The Other Foot

  Two creatures, two vastly

  different worlds—bound

  together by a fatal tie

  A scientific experiment went wrong and Martin Naumchik—newspaper reporter, cosmopolite, dashing adventurer—found himself inhabiting the body of a scaly green biped from Brecht’s Planet, kept as a curiosity in a zoo cage.

  The biped inherited Martin’s body, his girlfriends, his reputation, his freedom—but not his knowledge of the world. Even the question of how to get food was baffling.

  The first problem was one of simple survival of two creatures trapped in alien worlds. The second problem was more difficult: how to reverse the process of transformation and shed these hated new identities.

  THE

  OTHER

  FOOT

  Damon Knight

  MB

  A MACFADDEN-BARTELL BOOK

  A Macaffaden Book . . . . . . . . 1971

  This is the complete text

  of the hardcover edition.

  Macfadden-Bartell Corporation

  A subsidiary of Bartell Media Corporation

  205 East 42nd Street, New York, New York 10017

  Copyright, ©, Damon Knight 1965. Published by arrangement with the author.

  Printed in the U. S. A.

  A shorter version of this novel appeared in Galaxy, April 1963, under the title Mind Switch. Copyright, ©, 1963, by Galaxy Publishing Corp.

  I

  As the Flugbahn car began to slide away from the landing platform, the biped Fritz clutched the arms of his seat and looked nervously down through the transparent wall.

  He was unused to travel. Except for the trip by spaceship to Earth, which he hardly remembered, he had lived all his life in the Hamburg Zoo. Now, although he was sure the suspended car would not fall, being so high, and surrounded by nothing but glass, it made him want to grip something for security.

  In the seat beside him, his keeper, a stupid man named Alleks, was unfolding the crisp parchment sheets of the Berliner Zeltung. The breath whirled in his hairy nostrils as he gazed cow-eyed at the headlines. Down the aisle, the other passengers were all staring at Fritz; but, being used to this, the biped hardly noticed it.

  Below, Berlin was spread out in the morning sun like a richly faded quilt. Looking back, as the car began to fall with increasing speed, Fritz could see the high platform where the Hamburg rocket-copter had landed, and the long spidery cables of the other Flugbahnen radiating outward to the four quarters of the city.

  The car swooped, rose, checked at a station platform. The doors opened and closed again, then they were falling once more. At the second stop, Alleks folded his paper and got up. ‘Come,’ he said.

  Fritz followed him on to the platform, then into an elevator that dropped, in a dizzying fashion, through a transparent spiral tube, down, down and down, while the sunlit streets flowed massively upward. They got off into a bewildering crowd and a sharp chemical odour. Alleks, with a firm grip on the biped’s arm, propelled him down the street, through a high open doorway, then into another elevator and finally into an office full of people.

  ‘My dear young sir,’ said a red-faced fat man, advancing jovially, ‘come in. Allow me to introduce myself, I am Herr Doktor Grück. And you are our new biped? Welcome, welcome!’ He took the biped’s threefingered hand and shook it warmly, showing no distaste at the fact it was covered with soft, feathery-feeling spines.

  Other people were crowding around, some aiming cameras. ‘Sign,’ said Alleks, holding out a dog-eared notebook.

  Dr. Grück took the notebook absently, scribbled, handed it back. Alleks turned indifferently and was gone. ‘Gentlemen and ladies,’ said Grück in a rich tenor, ‘I have the honour to introduce to you our newest acquisition, Fritz—our second Brecht Biped—and you see that he is a male!’

  The biped darted nervous glances around the oak-panelled room, at the whirring cameras, the bookshelves, the massive chandelier, the people with their naked pink faces. His body was slight and supple, like that of a cat or a rooster. The greyish-green, cactus-like spines covered him all over, except for the pinkish sacs that swung between his thighs. His odd-shaped head was neither human, feline nor avian, but something like all three. Above the eyes, in the middle of his wide sloping forehead, was a round wrinkled organ of a dusty red-purple colour, vaguely suggestive erf a cock’s-comb, in shape more like a withered fruit.

  ‘A word for the newscast!’ called some of the people with cameras.

  Obediently, as he had been taught, the biped recited, ‘How do you do, gentlemen and ladies? Fritz, the biped, at your service. I am happy to be here and I hope you will come to see me often at the Berlin Zoo.’ He finished with a little bow.

  Three white-smocked men stepped forward; the first bowed, took the biped’s hand. ‘Wenzl, head keeper.’ He was bony and pale, with a thin straight mouth. The next man advanced, bowed, shook hands. ‘Rausch, dietician.’ He was blonder and ruddier than Grück, with eyelashes almost white in a round, serious face. The third: ‘Prinzmetal, veterinary surgeon.’ He was dark and had sunken cheeks.

  Dr. Grück beamed, his red face as stretched and shiny as if cooked in oil. His round skull was almost bald, but the blond hair, cut rather long, still curled crisply above the ears. His little blue eyes gleamed behind the rimless glasses. His body, round and firm as a rubber ball under the wide brown waistcoat and the gold watch chain, radiated joy. ‘What a specimen!’ he said, taking the biped’s jaw in one hand to open the mouth. ‘See the dentition!’ The biped’s ‘teeth’ were two solid pieces of cartilaginous tissue, with chisel-shaped cutting edges. He broke free nervously after a moment, clacking his wide jaws and shaking his head.

  ‘Halt, Fritz!’ said Grück, seizing him to turn him around. ‘See the musculature—perfect! The integument! The colour! Never, I promise you, even on Brecht’s Planet, would you find such a biped. And he is already sexually mature,’ said Grück, probing with his fat hand between Fritz’s legs. ‘Perfect! You would like to meet a female biped, would you not, Fritz?’

  The biped blinked and said haltingly, ‘My mother was a female biped, honoured sir.’

  ‘Ha, ha!’ said Grück, full of good humour. ‘So she was! Correct, Fritz!’ Rausch smiled; Prinzmetal smiled; even Wenzl almost smiled. ‘Come then, first we will show you your quarters, and afterwards—perhaps a surprise!’ Picking up his shiny new valise, the biped followed Grück and the others out of the office, along a high, glass-walled corridor that overlooked the grounds with their scattered cages. People walking on the gravel paths looked up and began to point excitedly. Grück, in the lead, bowed and waved benignly down to them

  Inside, they emerged in an empty hall. Wenzl produced a magnetic key to open a heavy door with a small pane of wired glass set into it. Inside, they found themselves in a small but conveniently arranged room, with walls and floor of distempered concrete, a couch which could be used for sitting or sleeping, a chair and tabic, NOIIIO utensils, a washbowl and toilet. ‘Here is the bedroom,’ said Dr. Grück with a sweeping gesture. ‘And here—’ he led the way through a doorless opening—‘your personal living room.’ The outer wall was of glass, through which, behind an iron railing, they saw a crowd of people. The room was larger and more nicely furnished than the one inside. The floor was tiled and polished. The walls were painted. There was a comfortable relaxing chair, a television, a little table with some magazines and newspapers on it, a large potted plant, even a shelf full of books.

  ‘And now for the surprise!’ cried Dr. Grück. Brushing the others aside, he led the way again through the bedroom, to another doorless opening in the far wall. The room beyond was much larger, with a concrete floor on which, however, some rubber mats had been laid, and two desks with business machines, filing c
abinets, wire baskets, telephones, a pencil sharpener, a pneumatic conveyor and piles of documents.

  Across the room, beside one of the filing cabinets which had an open drawer, someone turned and looked at them in surprise. It was another biped, smaller and more faintly coloured than Fritz. Of the other differences, the most notable was the organ in the middle of her forehead, which, unlike Fritz’s, was developed into a large, egg-shaped red-purple ball or knob. ‘Now the surprise!’ cried Dr Grück. ‘Fritz, here stands Emma, your little wife!’

  With a faint shriek, the other biped clapped her hands over her head and scurried out of the room, leaving a storm of dropped papers to settle behind her.

  Eight hundred kilometres to the south, in a cellar room of the Prague Institute Extension at Prdszto, Dr Egon Klementi gestured with a muscular, black-furred arm. ‘There I was, out beyond the surf in my little powered outrigger,’ he said. ‘The cockpit was just big enough for me, my Kanaka, and this infernal dog of my sister’s. A beautiful bright day, offshore breeze—perfect Here sits the Kanaka, here the dog, here me. Well, my Kanaka leans out—so—’ Klementi peered, shading his eyes with his hand. ‘—And he says, “Fish here, sir.” How the devil he can see them under the water! But, anyhow, my hook is baited—I swing my rod back, so—I make one cast, and splash!’ He paused dramatically. The Dane, Behrens, was smiling faintly, propped against the wall beside the control board, his heavy head nodding on his chest. Little Lewine, the Krupp-Farben man, was gnawing the ends of his ragged black moustache. Heinz Ek, the observer from Euratom, had folded his arms across his skinny chest and seemed half-asleep.

  ‘A fish?’ Klementi demanded. ‘Not at all! Nothing like it! It was that damned dog—out of the boat like a shot as soon as my plug hit the water. Can you believe it, I had to reel in as fast as I could, or he would have eaten it like a herring!’

  Klementi bellowed with laughter. ‘There went my day’s fishing. We had to take the dog all the way in to shore and deliver him to my sister, and, by that time, of course, it was too late to go out again.’ Klementi grinned, stuck a long black cigar between his teeth and lighted it. ‘You don’t fish yourself, Herr Ek?’

  ‘I? No, no,’ said the thin grey-faced man, waving feebly at the clouds of smoke that drifted toward him.

  ‘You should—you really should. There’s nothing like it—the sun—the air—’

  One of the perspiring white-jacketed young men in the room brushed past Klementi. ‘Pardon, Herr Professor.’ He plugged the leads of the instrument he carried into the control panel, read the dials, made a notation on a clipboard.

  ‘Are they almost ready?’ Lewine asked for the fifth time, glancing at his thumbwatch.

  ‘Patience, patience—you see how calm Behrens here is. That’s why you should fish, to develop your patience.’ Klementi puffed strongly on the cigar. In spite of the air conditioning, the crowded room was already hazy with smoke, but Klementi appeared not to notice it. ‘It’s tiresome to check every circuit over and over, I admit, but in research you have to get used to waiting. Better that than for all of us to go boom.’

  Lewine started visibly. ‘Boom?’ he repeated.

  Behrens roused himself. ‘There’s no danger,’ he said, patting Lewine kindly on the shoulder. ‘Klementi, stop alarming our Mend. Don’t worry, Herr Lewine, it won’t go boom.’

  ‘Quite right,’ Klementi said, biting his cigar in annoyance. ‘The converter is a standard model, die one they use here for demonstrations, in fact—there’s only a millionth of a gram of sodium in it—Hi, Rakosil’ He turned, gesturing at one of the white-jacketed undergraduates.

  ‘Herr Professor?*

  ‘Have you found the trouble with the fail-safe?’

  ‘Horvath is wiring in a new one—we’re almost ready to test it, Herr Professor.’

  ‘All right, good, good.’ Klementi turned back, took the cigar out of his mouth in an expansive gesture, and seemed about to speak.

  ‘But if it’s a standard model, why have you got it in an evacuated building half a mile away, with us all the way over here?’ Lewine demanded. His lips were white, and there was a sheen of perspiration on his pale forehead.

  ‘Tut,’ said Klementi, frowning, ‘a millionth of a gram, even with total conversion, is only enough for a small boom. In any event, it isn’t going to explode—some schnapps—haven’t you got some schnapps, Behrens?'

  Two of the white-jacketed young men, hurrying in different directions, collided in the middle of the room and went on with muttered curses. A television monitor flickered into life over the control panel, showing a view of another crowded room in which still other young men were at work. The dominant feature of the room was a machine in a scarred steel casing, mounted on a block of concrete and surrounded by clusters of instruments and cables.

  ‘The fact is,’ said the huge Dane, straightening slowly, ‘I do have a bottle put away. I was saving it for a celebration, but—’ He leaned over Lewine’s head, reaching a long arm for the door of a cabinet beyond him.

  ‘No, no—’ said Lewine testily. Tm all right, thanks just the same.’

  ‘You see, Herr Lewine,’ Klementi said, moving closer, *the idea is really beautifully simple, even if I myself say so. The converter is enclosed in a Hirsch-Revere field generator, that is, a device that generates a so-called suppressor field. . . .’

  ‘So it can’t explode,’ said Lewine, nodding wearily. ‘I understand, but—’

  ‘Ha! yes, so it can’t explode, if we should turn on the suppressor field first, or simultaneously. But!’ said Klementi, ‘what do we do? We begin the conversion process—energy is released—’

  ‘Boom,’ muttered Lewine.

  ‘No! By no means! No boom! Because before the wavefront can reach the wall of the chamber, eighty-five centimetres away, our microswitch turns on the suppressor field! Now—this energy cannot exist in any form of heat or radiation, correct?’

  ‘Correct,’ said Lewine. He blinked stolidly at Klementi.

  ‘Because of the suppressor field. But energy is conserved—it can’t just disappear, correct?—it must reappear in some form!’

  Ek, the Euratom man, put in, ‘And your contention is, Herr Professor, that the only form it can take is that of time energy.’

  ‘Exactly so,’ said Klementi. Beaming, he put his cigar back in his mouth.

  ‘And your calculations support this, Herr Behrens,’ said Ek, turning to the Dane. Behrens nodded and smiled.

  ‘I still don’t see what practical applications it could have,’ said Lewine to himself ‘Even if—’ He looked at his thumbwatch again, then at the large chronometer on the control panel.

  ‘Quite interesting,’ Ek was saying. Klementi had turned away abruptly and was holding a low-voiced conversation with one of the undergraduates. Ek moved closer to Behrens. ‘I can’t presume to follow your mathematics myself, naturally, Herr Professor, but I took the liberty of showing them to a friend of mine at the University of Berlin—Klaus Ifshin, perhaps you know his name?’

  ‘Ifshin, yes,’ said Behrens, nodding his massive head, but without smiling.

  ‘ . . . And he seemed to think, Herr Professor, that you had neglected the Einsteinian field equations—that even if it were possible to convert other forms of energy into additional quanta of time. . .

  ‘I know what you are saying,’ Behrens interrupted, wagging his head. ‘There would be dislocations throughout the continuum, because the relationship between the spacetime and mass of the universe would be upset, and so on . . . Believe me, Herr Ek, that is all exploded. No one uses the Einstein field equations any more. Yes, yes, your friend Herr Doktor Ifshin is a good man, but his physics are fifty years out of date. I say no more.’ Behrens raised one hand in a sign of peace; the flat palm looked capable of annihilating a hundred Tfshins at a single blow.

  “Check,’ one of the white-coated young men was calling. ‘Check . . . check . . . check.’ In the television screen, another young man was apparently reading of
f a list from a clipboard, but the sound was not turned on, and they could only see his lips moving.

  ‘Check,’ said the young man once more, and stopped. He turned to Klementi. ‘Ready, Herr Professorl’ In the screen, after a moment, the crowd of undergraduates began to mill around and then to grow thinner: they were leaving the apparatus room.

  ‘Behrens, one word,’ said Klementi, beckoning. The Dane, with a last kindly nod for Lewine, went to join him. Lewine and Ek glanced at each other.

  ‘Are all Hungarians crazy?’ Lewine muttered.

  Ek smiled faintly and raised his eyebrows.

  ‘In my opinion,’ Lewine said, ‘the whole thing is a boondoggle.’ He folded his arms. His face had again turned pale, and his forehead was sweaty.

  In a few minutes there was a clatter of bicycles in the corridor outside, and the young men from the apparatus room began to pour through the doorway. They were bright-eyed and exuberant, calling back and forth to each other in loud voices. The room became more impossibly crowded than ever.

  ‘Gentlemen, if you pleasel’ called Klementi, raising his arms. His eyes jittered and there was a flush on his cheekbones. Even on Behrens’ monumental face there was a look of boyish excitement.

  The noise died away slowly; someone made a joke, and

  there was a burst of nervous laughter, then silence. Klementi and Behrens made their way over to the control panel, where there was barely enough room for them to stand.

  ‘Now, gentlemen,’ Klementi said, turning to Ek and Lewine, ‘everything has been checked, the apparatus is ready, all that remains is for me to press two buttons, and the experiment will begin; it will also be over, in the same four-hundred-millionth of a second. Before I press these buttons, allow me to express my gratitude to all those here, who have worked so willingly—even if sometimes not without swear-words!’ There was another burst of laughter. ‘—And to you gentlemen of Euratom and Krupp-Farben, for your valuable assistance with equipment and facilities.’