The Edgar Pangborn Megapack Page 5

  “Are we big enough?”

  Wright shut his eyes. His thin cheeks were too bright; there was a tremor in the rifle tip. “Wish I knew, Paul. We have to try.”

  Ed Spearman yelled, “Look out!” A rifle banged, and a pistol.

  A brown darkness had come swooping from the lake. Others followed—mud-brown, squealing. They had banked at the noise of the shots to circle overhead. Paul fired; a near one tumbled, screeching, thrashing a narrow wolfish head on a long neck, black teeth snapping in the death throes—but even now it was trying to hobble forward and get at them. The others wheeled lower until Wright’s rifle spoke, and Spearman’s; there was the dry slap of Dorothy’s automatic pistol. “Back to the trees!” The wounded thing on the ground set up a bubbling howl.

  More were coming, with weaving of pointed red-eyed heads on mobile necks. Paul ran, Wright loping beside him, hearing the crash of their friends’ weapons. Something slammed Paul’s shoulder, flopped against his leg, tripping him. He tumbled over a shape furry and violent that smelled of fish and carrion. He fought clear of it, sobbing in animal wrath, and reached the shelter of the trees and Dorothy’s embrace. Sweat blinded him. Wright was clutching him too, getting his jacket off.

  “Flesh wound. The hind foot got you—”

  “I saw it.” Ann Bryan choked. “Saw it happen. Filthy claws—”

  Wright had a bottle of antiseptic. “Son, you ain’t going to like this. Hang on to the lady.” But the pain was a welcome flare. Paul’s eyes cleared as Wright made him a bandage of gauze, with Dorothy’s help. He could look from the shelter of overhanging branches at a confusion of wings. The creatures had not followed as far as the lifeboat; perhaps its shining mass disturbed them.

  Spearman groaned: “You would go out.”

  Wright snapped at him. “Camp in the open—some disadvantages—”

  “Granted. But you sure learned it the hard way.”

  “Eating”—Ann pointed, nauseated—“their own wounded—”

  Wright stepped between her and the loud orgy in the meadow. “Wing spread, fifteen feet. Well—sky’s bad, woods maybe. What do you suggest?”

  “Clear underbrush,” Spearman said, “so we can see into the woods. Pile it just beyond this overhang of branches for a barrier, leave a space so we can reach the lifeboat. We can get to the lake for water without going much in the open.”

  “Good,” said Wright. A peace offering. Spearman smiled neutrally.

  “If the water’s safe,” said Sears Oliphant.

  Wright grinned at the fat man. “Pal, it better be.”

  “Miracles?” Sears’ shoulders shot up amiably. “We can hope it is, with boiling. Gotta have it. Canteens won’t last the day, in this heat.”

  Paul helped Ed unpack tools from the lifeboat. “One sickle,” Spearman noted. “No scythe. Garden gadgets. Pruning shears. One ax, one damned hatchet. No scythe, no scythe—. There were two or three on the ship.”

  “Maybe the lake’s not so deep.”

  “Maybe we’ll play hell trying to find out too. Those things weren’t much scared by the shooting.…”

  Hot, tedious work created a circle of clear shaded ground which must be called home. A fire was boiling lake water in the few aluminum vessels. It had a fishy, mud-bottom taste and could not be cooled, but it eased thirst. Paul had glimpsed Ann in the lifeboat, opening her violin case, closing it, sick-faced. He had marveled again at the mystery of a Federation governing two-thirds of a world, which had genially allowed a fourteen-year-old musician to carry her violin on man’s greatest venture—with enough strings to last two or three years and no means of restringing the bow. Later Ann threw herself into the labor of clearing brush but tired quickly from her own violence. Sears’ microscope occupied a camp table; Paul and Dorothy joined him in a pause for rest. “Got anything for the local news-paper?”

  “Unboiled lake water-assorted wrigglers.” Sears mopped his cheeks. “’Twas never meant my name should be Linnaeus. Have a look.” The world on the slide seemed not unlike what Sears had once shown him in water from the hydroponics room of Argo: protoplasmic abundance no mind could grasp. “So far, nothing basically different from what you’d find in lake water on Earth—except for the trifle that every species is unknown, hey? I suppose that’s why they heaved a taxonomist into space, to see what the poor cluck would do, hey? Now, those red dots are something like algae. Notice a big ciliated schlemihl blundering around? He could almost be old man paramecium, oh my, yes. Gi’me your sickle, muscle man.”

  “Hot work, Jocko. Take it slow and easy.”

  “Believe me, Mistuh Mason, I will. What—”

  In undergrowth beyond the clearing there was deep-throated fury, a crashing of branches. A gray and white man shape staggered out of concealment, wrenching at what looked like swollen black rope. But the rope had a head, gripping the giant’s forearm; a black loop circled the giant’s loins and his free arm, tearing and pounding, could not loosen it. A saurian hind leg groped, hooking for purchase into gray fur.

  Paul’s hunting knife was out; there was time only for recognition. The gray and white being was everything human caught in a coil. Paul forced himself through a barrier of fear, hearing Wright yell, “Don’t shoot, Ed! Put that away.” There was no shot. Paul knew he was between Spearman and the confusion of combat; someone was blundering behind him. A black reptilian tail stretched into bushes, grasping something for anchorage. Paul slashed at that. The mass of heaving life rolled on the ground as the giant lost his footing, serpent teeth still buried in his forearm. Green eyes were pleading in a universal language.

  Wright was clutching a black neck, with no strength to move it, and Paul stabbed at scaled hide behind a triangular head, but the skin was like metal. The forelimbs were degenerate vestiges, the hind legs cruelly functional. At last the steel penetrated; Paul twisted it, probing for a brain. The giant had ceased struggling; the furred face was close. Paul could feel the difficult breath, sense a rigid waiting.… The teeth let go. The giant leaped free, returning at once with a stone the size of Paul’s chest, to fling it down on the slow-dying body, repeating the action till his enemy was a smear of black and red.

  Now in returning quiet a furred man eight feet tall watched them openly. Wright said, “Ed, put away that gun. This man is a friend.”

  “Man!” Spearman holstered his automatic, ready for a draw. “Your daydreams will kill us all yet.”

  “Smile, all of you—maybe his mouth does the same thing.” Wright stepped to the trembling monster, hands open. Ann was sobbing in reaction, smothering the sound. Wright pointed at himself. “Man.” He touched the gray fur. “Man.…”

  The giant drew back, not with violence. Paul felt Dorothy’s small fingers shivering on his arm. The giant sucked his wound and spat, turning his head away from Wright to do it. “Man—man.…” Wright’s hand, small and pale as an oyster shell, spread beside the huge palm, six fingers, long four-jointed thumb. “Paul—your first-aid kit. I want just the gauze.”

  Spearman said, “Are you crazy?”

  “It’s a chance,” Sears Oliphant said in a level, careful voice. “Doc knows what he’s doing. Ed, you should know you can’t stop him.”

  Wright was pointing to Paul’s bandaged shoulder and to the giant’s wound. The high furred forehead puckered in obvious effort. Dorothy was choking on a word or two: “Doc—must you—”

  “He knows we’re friends. He’s been watching a long time. He saw Paul get hurt and then bandaged.” The giant’s trembling was only a spasmodic shuddering. “Man—man.…” Wright snipped off gauze. “And he knows that thing is a weapon, Ed. Will you put it away?”

  “He could break you in two. You know that, don’t you?”

  “But he won’t. Give protoplasm a chance.” Now Wright was winding gauze lightly, firmly, hiding the already clo
tting blood, and the giant made no move of rejection. “Man—man.”

  “Man.” The giant murmured it cautiously, prolonging the vowel; he touched his chest. “Essa kana.” A finger ran exploringly over the gauze.

  “Essa kana—man,” said Wright, and swayed on his feet.

  The giant pointed at the bloody mess on the ground and rumbled: “Kawan.” He shuddered, and his arm swept in a loose gesture that appeared to indicate the curving quarter mile where lake and jungle met each other in a black-water marsh. Then he was staring out, muttering, at the wings in the meadow, and presently he touched Paul’s bandage with fantastic lightness. “Omasha,” he said, pointing at the flying beasts. He indicated the rifle wobbling in Sears’ arm and held up two fingers. “Omasha.”

  “Yes, we killed two omasha. Sears-man. Paul-man. Wright-man.”

  The giant rumpled his chest fur. “Mijok.”

  “Mijok-man.… Mijok, why didn’t I have you in Anthropology IA fifteen years ago? We’d’ve cleaned up the joint.” Mijok knew laughter; his booming in response to Wright’s tone and smile could mean nothing else. But Wright staggered and was breathing hard. Dorothy whispered, “Paul—”

  It could not be pushed aside any more—the pain separate from the smart of his shoulder, tightness in the eyeballs, chill, nausea. “The air—”

  Wright’s knees buckled. Sears had dropped the rifle and was helping him to the lifeboat, Paul watching the action in a daze of stupidity. Wright’s eyes had gone empty.… Paul was uncertain how he himself came to be sitting on the ground. Dorothy’s face was somewhere; he touched it. Her brown cheek was fire-hot, and she was trying to speak. “Paul—take care of you—always—”

  The face of Mijok was there too—red vapor turning black.

  CHAPTER 5

  Paul Mason stared into blue calm: airy motion of branches against the sky, a mystery remembered from long ago, in a place called New Hampshire. Those years were not dead: secretly the mind had brought them here. What a small journey! Less than five light-years: on a star map you could hardly represent it with the shortest of lines.… He was without pain, and cool. Time? Why, that amiable thud of a heart in a firm, familiar body (his own, surely?), that was indicating time. The boy in New Hampshire, after sprawling on his lazy back and discovering the miracle of sky—hadn’t he tried to paint it, even then? Messed about with his uncle’s palette, creating a daub that had—oh, something, a little something. Very well. Once upon a time there was a painter named Paul Mason … Dorothy.…

  “You’re back—oh, darling! No, Paul, don’t sit up fast or your head’ll hurt. Mine did.” Now she was curling into the hollow of his arm, laughing and weeping. “You’re back.…”

  A thin old man sat cross-legged on gray moss. Paul asked him, “How long?”

  Christopher Wright smiled, twisting and teasing the skin of his gaunt throat, gray with a thick beard stubble. “A day and a night, the nurse says. You know—the nurse? You were kissing her a moment ago. It’s early morning again, Paul. She was never quite unconscious, she claims. I recovered an hour ago. No ill effects. It knocked out the others at nightfall—predictable. They were exposed to Lucifer’s air thirteen hours later than we were.” Paul saw them now, lying on beds of the gray—moss? And where he and Dorothy clung to each other was the same pleasant stuff—dry, spongy, with an odor like clover hay. “Beds by courtesy of Mijok.” Wright nodded toward the gray giant, who had also brought moss for himself and now sprawled belly down, breathing silently, the bulge between his shoulder blades lightly rising and falling. Mijok’s face was on his arm, turned away toward the purple shadow of forest.

  Dorothy whispered, “He watched over us all night.”

  “So you were conscious all the time? Tell me.”

  Dorothy kept her voice low. Paul noticed the towering slimness of the lifeboat beyond the barrier of branches, reversed—Ed Spearman’s work, he supposed. It pointed toward the west. Turned so, the jet would blast toward the lake, harming nothing. Its shadow held away the heat of the sun, a gleaming artifact of twenty-first century man, the one alien thing in this wilderness morning. The sickness, Dorothy said, had taken her with a sudden paralysis: she could see, hear, be aware of boiling fever, but could not move. Then even the sense of heat left her—she was only observing eyes, ears, and a brain. She had had a fantasy that she was dead, no longer breathing. “But I breathed.” Her small brown face crinkled with a laughter rich in more than amusement. “It’s a habit I don’t mean to abandon.”

  “Neurotoxin,” said Wright, “and a damn funny one. Back on Earth, when I believed myself to be a doctor, I never heard of anything like it.”

  The condition had lasted all day, she said; at nightfall her sense of touch had gradually returned. She could move her hands, later her feet and head. At length she had sat up, briefly blinded by pain in the forehead, then she had given way to an overwhelming need for sleep. “I got a glimpse of you, Paul, and tumbled off into a set of dreams that were—not so bad, not so bad. I woke before sunrise. Different. Don’t ask me how. Never felt healthier. Not even weak, as you should be after a fever. But Doc—what if the illness—”

  Wright looked away from the terror that had crossed her face. “If you go on feeling all right, we can assume nothing’s wrong with the baby. Don’t borrow trouble, sugarpuss—we’ve got enough.”

  “Maybe,” Paul suggested, “the illness was just—oh, some of our Earth metabolism getting burned out of us. A stiff acclimation course.” Wright grunted, pinching his long nose. Paul said, “Wish it had burned out the yen for a cigarette that I’ve had for eleven years.”

  Sears Oliphant, the only other with some medical knowledge, had taken charge immediately after their collapse. “He is—scared, Paul,” Dorothy murmured. “Of Lucifer, I mean. I could feel it when I was just a pair of eyes and ears. More physical shrinking in him than in the rest of us, and he’s fighting it back with all he’s got. He’s a very big man, Paul.…” Sears looked peaceful enough now, in the dark sleep of the sickness, his moon face bristling with black beard growth but relaxed and bland. On another couch of moss, Spearman was more restless, powerful arms twitching as if he needed to fight the disaster even in sleep. Ann Bryan was deeply flushed and moaned a little now and then. “Ed was all right too. Considerate. Took all Sears’ orders without any fuss or question; I don’t think he’s much scared. He feels he can bull his way through anything, and maybe he’s right.” Dorothy’s helpless eyes had also seen Mijok bringing moss in great armfuls. This, she thought, had helped Ed Spearman to accept the giant as a man and perhaps as a friend. She remembered Mijok raising Paul and herself in one careful swing of his arms to set them down beside each other on the moss. Later she had watched him turning the lifeboat under direction of Spearman’s blunt gestures. Its length was thirty-four feet, its weight over three tons Earth gravity—more here. One gray-white arm had lifted the tail and swung the boat on its landing gear as a man might push a light automobile. “I wasn’t afraid. After dark, when I knew the sickness had got the others, I still wasn’t afraid. Believe me? I could see Mijok moving around. Once I heard him growl—I think he was driving something off. And then while the red moon was coming up, he sat by us—his eyes are red in the dark, Paul, not green. He smells musky at close range, but clean. I wasn’t afraid. Now and then he’d look us over and smile with his funny black lips and touch the furry back of his finger to our foreheads.… I could see the blue fireflies, Paul. Someday you’ll make up stories about them for the baby.… I heard that crying again—much nearer than when we heard it that first night by the other lifeboat. Like a group of children crying, if you can imagine that synchronized, almost musical. Mijok growled and fretted when it began, but it came no nearer. It had stopped when I woke.”

  “Some of Earth’s critters sounded human—panthers, owls, frogs—”

  “Ye-es. Just possibly something like tree fr
ogs.…”

  Wright said, “Mijok brought us raw meat this morning before he went to sleep, something like a deer haunch. The fire bothers him—he evidently didn’t go near it last night after the others collapsed.”

  “Ed tried to show him about fire,” Dorothy said. “I remember. Mijok was scared, and Sears told Ed to let it wait.”

  “Meat was good too.” Wright smirked. “We got the fire going, and Mijok did try some cooked and liked it. You and Dorothy can have some tomorrow if I don’t turn purple.”

  “Not guinea-pig,” said Dorothy. “Just pig.”

  “Hungry?” Wright tossed Paul a ration package.

  “Gah!” But he opened it. “Learned any more of Mijok’s words?”

  “No. He won’t have many. Nouns, simple descriptives. Must have some continuing association with his own breed, or he’d have no words at all. A hunter—with only nature’s weapons, I think. That haunch was torn, not cut—some hoofed animal smaller than a pony, fresh-killed and well bled. He must have got it while Dorothy slept. It may have strayed into the camp during the night. I think Mijok lives in the woods, maybe not even a shelter or a permanent mate. Anthropology IA,” said Wright, and bowed in mimic apology to the sleeping giant. “Those pygmies will be something else again—Neolithic. Wish I understood that bulge between the shoulder blades. All the creatures we’ve seen have it—even that damn black reptile, I believe, though things were too mixed up to be sure.”

  Mijok woke—all at once, like a cat. He stretched, extending his arms twelve feet from wrist to wrist. He smiled down at Paul. He studied the helpless ones, peering longest at Ann Bryan; the black-haired girl was breathing harshly, fidgeting. Now and then her eyes flickered open and perhaps they saw. Softly as smoke Mijok stepped into the shadow of the trees and listened. Wright remarked, “Speaking of that reptile, we should set up a monument to it. Nothing luckier could have happened than that chance to lend Mijok a hand.” His gray eyes fixed on Paul, lids lowered in a speculative smile. “I’m not the only one who remembers, Paul, that you were the first to go to his help. He hasn’t forgotten.… Dot, you’re sure Ed understood that we have a friend there?”