The Edgar Pangborn Megapack

by Edgar Pangborn

  “He seemed to, Doc. I watched them. They got along—practically buddies.”

  Paul saw the bandage was still on Mijok’s arm, earth-stained and with fragments of gray moss, but not disarranged; the bandage on his own shoulder had been removed. The flying beast’s attack had left only a heavy scratch, which looked clean; there was no pain, only an itching. The meadow was empty of brown wings. The dead fish were gone from the lake. Perhaps other scavengers had been busy in the thirteen-hour night. The water was an innocent blue, a luminous stillness under the sun.

  Mijok stole out into the grass, gazing westward along the line where meadow met jungle. Returning, he squatted by Wright and muttered, “Migan.” He spread a hand three feet above the ground; two fingers drooped and indicated the motion of walking legs. Paul suggested: “Pygmies?”

  “Could be.” Mijok stared eloquently at Wright’s rifle then crouched at the barrier of branches, complaining in his throat. Taking up his own rifle, Paul joined him. Dorothy hurried to the lifeboat and came back with field glasses for him and Wright and herself. In spite of the great planet’s heavy pull, her body moved with even more light easiness than it had shown in the unreal years of Argo. With the glasses, vague motion a quarter mile away in the meadow leaped shockingly into precision.

  The pygmies were not approaching but heading out from the edge of the forest, a group of nine, barely taller than the grass, bald red heads and shoulders in single file. The rearmost had a burden: seven others carried bows, with quivers on the right hip. “Left-handed,” Paul observed aloud. The leader was the tallest—a woman, with a long spear. All were sending anxious glances at the sky and toward the human shelter; their motions suggested a fear so deep it must be pain, yet something drew them out there in spite of it. The pygmy with the burden, a rolled-up hide, was also a woman. The leader was bald as the others, slender, muscular, her head round, with prominent forehead and thin nose, tattooed cheeks. The bowmen had only simple loincloths, and belts for their arrow quivers. The women’s knee-length grass skirts were like the Melanesian, but the leader’s was dyed a brilliant blue. Her two little pairs of breasts were youthfully firm and pointed. Dorothy murmured, “American civilization would have gone mad about those people.”

  “What a girl!” Wright sighed. “I mean Dorothy—the Dope.”

  “Even a dope can be jealous. Do you s’pose Mrs. Mijok has—Oh! Oh, poor darling! Not funny after all, gentlemen—”

  The pygmy leader had turned full face, as the nine paused at trampled grass. She wore a necklace of shell. These had no glitter, but their yellow and blue made handsome splashes against the red of her skin. Reason told Paul that she could see at most only dazzling spots where sunlight might be touching the glasses he had thrust through wilted leaves. It made no difference: she was staring directly into him, making her grief a part of his life. A still-faced grief, too profound for any tears, if she knew of tears. The green cat eyes lowered; she stabbed her spear into the ground and lifted her arms, a giving, yielding motion. Her lips moved—in prayer, surely, since all but one of the men were bowed, performing ritual gestures toward whatever lay on the ground. The one who did not bow never ceased to watch the sky. The prayer was brief. The woman’s left hand dropped meaningly, the hide was unrolled, and its bearer raised what the grass had hidden—no more than a skull and a few bones, a broken spear, a muddy scrap that might have been a grass skirt. The hide was folded gently over these; the group went on.

  “Dorothy—those things you saw running when we were circling down—I missed ’em,” Wright said. “Poor eyesight, and seems to me the air was still misty from Argo’s crash in the lake. They were going south, away from here? And they could have been—people like these?”

  “Yes. Hundreds or thousands of them. I suppose the crash of Argo must have seemed like the heavens falling. The lifeboats too.”

  “I think we interrupted a war.”

  “These would be survivors? Live in this part of the jungle maybe? Looking for what’s left after those—those flying beasts—”

  “It makes sense,” Wright said. “They’re more afraid of the sky than of our setup over here. Maybe we’re gods who came down to help them. If we did help them. Look: they’ve found another.… Yes, now the prayer.… Wish Mijok wasn’t so afraid of them. Inevitable. To them I suppose he’s an ugly wild animal. Different species, similar enough to be shocked at the similarity. ’Tain’t good.”

  “Do we try for a foot in both camps?”

  “Paul, I think I’ll take a rain check on answering that.… Ach—if I could go out there now—communicate—”

  “No!” Dorothy gasped. “Not while the others are still sick.”

  “You’re right of course.” Wright fretted at his beard stubble. “I get sillier all the time. As Ed would tell me if he were up and around. It’s the high oxygen.…”

  There were brown splashes in the sky. The pygmies saw the peril first and darted for the woods—an orderly flight however—the woman with the hide in front, the blue-skirted woman next, then the bowmen. Three of the latter turned bravely and shot arrows that glittered and whined. The brown beasts wheeled and flapped angrily upward, though the buzzing arrows dropped far short of them. The pygmies gained the trees; the omasha scouted the edge of the woods, squawking, three of them drifting toward the lifeboat, weaving heads surveying the ground. Paul gave way to unfamiliar savage enjoyment. “Do we, Doc?”

  “Yes,” said Wright, and took aim himself.

  All three were brought down, at a cost of four irreplaceable rifle bullets and two shots from Dorothy’s automatic. Mijok bellowed with satisfaction but recoiled as Wright dragged a dirty brown carcass into the clearing. “A dissection is in order.” Mijok grumbled and fidgeted. “Don’t fret, Mijok.” Wright pegged down the wings of the dead animal with sharp sticks and drew an incision on the leathery belly with his hunting knife. “Good head shot, Paul—this one’s yours. We’ll do a brain job from one of the others, but I think we’ll let that wait for Sears—oh my, yes…! Doesn’t weigh over thirty pounds. Hollow bones like a bird’s, very likely. Hope they’ll keep.”

  “You hope,” Dorothy sniffed. “What do you do when I turn housewife and instruct you to get that awful mess the hell off my nice clean floor?”

  “Dope! And you my best and only medical student.” He worked at the cutting dubiously, inexpertly. “Conventional mammalian setup, more or less. Small lungs, big stomach. Hah—two pairs of kidneys?” He spread the viscera out on the wing. “Short intestine, also like a bird. And she was preparing a blessed event multiplied by—count ’em—six.”

  “Too many,” said Paul. “Altogether too industrious.”

  “What I really want to know—Oh…?” With the lungs removed, it could be seen that the hump on the back was caused by a great enlargement of four thoracic vertebrae, which swelled into the chest cavity as well as outward. Wright cut away spinal cartilage. “Damn, I wish Sears was doing this. Well, it’s neural tissue, nothing else—a big swelling of the spinal cord.” He sliced at the ugly head, but the hermorrhage from a .30-caliber bullet confused the picture. “The brain looks too simple. Could that lump in the cord be the hind brain? I hereby leave the theories to Sears. But, son, you might slit the stomach and see what the old lady had for breakfast.”

  Paul’s clumsy cut on the slippery stomach bag made it plain what the omasha had eaten—among other things, an almost complete seven-fingered hand. Dorothy choked and walked away, saying, “I am going to be—”

  “Cheer up.” Paul held her forehead. “Never mind the clean floor—”

  “Go away. I mean stay very close. Sorry to be so physiological. Me a medic student! Even blood bothers me.”

  “Never mind, sugar—”

  “Sugar yourself, and wash your paws. We smell.”

  Mijok was muttering in alarm. Wright had abandoned the dissecti
on and gone out in the meadow, cautious but swift, to the spot where yesterday they had found the pygmy soldiers. He took up a small skull and arm bone, pathetically clean—perhaps there were insect scavengers that followed after the omasha—and the discarded bow. But instead of bringing back these relics, Wright held them high over his head, facing westward. Tall and gray in the heavy sun, he stepped twenty paces further toward the region where the pygmies had entered the jungle; then he set the bones down in the grass and strode back to the shelter, fingers twitching, lips moving in his old habit of talking half to himself, half to the world. “The omasha,” he said, “cracked the enlarged vertebrae—favorite morsel maybe.”

  Mijok moaned, blinking and sighing. He stared long at the silent grace of the lifeboat, then at Christopher Wright. He too was talking to himself. Abruptly, something gave way in him. He was kneeling before Wright, bending forward, taking Wright’s hands and pressing them against the gray-white fur of his face and his closed eyes. “Oh, now,” Wright said, “now, friend—”

  Paul remarked, “You’re elected.”

  “I will not be a god.”

  CHAPTER 6

  Mijok released the hands of his deity and sat back on his haunches, foggy-eyed. Wright stroked the great furry head, troubled and amazed. “It won’t do,” Wright said. “We’ll have no gods on this planet. Unless human nature can make itself a little godlike. And no final Armageddon—for that’s within too, and always was. Well, he’ll learn language fast. As he does, the first thing he must discover is that we’re all one flesh.” But Mijok was gazing up in adoration at the sound of the voice, trembling, not in fear, smiling when he saw Wright smile. “I believe he never had a god before—hadn’t reached the stage of personalizing the forces of nature. They’re just forces, and himself a bundle of perception, not even realizing that he’s more knowing and sensitive than other animals. Not arrogant yet, not sophisticated enough to be cruel, or mean, or even ambitious.…”

  Dorothy pushed her fists into her cheeks, brown eyes upturned to study the old man: a way she had, carrying Paul back eleven years to the day he had come aboard the ship and seen her for the first time and loved the woman who was, even then, manifest in the leggy, awkward child. “Doc, why did you do that, out there in the meadow?”

  “Why, Dorothy, we must make contact with those pygmies too. They are—advanced. It’ll be more difficult. They’ll have traditions—maybe some very ancient ones. But we must make contact.”

  “Mijok hates them though. If they come here—”

  Wright grinned. “Temporary advantage of being little tin deities. I think Mijok will do whatever we indicate—until we’re able to teach him independence.”

  Paul said, “Don’t think for a minute I’m not with you. But Doc, with the others helpless we’re only three—”

  “Four.”

  “Yes, four. There’s our own survival to think of. It’s a big planet. Seems to me you’re taking it on all at once.”

  Wright slouched, loose-limbed, at the barrier, where he could watch the meadow, and Mijok stayed close to him. “I think we must, Paul. If we start right perhaps we can go on right. A mistake at this point could go on burning for a thousand years.… Why do you think he broke out into worship when he did? Our superior achievements—lifeboat, guns, the rescue from that reptile? The fact that I wasn’t afraid of a poor pygmy’s bones? All that, sure, but something else. Ed would say I was daydreaming—but I think Mijok’s heart knows what his brain can’t yet interpret. Sears would agree, I think—his own heart’s bigger than Lucifer. Mijok hasn’t the least conscious idea why I invited those pygmies to come and get their dead. Down deeper, in the part of him that made him bring the moss and the meat and take care of us, I think he knows very well.”

  “You’re proposing,” Dorothy said, “to take a chance on love?”

  Wright was tranquil, watching the meadow. “Whenever men put their chips on the other thing they always lost, didn’t they? Repeatedly, for twenty or thirty thousand years? Did they ever create anything good except in a milieu of co-operation, friendship, forbearance? One of the oldest of commonplaces—the teachers all knew it. Lao-tse—Buddha—or stated negatively: ‘He who lives by the sword.…’ And so on. Good is not the mere absence of evil, but the most positive of human forces. The instruments of good are charity, patience, courage, effort and self-knowledge, each unavailing without the others; remember that. And that’s all the basic ethics I know. The rest is detail, solution of immediate problems as they arise. Even on Earth the good tended to win out in the long run: at least it did until the mechanical toys got out of hand. Then there was a century of living under a question mark. There was also the Collectivist Party. Yes, as a prime example of a part of my own philosophy totally perverted, I give you the Collectivist Party.” Wright was talking to himself again, the bitterness of Earth’s history goading him into soft-spoken monotone, drawling and dark, on a planet nearly five light-years distant from the ancient confusions. “The Collectivist Party, which turns ‘co-operation’ into the same sort of word fetish that ‘democracy’ was less than a hundred years ago—co-operation without charity, without patience, without courage and always, always, without self-knowledge.”

  Dorothy still watched him with sober upturned eyes. “Ed told me once his father was a pilot in the Collectivist Army during the Civil War.”

  “I know.” Wright smiled at her in bashful half apology. “Some of the old wounds still bleed too, I guess. I generally manage to keep my political mouth shut when he’s listening, if I can. Not that Ed could be accused of still fighting the war that ended before he was born.… Relax: I think they’re coming.”

  Paul joined Wright and the giant at the barrier, but Dorothy stayed a moment with the sick, feeling their wrists, murmuring something close to Ann’s ear, although the girl could not respond. “Past the fever stage, I believe,” she said. “They’re all breathing well. No chance they’ll be out of it before night, I suppose.…”

  The pygmies were still some distance away, slipping along the edge of the woods in plain sight. There were only three—the two women and one bowman; perhaps the others were paralleling their course inside the forest—perhaps a hundred others were. Wright whispered, “Have we anything that would make a respectable gift?”

  Mijok was rumbling in misery and fright. Dorothy came over holding a locket. “This—you remember, Doc—a matron at the Orphanage gave it to me. I used to imagine it could be a portrait of my mother—”

  “But my dear—”

  The brown girl shook her head. “This ship-metal wedding ring Paul hammered out for me—that’s the only Earth jewelry I want to keep. This face that might be like my mother’s—Oh, Doc, I’m getting to be a big girl now. Besides, Lucifer will have plenty of pretties for us later on. And Doc—let me do this, will you? They’ve got a woman leading ’em, so—wouldn’t she be less afraid of another woman? I’ll uncover, so she—” Dorothy shrugged out of her jacket. “Please, Doc? I’m scared, but—”

  Wright glanced helplessly at Paul. “We—”

  Dorothy said quickly, “My decision.” Holding the locket up for the sun to gleam on it, she walked into the meadow and waited in the brightness. Paul’s hand sweated on the rifle stock. He saw Wright patting Mijok’s arm, heard his restraining murmur: “Quiet, Mijok—keep your shirt on, Mijok, old man—man.…” Mijok searched the face of his god with a mute desperation and remained as he was.

  The pygmy woman halted fifty feet away in still-faced musing. As Paul had seen through the binoculars, she was elaborately tattooed and young. The pause was long. Dorothy stepped nearer to the place where Wright had left the bones, displaying the locket, her open left hand waving down at her body to demonstrate that she carried no weapons. For the first time Paul realized she had left her holster belt behind.

  The blue-skirted woman shrilled a word; her two follo
wers fell back. She thrust the blunt end of her spear in the ground and came forward steadily until she was only a few feet from the woman of the twenty-first century; mask-faced, she met Dorothy’s smile with a long scrutiny. Now and then the green eyes shifted to study the clearing, the lifeboat, the quiet shapes of Paul and Wright. And Mijok. Perhaps she stared longest at Mijok, but by some heavy discipline her face refused to tell of anything but dignity and caution.

  She spoke at last. It was complex, in a tone like the piping of a tree frog. There were pauses, studied inflections, no gestures: her seven-fingered hands hung limp against the blue grass skirt. The closing words seemed to have a note of questioning and of sternness; she waited.

  Dorothy’s contralto was startlingly deep in contrast: “Darling, I would like to know where you picked up that perfectly adorable wrap-around, only I don’t think it would suit me. I’m, to put it frankly, a shade too hippy for such. In case you’re wondering, I’m a female sample of man”—she touched herself and pointed to the pygmy lady—“man—”

  “Oh!” Wright whispered. “Good girl, good—”

  “—and it does seem to me us girls ought to stick together, because”—she held out the locket—“well, just because. And anyway look: I have only ten toes, fastened on to the ends of my feet, and if I had more, Heaven knows (just count ’em and see how each grows!) I’d have trouble in keeping them neat. Pome. There now, sweetie pie, please take it, huh?” And she opened the locket—Paul remembering in lessening panic how much the unknown portrait did resemble her—and held it face out to the woman of Lucifer. A tiny palm came up dubiously; Dorothy placed the locket in it. “It won’t bite, baby.” The pygmy woman turned it about, puzzling at the hinge. Dorothy stooped to demonstrate the mechanism a few times. “I’m Dorothy, by the way, more widely known as the Dope, which is a title of uncommon distinction among my people, achieved only after long study of the art of saying the right thing at the wrong time, burning the bacon, and preserving at all times an air of sweet and addled dignity—Dorothy.…” She indicated herself plainly and pointed, with questioning eyebrows.