Part 1

MUCK MAN

BY FREMONT DODGE

The work wasn't hard, but there were some sacrifices. You had to give up hope and freedom--and being human!

[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Worlds of If Science Fiction, November 1963. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]

I

The girl with the Slider egg glittering in her hair watched the bailiff lead Asa Graybar out of the courtroom. He recognized her as old Hazeltyne's daughter Harriet, no doubt come to see justice done. She didn't have the hothouse-flower look Asa would have expected in a girl whose father owned the most valuable of the planetary franchises. She was not afraid to meet his eye, the eye of a judicially certified criminal. There was, perhaps, a crease of puzzlement in her brow, as if she had thought crimes were committed by shriveled, rat-faced types, and not by young biological engineers who still affected crewcuts.

Tom Dorr, Hazeltyne's general manager, was her escort. Asa felt certain, without proof, that Dorr was the man who had framed him for the charge of grand theft by secreting a fresh Slider egg in his laboratory. The older man stared at Asa coldly as he was led out of the courtroom and down the corridor back to jail.

Jumpy, Asa's cellmate, took one look at his face as he was put back behind bars.

"Guilty," Jumpy said.

Asa glared at him.

"I know, I know," Jumpy said hastily. "You were framed. But what's the rap?"

"Five or one."

"Take the five," Jumpy advised. "Learn basket-weaving in a nice air-conditioned rehab clinic. A year on a changeling deal will seem a lot longer, even if you're lucky enough to live through it."

Asa took four steps to the far wall of the cell, stood there briefly with his head bent and turned to face Jumpy.

"Nope," Asa said softly. "I'm going into a conversion tank. I'm going to be a muck man, Jumpy. I'm going out to Jordan's Planet and hunt Slider eggs."

"Smuggling? It won't work."

Asa didn't answer. The Hazeltyne company had gone after him because he had been working on a method of keeping Slider eggs alive. The Hazeltyne company would be happy to see him mark time for five years of so-called social reorientation. But if he could get out to Jordan's Planet, with his physiology adapted to the environment of that wretched world, he could study the eggs under conditions no laboratory could duplicate. He might even be able to cause trouble for Hazeltyne.

His only problem would be staying alive for a year.

An interview with a doctor from the Conversion Corps was required for all persons who elected changeling status. The law stated that potential changelings must be fully informed of the rights and hazards of altered shape before they signed a release. The requirement held whether or not the individual, like Asa, was already experienced.

By the time humanity traveled to the stars, medical biology had made it possible to regenerate damaged or deficient organs of the body. Regeneration was limited only by advanced age. Sometime after a man's two hundredth year his body lost the ability to be coaxed into growing new cells. A fifth set of teeth was usually one's last. As long as senescence could be staved off, however, any man could have bulging biceps and a pencil waist, if he could pay for the treatment.

Until the medical associations declared such treatments unethical there was even a short fad of deliberate deformities, with horns at the temples particularly popular.

From regeneration it was a short step to specialized regrowth. The techniques were perfected to adapt humans to the dozen barely habitable worlds man had discovered. Even on Mars, the only planet outside Earth in the solar system where the human anatomy was remotely suitable, a man could work more efficiently with redesigned lungs and temperature controls than he could inside a pressure suit. On more bizarre planets a few light-years away the advantages of changeling bodies were greater.

Unfortunately for planetary development companies, hardly anyone wanted to become a changeling. High pay lured few. So a law was passed permitting a convicted criminal to earn his freedom by putting in one year as a changeling for every five years he would otherwise have had to spend in rehabilitation.

"What types of changelings do you have orders for right now, doctor?" Asa asked the man assigned to his case. It would look suspicious if he asked for Jordan's Planet without some preliminary questions.

"Four," answered the doctor.

"Squiffs for New Arcady. Adapted for climbing the skycraper trees and with the arm structure modified into pseudo-wings or gliding. Then we need spiderinos for Von Neumann Two. If you want the nearest thing we have to Earth, there's Caesar's Moon, where we'd just have to double your tolerance for carbon monoxide and make you a bigger and better gorilla than the natives. Last, of course, there's always a need for muck men on Jordan's Planet."

The doctor shrugged, as if naturally no one could be expected to choose Jordan's Planet. Asa frowned in apparent consideration of the alternatives.

"What's the pay range?" he asked.

"Ten dollars a day on Caesar's Moon. Fifteen on New Arcady or Von Neumann Two. Twenty-five on Jordan's."

Asa raised his eyebrows.

"Why such a difference? Everyone knows about muck men living in the mud while they hunt Slider eggs. But don't your conversions make the changeling comfortable in his new environment?"

"Sure they do," said the doctor. "We can make you think mud feels better than chinchilla fur and we can have you jumping like a grasshopper despite the double gravity. But we can't make you like the sight of yourself. And we can't guarantee that a Slider won't kill you."

"Still," Asa mused aloud, "it would mean a nice bankroll waiting at the end of the year."

He leaned forward to fill in the necessary form.

Since it was cheaper to transport a normal human than to rig special environments in a spaceship, every planet operated its own conversion chambers. On the space freighter that carried him from Earth Asa Graybar was confined to a small cabin that was opened only for a guard to bring meals and take out dirty dishes. He was still a prisoner.

Sometimes he could hear voices in the passageway outside, and once one of them sounded like a woman's. But since women neither served on spaceships nor worked in the dome settlements on harsher worlds, he decided it was his imagination. He might have been dead cargo for all he learned about space travel.

Nevertheless his time was not wasted. He had as a companion, or cellmate, another convict who had elected conversion to muck man. More important, his companion had done time on Jordan's Planet before and had wanted to return.

"It's the Slider eggs," explained Kershaw, the two-time loser. "The ones you see on Earth knock your eyes out, but they've already begun to die. There's nothing like a fresh one. And I'm not the first to go crazy over them. When I was reconverted and got home I had nine thousand dollars waiting for me. That'll buy a two-year-old egg that flashes maybe four times a day. So I stole a new one and got caught."

Asa had held a Slider egg in his hand as he gazed into it. He could understand. The shell was clear as crystal, taut but elastic, while the albumen was just as clear around the sparkling network of organic filaments that served as a yolk. Along these interior threads played tiny flashes of lightning, part of some unexplained process of life. Electrical instruments picked up static discharges from the egg, but the phenomenon remained a mystery.

Hardly anyone faced with the beauty of a Slider's egg bothered to question its workings. For a few expectant moments there would be only random, fitful gleamings, and then there would be a wild coruscation of light, dancing from one filament to the next in a frenzy of brilliance.

It took about four years for a Slider egg to die. Beauty, rarity and fading value made the eggs a luxury item like nothing the world had ever seen. If Asa had found a means of keeping them alive it would have made him wealthy at the expense of the Hazeltyne monopoly.

"You know what I think?" Kershaw asked. "I think those flashes are the egg calling its momma. They sparkle like a million diamonds when you scoop one out of the muck, and right away a Slider always comes swooping out of nowhere at you."

"I've been meaning to ask you," Asa said. "How do you handle the Sliders?"

Kershaw grinned.

"First you try to catch it with a rocket. If you miss you start leaping for home. All this time you're broadcasting for help, you understand. When the Slider catches you, you leap up while it buries its jaws in the mud where you were just standing. You dig your claws in its back and hang on while it rolls around in the mud. Finally, if the 'copter comes--and if they don't shoot off your head by mistake--you live to tell the tale."

II

Asa Graybar kept his normal form on Jordan's Planet just long enough to learn the discomfort of double gravity. He was told he needed another physical examination and was taken right in to a doctor. His heart was pounding to keep his blood circulating on this massive world, but the doctor had apparently learned to make allowances.

"Swallow this," said the doctor after making a series of tests.

Asa swallowed the capsule. Two minutes later he felt himself beginning to lose consciousness.

"This is it!" he thought in panic.

He felt someone ease him back down onto a wheeled stretcher. Before consciousness faded completely he realized that no one got a chance to back out of becoming a changeling, that he was on his way to the conversion tank right now.

When he finally awoke he felt well rested and very comfortable. But for a long time he was afraid to open his eyes.

"Come on, Graybar," said a deep, booming voice. "Let's test our wings."

It was not Kershaw's voice, but it had to be Kershaw. Asa opened his eyes.

Everyone had seen pictures of muck men. It was different having one stand beside you. Kershaw looked much like an enormous frog except that his head was still mostly human. He was sitting on webbed feet, his lower legs bent double under huge thighs, and his trunk tilted forward so that his arms dangled to the ground. The arms were as thick around as an ordinary man's legs. The hands had become efficient scoops, with broad fingers webbed to the first joint and tipped with spade-like claws. The skin was still pinkish but had become scaly. Not a thread of hair showed anywhere on the body, not even on the head.

This, Asa realized, was what he looked like himself.

It would have been more bearable if the head had not retained strong traces of humanity. The nostrils flared wide and the jaws hardly emerged from the neck, but the ears were human ears and the eyes, under those horny ridges, were human eyes. Asa felt sure that the eyes could still weep.

He started to walk forward and tipped over on his side. Kershaw laughed.

"Come to daddy, babykins," Kershaw said, holding out his hands. "Only try hopping this time. And take it easy."

Asa pushed himself upright with one arm and tried a small hop. Nerve and muscle coordination was perfect. He found himself leaping as high as Kershaw's head.

"That's the way," Kershaw said approvingly. "Now get this on and we'll go outside."

Asa snapped on a belt and breech cloth combination that had flaps of fabric dangling from the belt in front and behind. He followed as Kershaw pushed open a sliding door to lead the way out of the room where they had been left to revive from conversion.

They went into a courtyard partly covered by a roof projecting from the Hazeltyne company's dome settlement. The far half of the courtyard was open to the gray drizzle that fell almost ceaselessly from the sky of Jordan's Planet and turned most of its surface into marsh and mud flats. A high wall enclosed the far portion of the courtyard. Ranged along the wall were thirty stalls for muck men.

From fifty yards across the courtyard a muck man bounded over to them in two leaps. Attached to a harness across his shoulders and chest were a gun and a long knife.

"Names?" he growled. He was a foot taller than Graybar and big everywhere in proportion.

"Kershaw. I'm back, Furston."

"I'm Graybar."

"Kershaw again? Just start in where you left off, sucker. Come on, you." He pointed to Asa and leaped to the open portion of the courtyard.

"Do what he says," Kershaw whispered to Graybar. "He's sort of a trusty and warden and parole officer rolled into one."

Asa was put through a series of exercises to get him used to his distorted body, to teach him how to leap and how to dig. He was shown how to operate the radio he would carry and how to fire the pencil-slim rockets of this gun. Finally he was told to eat a few berries from a native vine. He did so and immediately vomited.

Furston laughed.

"That's to remind you you're still a man," Furston said, grinning. "Everything that grows on this planet is poison. So if you got any ideas of hiding out till your term is up, forget 'em. Right here is where you eat."

Asa turned without a word and hopped feebly away from Furston. He lifted his head to breathe deeply and saw two humans watching him from an observation tower on the roof.

He leaped twenty feet into the air for a closer look.

Gazing at him with repugnance, after witnessing the end of his session with Furston, were Harriet Hazeltyne and general manager Tom Dorr.

The girl's presence merely puzzled Asa, but Dorr's being here worried him. Dorr had tried to get rid of him once and was now in an excellent position to make the riddance permanent.

At supper that night, squatting on the ground beside a low table with the dozen other muck men operating from the dome, Asa asked what the two were doing out here.

"The girl will inherit this racket some day, won't she?" asked one of the others. "She wants to see what kind of suckers are making her rich."

"Maybe that guy Dorr brought her along to show her what a big wheel he is," said one of the others. "Just hope he doesn't take over the operations."

III

Next morning Furston passed out guns, knives, radios, and pouches to carry any eggs the muck men found. He gave each man a compass and assigned the sectors to be worked during the day. Finally he called Graybar aside.

"In case you don't like it here," Furston said, "you can get a week knocked off your sentence for every egg you bring in. Now get out there and work that muck."

Furston sent Graybar and Kershaw out together so that the veteran could show Asa the ropes. Asa had already learned that the wall around the courtyard was to keep Sliders out, not muck men in. He leaped over it and hopped along after Kershaw.

Feet slapping against the mud, they went about five miles from the Hazeltyne station, swimming easily across ponds too broad to jump. The mud, if not precisely as pleasant to the touch as chinchilla fur, was not at all uncomfortable, and the dripping air caressed their skins like a summer breeze back on Earth. Tiny, slippery creatures skidded and splashed out of their way. Finally Kershaw stopped. His experienced eye had seen a trail of swamp weeds crushed low into the mud.

"Keep your eyes open," Kershaw said. "There's a Slider been around here lately. If you see something like an express train headed our way, start shooting."

At each leap along the trail they peered quickly around. They saw no Sliders, but this meant little, for the beasts lived under the mud as much as on top of it.

Kershaw halted again when they came to a roughly circular area some ten yards in diameter where the weeds had been torn out and lay rotting in the muck.

"We're in luck," he said as Asa skidded to a stop at his side. "An egg was laid somewhere here within the last week. These places are hard to spot when the new weeds start growing."

Kershaw took a long look around.

"No trouble in sight. We dig."

They started at the center of the cleared area, shoveling up great gobs of mud with their hands and flinging them out of the clearing. Usually a muck man dug in a spiral out from the center, but Graybar and Kershaw dug in gradually widening semi-circles opposite each other. They had to dig four feet deep, and it was slow going until they had a pit big enough to stand in. Each handful of mud had to be squeezed gently before it was thrown away, to make sure it didn't conceal an egg. As he worked, Asa kept thinking what an inefficient system it was. Everything about the operation was wrong.

"Got it!" Kershaw shouted. He leaped out of the pit and started wiping slime off a round object the size of a baseball. Asa jumped out to watch.

"A big one," Kershaw said. He held it, still smeared with traces of mud, lovingly to his cheek, and then lifted it to eye level. "Just look at it."

The egg was flashing with a mad radiance, like a thousand diamonds being splintered under a brilliant sun. Static crackled in Asa's earphones and he thought of what Kershaw had said, that the scintillation of an egg was an effect of its calls to a mother Slider for help. Asa looked around.

"Jump!" he shouted.

At the edge of the clearing a segmented length of greenish black scales, some two feet thick and six feet high, had reared up out of the weeds. The top segment was almost all mouth, already opened to show row upon row of teeth. Before Asa could draw his gun the Slider lowered its head to the ground, dug two front flippers into the mud and shot forward.

Asa leaped with all his strength, sailing far out of the clearing. While he was still in the air he snapped the mouthpiece of his radio down from where it was hinged over his head. As he landed he turned instantly, his gun in his hand.

"Calling the 'copter!" he spoke rapidly into the mouthpiece. "Kershaw and Graybar, sector eight, five miles out. Hurry!"

"Graybar?" asked a voice in his earphone. "What's up?"

"We've got an egg but a Slider wants it back."

"On the way."

Asa hopped back to the clearing. Kershaw must have been bowled over by the Slider's first rush, for he was trying to hop on one leg as if the other had been broken. The egg lay flickering on top of the mud where Kershaw had dropped it. The Slider, eight flippers on each side working madly, was twisting its thirty feet of wormlike body around for another charge.

Aiming hastily, Asa fired a rocket at the monster's middle segment. The rocket smashed through hard scales and exploded in a fountain of gray flesh. The Slider writhed, coating its wound in mud, and twisted toward Asa. He leaped to one side, firing from the air and missing, and saw the Slider turn toward the patch of weeds where he would land. His legs were tensed to leap again the moment he hit the mud, but he saw the Slider would be on top of him before he could escape. As he landed he thrust his gun forward almost into the mouth of the creature and fired again.

Even as he was knocked aside into the muck, Asa's body was showered with shreds of alien flesh scattered by the rocket's explosion. Desperately pushing himself to his feet, he saw the long headless body shiver and lie still.

Asa took a deep breath and looked around.

"Kershaw!" he called. "Where are you?"

"Over here." Kershaw stood briefly above the weeds and fell back again. Asa leaped over to him.

"Thanks," Kershaw said. "Muck men stick together. You'll make a good one. I wouldn't have had a chance. My leg's busted."

"The helicopter ought to be here pretty soon," Asa said. He looked over at the dead Slider and shook his head. "Tell me, what are the odds on getting killed doing this?"

"Last time I was here there was about one mucker killed for every six eggs brought out. Of course you're not supposed to stand there admiring the eggs like I did while a Slider comes up on you."

Asa hopped over to the egg, which was still full of a dancing radiance where it rested on the mud. He scooped a hole in the muck and buried the egg.

"Just in case there are any more Sliders around," he explained.

"Makes no difference," said Kershaw, pointing upward. "Here comes the 'copter, late as usual."

The big machine circled them, hovered to inspect the dead Slider, and settled down on broad skids. Through the transparent nose Asa could see Tom Dorr and Harriet Hazeltyne. The company manager swung the door open and leaned out.

"I see you took care of the Slider," he said. "Hand over the egg."

"Kershaw has a broken leg," Asa said. "I'll help him in and then I'll get the egg."

While Kershaw grabbed the door frame to help pull himself into the helicopter, Asa got under his companion's belly and lifted him by the waist. He hadn't realized before just how strong his new body was. Kershaw, as a muck man, would have weighed close to three hundred pounds on Earth, close to six hundred here.

Dorr made no move to help, but the girl reached under Kershaw's shoulder and strained to get him in. Once he was inside, Asa saw, the cabin was crowded.

"Are you going to have room for me too?" he asked.

"Not this trip," Dorr answered. "Now give me the egg."

Asa didn't hesitate. "The egg stays with me," he said softly.

"You do what I tell you, mucker," said Dorr.

"Nope. I want to make sure you come back." Asa turned his head to Harriet. "You see, Miss Hazeltyne, I don't trust your friend. You might ask him to tell you about it."

Dorr stared at him with narrowed eyes. Suddenly he smiled in a way that worried Asa.

"Whatever you say, Graybar," Dorr said. He turned to the controls. In another minute the helicopter was in the sky.

A round trip for the helicopter should have taken no more than twenty minutes, allowing time for Kershaw to be taken out at the settlement.

After an hour passed Asa began to worry. He was sure Dorr would return for the egg. Finally he realized that Dorr could locate the egg approximately by the body of the dead Slider. Dorr could return for the egg any time with some other muck man to dig for it.

Asa pulled down the mouthpiece of his radio.

"This is Graybar, calling the helicopter," he said. "When are you coming?"

There was no answer except the hum of carrier wave.

If he tried to carry the egg back, Asa knew, Sliders would attack him all along the way. A man had no chance of getting five miles with an egg by himself. He could leave the egg here, of course. Even so he would be lucky if he got back, following a hazy compass course from which he and Kershaw had certainly deviated on their outward trip. There were no landmarks in this wilderness of bog to help him find his way. The workers were supposed to home in on radio signals, if they lost their bearings, but Dorr would deny him that help.

What was the night like on Jordan's Planet? Maybe Sliders slept at night. If he could stay awake, and if he didn't faint from hunger in this strange new body, and if the Sliders left him alone....

A whirring noise made Asa jump in alarm.

Then he smiled in relief, for it was the helicopter, the blessed helicopter, coming in over the swamp. But what if it was Dorr, coming back alone to dispose of him without any witnesses? Asa leaped for the carcass of the dead Slider and took shelter behind it.

No machine-gun blast of rockets came from the helicopter. The big machine swooped low dizzily, tilted back in an inexpert attempt to hover, thumped down upon the mud and slid forward. As Asa jumped aside, the landing skids caught against the Slider's body and the helicopter flipped forward on its nose, one of the rotor blades plunging deep into the mud.

Asa leaped forward in consternation. Not only was his chance of safe passage back to the settlement wrecked, but now he would have the extra burden of taking care of the pilot. When he reached the nose of the helicopter he saw that the pilot, untangling herself from the controls to get up, was Harriet Hazeltyne.

IV