The Edgar Pangborn Megapack Page 4

  “I’ll try it.”

  “Oh, but not with that thing—”

  “He didn’t seem to mind us. I’ll stay near the door.” He knew Dorothy would come with him. Feeling earth under legs that had nearly forgotten it, he turned to help her down; her dark eyes played diamond games with the moon-light.

  It could have been a night anywhere in the Galaxy, up there beyond torn branches, stars, and red moon in a vagueness of cloud. Blue fireflies …

  But there was a child wailing somewhere. Far-off and weak, a dim rise and fall of sound, grief and remoteness. A waterfall? Wind in upper branches? But they were still, and the sound carried the timbre of animal life. Dorothy murmured, “It’s been crying that way ever since moon-rise.” She came closely into his arms.

  “I can read one thing inside of you—you’re not scared.”

  “I’m not, Paul?”

  “No.”

  “But don’t ever leave me—Adam.”

  3

  This was dawn: vision out of the dark: ripples of music coalescent in one forest voice moving toward a crescendo of daytime.

  Paul watched a spreading of color in the leaves, a shift from black to gray to a loveliness more green than red; the trees were massively old, with varied bark of green or purple-brown. Phantoms in the more distant shadows could be understood now that light was advancing: they were thick trees with a white bark like that of the never-forgotten birches of New Hampshire. Underfoot Paul felt a humus that might have been a thousand years in growing; he prodded it with his knife—a white worm curled in mimic death.

  Everywhere purple-leaved vines, vastly proliferating, climbed in a riot of greed for the sunlight of the forest ceiling. Paul sensed a mute cruelty in them, a shoving lust of growth. It might have been these, elastically yielding, that had saved the lifeboat from total ruin.

  Overnight the gravity of Lucifer had become natural. His close-knit body accepted and relished it, finding a new pleasure in strength: thirty-seven years old and very young.

  One tiny voice was near, persistent. Paul walked around the boat, where Dorothy and Wright still slept. The starboard wing, parting from the lifeboat, had gashed a tree trunk, littering the ground with branches. The source of the voice was a brown lump, twenty feet up, clinging head downward, a body small as a sparrow’s, wings folded like a bat’s. As he watched they spread, quivered, and relaxed. Head and ears were mousy, the neck long, with a hump at its base. The throat pulsed at each cry. Near Paul’s foot lay a fabric like an oriole’s nest, fastened to a twig that had been torn from the tree. Three young had tumbled out. One was not mangled but all were dead, hairless, poignantly ugly. “Sorry, baby—our first act on Lucifer.” The parent creature made another abortive motion as Paul took up the young.

  Its high lament was not what he and Dorothy had heard in the night. That had been continuing when he slipped out to watch for dawn, and it had ended at some unnoticed moment—profoundly different, surely far off.…

  He tried to study the dead things as Sears Oliphant would want to do. Two were hopelessly torn; he dug a hole in the humus and dropped those in, smoothing the surface, wondering at his need for an act which could mean nothing to the unhappy morsel of perception on the tree trunk. The third, and the nest, he carried around the boat where the light was better.

  All seven digits of the forelimb spread into a membranous wing; the hind leg divided at the ankle, three toes anchoring the wing, the other four fused into a slim foot which had suction pads. He cradled the bit of mortality in his palm, recalling a thing Wright had said when they entered the lifeboat. Captain Jensen, waiting for take-off at the spaceport, trying, as he drank sherry with Christopher Wright, to look at the venture under the aspect of eternity, had said he liked the philosophical implications of Argo’s converter, into which his own body was strangely soon to pass. What was Wright’s comment eleven years later? “All life is cannibalism, benign or not: we are still eating the dinosaurs.” There had been more, which Paul could not remember. So, man drove eleven years through space and killed three babies. But there was no element of malevolence.…

  Perhaps there was none in most of man’s actions over the millennia.

  Wright crawled out, stiff-limbed and unrested.

  “’Morning, Doc. Let me introduce Enigma Luciferensis.”

  “‘Luciferensis’ won’t do.” Wright peered down. “Everything is ‘Luciferensis,’ including the posterity Dot mentioned. Well now, what—”

  “A nestling. Our crash broke the nest and killed the young.”

  Wright fingered the fabric. “Beautiful. Leaves gummed together with some secretion.” With a doctor’s intentness he added: “How d’you feel?”

  “Good.”

  A shadow circled Paul, settled on his arm, hobbling toward his palm and what it held. He felt the suction cups; with a careful mouth the creature took up its dead and flew away. “I’ve been remembering something you said: life eating life—without too much concern for the second law of thermodynamics. Forgive us our trespasses … Good morning, lady.”

  “What did I miss?” Dorothy had glimpsed the departure.

  “Lucifer’s idea of a bat. I think that big flying thing I saw from the lifeboat was shaped like this midget. Haven’t seen any birds.”

  Dorothy hugged his arm. “Not even one measly robin?”

  “Sorry, Whifflepuff—fresh out of robins.”

  Wright blinked at his compass. “Meadow that way.” Paul was inattentive, needing the warm quiet of the woman beside him. Wright added: “First, breakfast.” He broke the seal of a ration package and snarled. “Thirty days, I b’lieve you said. Antique garbage—dehydrated hay.”

  Dorothy said, “You’re nicest when you’re mad, Doc. We’ll soon have to try the local stuff, I suppose.”

  “Uh-huh. But no guinea-pig work for you or Ann.”

  She was startled. “Why not? I can digest boilerplate.”

  “Two women on Lucifer: valuable livestock.” Wright smiled with his mouth full. “I’m boss, remember? For guinea-pig work, the men draw lots.”

  She was grave. “I won’t argue. It so happens—” She peeked into the nest. “Poor little fuzzies lined it with fur. Their own, I’ll bet.”

  “It so happens what, dear?”

  “Ah … This eleven-year-old gookum claims to be coffee. Can we make a fire? Looks like dead wood over there.”

  The branches burned aromatically; the morning was growing into deep warmth, but still with freshness. Wright said, “Coffee my shirt.”

  Dorothy tasted it. “Brr…! I was about to say when I interrupted myself, it so happens I’m six or seven weeks pregnant, I think.”

  “Six—” Wright set his aluminum cup carefully upside down. Paul mumbled, “That’s what’s been on your mind.”

  Behind her eyes he glimpsed the primitive thing, deeper than thought, not like a part of her but a force that sustained her, himself, all others: the three billion of Earth, the small grieving spirit now flown away into the trees. “Yes, Adam. I would have told you sooner, but we all had a lot on our minds.”

  “Even before we got in orbit, you saw us settling—staying—”

  Dorothy grinned then. “No-o, Paul. I just wanted the baby. Could have been born on the ship. The Federation said no, but.…”

  Gradually Paul began to realize it. “But you said yes.”

  She leaned to him, no longer smiling. “I said yes.…”

  The forest floor hushed footsteps; some coolness lingered. Paul walked in front, then Dorothy, and Wright marked blazes on the tree trunks. Paul glanced backward often, to capture the receding patterns. At the third such pause the lifeboat was no longer visible—only a sameness of trees and sparse young life groping through shadow for the food of the sun. In this depth of forest there was no brush; the g
oing was easy except for the nuisance of purple vines that sometimes looped from tree to tree. Paul searched for any change of light ahead.

  The boat held all but what they wore, the two rifles, the three pistols holstered at their hips, the three knives, three sealed ration packages. Damage had prevented locking the door of the boat: to rob, an inhabitant of Lucifer would need only intelligence enough to solve the sliding mechanism. They had seen no life but that huge nocturnal leaf eater, the small fliers, a white worm, and now a few timid ten-legged scuttlers on the warm ground and midge-like specks dancing in shafts of sunlight. Too quietly, Wright said, “Stop.”

  Paul raised his rifle as he turned. Only untroubled forest. Wright’s warning hand lowered. “Almost saw it. Heard nothing, just felt a—watching. Might be in my head. Let’s go on. And don’t hurry.”

  It would have been possible to hurry, even with an eye on the compass. It would have been possible, Paul thought, to run in panic, fall whimpering and waiting. But you wouldn’t do it.…

  No shape in this dim region could be right or wrong; the trees themselves were no sweetly familiar beech or pine. They halted at sight of a new sprawling type of vine, uprooted where a break in the forest ceiling admitted more sunshine. The earth displayed hoof-prints like a pig’s. Some scattered tuberous roots were marked by teeth; Dorothy sniffed one. “Spud with garlic for a papa.” Paul pocketed a sample. She said, “Not that Lucifer cares, Doc, but what time is it?”

  “My watch says we’ve been walking fifteen minutes. Take it slow.” Wright presently added: “I’ve had another glimpse. Not a good one. Furry, gray and white—white face, splashes of white on a gray body seven or eight feet tall. Human shape. We may be all right if we don’t bother him.”

  “Or blunder into territory where he doesn’t want us.”

  “There is that, Paul.”

  “Human shape,” said Dorothy evenly. “How human?”

  “Very. Upright. Good-sized head … Ah—hear that?” It was Ann’s voice, calling, from someplace where there should be sunlight. “Don’t answer just yet—no sudden noises.”

  Close to Paul, Dorothy whispered, “The baby—I don’t want to tell the others quite yet.”

  That made it real—so real that in spite of a patch of beckoning blue Paul had to turn to her.

  Behind Wright, he saw it, among the pillars of the trees, retreating in fluid slowness till it was only a black ear, part of a white-furred cheek, an iridescent green eye showing, like a cat’s, no white. But the blue was also real.…

  The edge of the forest was a mass of young growth fighting for the gold coin of sunlight. “Shield your faces”—Wright was panting—“could be poisonous leaves.” They broke through to a red-green field, the slim silver of the undamaged boat, the certainty of friends, an expanse of lake no longer blue but sickly white. The boat’s nose was thrust under an overhang of branches. Ann Bryan was unsteady and wan, but there was welcome in her gray eyes for Dorothy, who joined her at once and whispered with her. Sears’ fat affectionate face carried a determined smile. Ed Spearman came forward, alert and commanding. Wright asked, “How long have you been out in the air?”

  “An hour.” Ed was impatient. “Sealed overnight. Nothing in the boat for a test of the air, no point in waiting. You—”

  “Okay.” Wright watched brown wings over the lake. “What are those?”

  “Birds or some damn thing. The white on the lake is dead fish. I suppose the ship blew under water or the impact killed them. Our Geiger says the water isn’t radioactive. We haven’t gone into the meadow—been waiting for you.”

  In the south the meadow reached the horizon—twenty miles of it, Paul remembered from the air view, before jungle again took over. Near by, threads of smoke were rising straight from the grass. “Abandoned fires? We scared off—”

  “Maybe,” Spearman said. “Seen no life except those birds.”

  “Bat wings,” Sears Oliphant remarked. “Mammalian, I think—oh my, yes. Can’t have furry birds, you know, with a taxonomist in the family, hey?”

  Spearman shrugged. “Must get organized. How much damage, Paul?”

  “The boat itself. Both wings off, radio dead. Couldn’t lock the door.…” It was like an Earth landscape. Tall grass carried oatlike ruddy seed clusters on green stems. The lake was bordered by white sand except close by, where jungle reached into water. There was casual buzzing traffic above the grass, reminiscent of bees, wasps, flies. Far up, something drifted on motionless wings, circling. And ten or fifteen miles to the west there was the calm of hills—rounded, old, more green than blue in a sleepy haze, but to paint them, Paul thought, you would shade off into the purple. Paul went on, absently: “We’ll have the charlesite of the wrecked boat of course. That gives this one a theoretical twenty hours of jet. We have ammunition for long enough to learn how to use bow and arrow, I think.”

  Ann muttered, “Paul, don’t—”

  “What?” Spearman was disgusted. “Oh, you could be right at that, Paul. Hard to realize … Well, we must make some kind of camp.”

  Wright began: “Some knowledge of the life around us—”

  “Oh my, yes—”

  “We’ll have to make a camp before we can do any exploring, Doc. Here, out in the open. See anything in the woods?”

  “Something followed. More or less human—”

  “So we know the camp has to be in the open.”

  “Do we, Ed?” Wright watched the distant bat wings. Spearman stared. “Can’t chance a forest we don’t know.”

  “Still, I mean to look things over a bit. Feel not so good, Ann?”

  “All right,” she said, glancing from Wright to Spearman, silently begging to know: Who is leader? “Slightly slap-happy, Doc.”

  “Mm, sure.” Wright hitched his rifle. “Going to look at that nearest smoke. You come, Paul—or you, Ed. One of you should stay here.”

  Spearman leaned against the lifeboat, still-faced. “Paul can go if he wants to. I think it’s a risk and a waste of time.”

  Paul watched him a moment, frightened not by a man whom he had never quite been able to like, but by the withdrawal itself, the sense of a barrier to communication. We start with a division on this first morning of the world…? Paul hugged his own rifle and followed Wright into the long whisper of the grass.

  CHAPTER 4

  Moist heat pressed down, but the air of the meadow was sweet. There were marks of trampling as well as the swath the boat had cut—trails, places where something might have crouched. Under his breath Wright asked, “Feel all right, Paul?”

  Truth was more needed than a show of courage. “Not perfect, Doc. Am I flushed? You are, a little.”

  “Yes. Trace of fever; may wear off. Here’s something—”

  They had not come far. Two red bodies barely three feet tall sprawled near each other face down in the grass. Paul noticed oval bulges between shoulder blades modified to accommodate them, the pathos of fingers—seven-fingered hands—holding earth in a final grasp. The male wore a loincloth of black fabric and a quiver almost full of arrows; the female had a grass skirt, and her hand was tight on a stone-headed spear longer than herself. A bow of carved wood lay some distance away; one could see how the little man had crawled in his agony after the bow was lost. Wright turned them over gently—bald skulls, no trace of body hair on skin of a rich copper color exciting to a painter’s vision, green eyes with no visible whites in human faces heavily tattooed, wide-open eyes, accusing no one. The bodies were in rigor, a shaft in the man’s neck, the woman pierced by an arrow in the side. Blood colored the grass, dry but eloquent.

  “War too,” said Wright, and pulled out the arrows, showing Paul the stone heads, the intricate carving of the wood, thin-whittled wooden vanes taking the place of feathers. “Stone Age war.…”

  The male pygmy w
as the smaller of the two, and softer, his shape not feminine but rounded and smooth. Both seemed mature, so far as age could be guessed at all. The woman was rugged, with a coarser skin and the scar tissue of old wounds; her two pairs of breasts were scarcely more prominent than the ridged muscles of her midget chest.

  Wright mulled it over, kneading his wrinkled throat. “Physical refinements of evolution as far along as our own. Straight thigh and neck, perfect upright posture; there was no slouch or belly sag when they were on their feet. Human jaw, big brain case. That furry giant I saw in the woods had complete upright posture too. Oh, it’s natural, Paul. You stick fins on an ocean vertebrate, turn him into a four-legged land animal, give him a few hundred million years. Almost bound to free his front limbs if they’ve stayed unspecialized.” In the gaunt face, sadness and pity struggled with a bitter sort of mirth. “The brain gets large, boy, and away you go, to—ach—to the Federation versus the Asian Empire—Lincoln, Rembrandt, the state papers of Abraham Brown. And to you and Dorothy and the baby.” Wright stood erect, brushing bony knees, calm again. “I’m almost pleased to find it this primitive. I don’t think it can have gone further anywhere on the planet, or we’d have seen cities, farms, roads, in the photographs. Unless—”

  “Unless what, Doctor?”

  “Oh—unless there might be forms with no Earth parallel. In the forests perhaps—even underground. Thought of that? But that’s speculations, and our little soldiers here are fact. They have a civilization—arrows say so, tattooing, garments. Rigid, tradition-bound—or maybe not, depending on how much language they’ve developed to tie ’emselves in knots with.”

  “Bow and arrow—why, suh, almost as advanced as not being afraid to end a sentence with a preposition.”

  “Hell with you. Twenty thousand years ago, or whenever it was we reached our present physique, if there’d been anything external to teach men how to behave like grown-ups—. Well, we had to sweat it out—tribal wars, bigger wars, venerated fears, errors, and stupidities. But maybe here—”