhabitants, but undoubtedly....

 

"Burn down that door!" Casker shrieked, his voice breaking.

 

Hellman was pondering the irony of it all. If one man's meat—and his poison—are your poison, then try eating something else. So simple, really.

 

But there was one thing that still bothered him.

 

"How did you know it was an Earth-type animal?" he asked.

 

"Its breath, stupid! It inhales and exhales and smells as if it's eaten onions!" There was a sound of cans falling and bottles shattering. "Now hurry!"

 

"What's wrong?" Hellman asked, finally getting to his feet and poising the burner.

 

"The Custom Super Transport. It's got me cornered behind a pile of cases. Hellman, it seems to think that I'm its meat!"

 

Broiled with the burner—well done for Hellman, medium rare for Casker—it was their meat, with enough left over for the trip back to Calao.

 

—ROBERT SHECKLEY