Golden Age of Science Fiction Vol X

by Various

  * * *

  Contents

  THE WORLD THAT COULDN'T BE

  By Clifford D. Simak

  The tracks went up one row and down another, and in those rows the vua plants had been sheared off an inch or two above the ground. The raider had been methodical; it had not wandered about haphazardly, but had done an efficient job of harvesting the first ten rows on the west side of the field. Then, having eaten its fill, it had angled off into the bush--and that had not been long ago, for the soil still trickled down into the great pug marks, sunk deep into the finely cultivated loam.

  Somewhere a sawmill bird was whirring through a log, and down in one of the thorn-choked ravines, a choir of chatterers was clicking through a ghastly morning song. It was going to be a scorcher of a day. Already the smell of desiccated dust was rising from the ground and the glare of the newly risen sun was dancing off the bright leaves of the hula-trees, making it appear as if the bush were filled with a million flashing mirrors.

  Gavin Duncan hauled a red bandanna from his pocket and mopped his face.

  "No, mister," pleaded Zikkara, the native foreman of the farm. "You cannot do it, mister. You do not hunt a Cytha."

  "The hell I don't," said Duncan, but he spoke in English and not the native tongue.

  He stared out across the bush, a flat expanse of sun-cured grass interspersed with thickets of hula-scrub and thorn and occasional groves of trees, criss-crossed by treacherous ravines and spotted with infrequent waterholes.

  It would be murderous out there, he told himself, but it shouldn't take too long. The beast probably would lay up shortly after its pre-dawn feeding and he'd overhaul it in an hour or two. But if he failed to overhaul it, then he must keep on.

  "Dangerous," Zikkara pointed out. "No one hunts the Cytha."

  "I do," Duncan said, speaking now in the native language. "I hunt anything that damages my crop. A few nights more of this and there would be nothing left."

  * * * * *

  Jamming the bandanna back into his pocket, he tilted his hat lower across his eyes against the sun.

  "It might be a long chase, mister. It is the skun season now. If you were caught out there...."

  "Now listen," Duncan told it sharply. "Before I came, you'd feast one day, then starve for days on end; but now you eat each day. And you like the doctoring. Before, when you got sick, you died. Now you get sick, I doctor you, and you live. You like staying in one place, instead of wandering all around."

  "Mister, we like all this," said Zikkara, "but we do not hunt the Cytha."

  "If we do not hunt the Cytha, we lose all this," Duncan pointed out. "If I don't make a crop, I'm licked. I'll have to go away. Then what happens to you?"

  "We will grow the corn ourselves."

  "That's a laugh," said Duncan, "and you know it is. If I didn't kick your backsides all day long, you wouldn't do a lick of work. If I leave, you go back to the bush. Now let's go and get that Cytha."

  "But it is such a little one, mister! It is such a young one! It is scarcely worth the trouble. It would be a shame to kill it."

  Probably just slightly smaller than a horse, thought Duncan, watching the native closely.

  It's scared, he told himself. It's scared dry and spitless.

  "Besides, it must have been most hungry. Surely, mister, even a Cytha has the right to eat."

  "Not from my crop," said Duncan savagely. "You know why we grow the vua, don't you? You know it is great medicine. The berries that it grows cures those who are sick inside their heads. My people need that medicine--need it very badly. And what is more, out there--" he swept his arm toward the sky--"out there they pay very much for it."

  "But, mister...."

  "I tell you this," said Duncan gently, "you either dig me up a bush-runner to do the tracking for me or you can all get out, the kit and caboodle of you. I can get other tribes to work the farm."

  "No, mister!" Zikkara screamed in desperation.

  "You have your choice," Duncan told it coldly.

  * * * * *

  He plodded back across the field toward the house. Not much of a house as yet. Not a great deal better than a native shack. But someday it would be, he told himself. Let him sell a crop or two and he'd build a house that would really be a house. It would have a bar and swimming pool and a garden filled with flowers, and at last, after years of wandering, he'd have a home and broad acres and everyone, not just one lousy tribe, would call him mister.

  Gavin Duncan, planter, he said to himself, and liked the sound of it. Planter on the planet Layard. But not if the Cytha came back night after night and ate the vua plants.

  He glanced over his shoulder and saw that Zikkara was racing for the native village.

  Called their bluff, Duncan informed himself with satisfaction.

  He came out of the field and walked across the yard, heading for the house. One of Shotwell's shirts was hanging on the clothes-line, limp in the breathless morning.

  Damn the man, thought Duncan. Out here mucking around with those stupid natives, always asking questions, always under foot. Although, to be fair about it, that was Shotwell's job. That was what the Sociology people had sent him out to do.

  Duncan came up to the shack, pushed the door open and entered. Shotwell, stripped to the waist, was at the wash bench.

  Breakfast was cooking on the stove, with an elderly native acting as cook.

  Duncan strode across the room and took down the heavy rifle from its peg. He slapped the action open, slapped it shut again.

  Shotwell reached for a towel.

  "What's going on?" he asked.

  "Cytha got into the field."

  "Cytha?"

  "A kind of animal," said Duncan. "It ate ten rows of vua."

  "Big? Little? What are its characteristics?"

  The native began putting breakfast on the table. Duncan walked to the table, laid the rifle across one corner of it and sat down. He poured a brackish liquid out of a big stew pan into their cups.

  God, he thought, what I would give for a cup of coffee.

  * * * * *

  Shotwell pulled up his chair. "You didn't answer me. What is a Cytha like?"

  "I wouldn't know," said Duncan.

  "Don't know? But you're going after it, looks like, and how can you hunt it if you don't know--"

  "Track it. The thing tied to the other end of the trail is sure to be the Cytha. Well find out what it's like once we catch up to it."

  "We?"

  "The natives will send up someone to do the tracking for me. Some of them are better than a dog."

  "Look, Gavin. I've put you to a lot of trouble and you've been decent with me. If I can be any help, I would like to go."

  "Two make better time than three. And we have to catch this Cytha fast or it might settle down to an endurance contest."

  "All right, then. Tell me about the Cytha."

  Duncan poured porridge gruel into his bowl, handed the pan to Shotwell. "It's a sort of special thing. The natives are scared to death of it. You hear a lot of stories about it. Said to be unkillable. It's always capitalized, always a proper noun. It has been reported at different times from widely scattered places."

  "No one's ever bagged one?"

  "Not that I ever heard of." Duncan patted the rifle. "Let me get a bead on it."

  He started eating, spooning the porridge into his mouth, munching on the stale corn bread left from the night before. He drank some of the brackish beverage and shuddered.

  "Some day," he said, "I'm going to scrape together enough money to buy a pound of coffee. You'd think--"

  "It's the freight rates," Shotwell said. "I'll send you a pound when I go back."

  "Not at the price they'd charge to ship it out," said Duncan. "I wouldn't hear of it."

  They ate in silence for a time. Finally Shotwell said: "I'm getting nowhere, Gavin. The natives are willing to talk, but it all adds up to nothing."

  "I tried to tell you that. You could have saved your tim
e."

  Shotwell shook his head stubbornly. "There's an answer, a logical explanation. It's easy enough to say you cannot rule out the sexual factor, but that's exactly what has happened here on Layard. It's easy to exclaim that a sexless animal, a sexless race, a sexless planet is impossible, but that is what we have. Somewhere there is an answer and I have to find it."

  * * * * *

  "Now hold up a minute," Duncan protested. "There's no use blowing a gasket. I haven't got the time this morning to listen to your lecture."

  "But it's not the lack of sex that worries me entirely," Shotwell said, "although it's the central factor. There are subsidiary situations deriving from that central fact which are most intriguing."

  "I have no doubt of it," said Duncan, "but if you please--"

  "Without sex, there is no basis for the family, and without the family there is no basis for a tribe, and yet the natives have an elaborate tribal setup, with taboos by way of regulation. Somewhere there must exist some underlying, basic unifying factor, some common loyalty, some strange relationship which spells out to brotherhood."

  "Not brotherhood," said Duncan, chuckling. "Not even sisterhood. You must watch your terminology. The word you want is ithood."

  The door pushed open and a native walked in timidly.

  "Zikkara said that mister want me," the native told them. "I am Sipar. I can track anything but screamers, stilt-birds, longhorns and donovans. Those are my taboos."

  "I am glad to hear that," Duncan replied. "You have no Cytha taboo, then."

  "Cytha!" yipped the native. "Zikkara did not tell me Cytha!"

  Duncan paid no attention. He got up from the table and went to the heavy chest that stood against one wall. He rummaged in it and came out with a pair of binoculars, a hunting knife and an extra drum of ammunition. At the kitchen cupboard, he rummaged once again, filling a small leather sack with a gritty powder from a can he found.

  "Rockahominy," he explained to Shotwell. "Emergency rations thought up by the primitive North American Indians. Parched corn, ground fine. It's no feast exactly, but it keeps a man going."

  "You figure you'll be gone that long?"

  "Maybe overnight. I don't know. Won't stop until I get it. Can't afford to. It could wipe me out in a few days."

  "Good hunting," Shotwell said. "I'll hold the fort."

  Duncan said to Sipar: "Quit sniveling and come on."

  He picked up the rifle, settled it in the crook of his arm. He kicked open the door and strode out.

  Sipar followed meekly.

  II

  Duncan got his first shot late in the afternoon of that first day.

  In the middle of the morning, two hours after they had left the farm, they had flushed the Cytha out of its bed in a thick ravine. But there had been no chance for a shot. Duncan saw no more than a huge black blur fade into the bush.

  Through the bake-oven afternoon, they had followed its trail, Sipar tracking and Duncan bringing up the rear, scanning every piece of cover, with the sun-hot rifle always held at ready.

  Once they had been held up for fifteen minutes while a massive donovan tramped back and forth, screaming, trying to work up its courage for attack. But after a quarter hour of showing off, it decided to behave itself and went off at a shuffling gallop.

  Duncan watched it go with a lot of thankfulness. It could soak up a lot of lead, and for all its awkwardness, it was handy with its feet once it set itself in motion. Donovans had killed a lot of men in the twenty years since Earthmen had come to Layard.

  With the beast gone, Duncan looked around for Sipar. He found it fast asleep beneath a hula-shrub. He kicked the native awake with something less than gentleness and they went on again.

  The bush swarmed with other animals, but they had no trouble with them.

  Sipar, despite its initial reluctance, had worked well at the trailing. A misplaced bunch of grass, a twig bent to one side, a displaced stone, the faintest pug mark were Sipar's stock in trade. It worked like a lithe, well-trained hound. This bush country was its special province; here it was at home.

  With the sun dropping toward the west, they had climbed a long, steep hill and as they neared the top of it, Duncan hissed at Sipar. The native looked back over its shoulder in surprise. Duncan made motions for it to stop tracking.

  The native crouched and as Duncan went past it, he saw that a look of agony was twisting its face. And in the look of agony he thought he saw as well a touch of pleading and a trace of hatred. It's scared, just like the rest of them, Duncan told himself. But what the native thought or felt had no significance; what counted was the beast ahead.

  Duncan went the last few yards on his belly, pushing the gun ahead of him, the binoculars bumping on his back. Swift, vicious insects ran out of the grass and swarmed across his hands and arms and one got on his face and bit him.

  * * * * *

  He made it to the hilltop and lay there, looking at the sweep of land beyond. It was more of the same, more of the blistering, dusty slogging, more of thorn and tangled ravine and awful emptiness.

  He lay motionless, watching for a hint of motion, for the fitful shadow, for any wrongness in the terrain that might be the Cytha.

  But there was nothing. The land lay quiet under the declining sun. Far on the horizon, a herd of some sort of animals was grazing, but there was nothing else.

  Then he saw the motion, just a flicker, on the knoll ahead--about halfway up.

  He laid the rifle carefully on the ground and hitched the binoculars around. He raised them to his eyes and moved them slowly back and forth. The animal was there where he had seen the motion.

  It was resting, looking back along the way that it had come, watching for the first sign of its trailers. Duncan tried to make out the size and shape, but it blended with the grass and the dun soil and he could not be sure exactly what it looked like.

  He let the glasses down and now that he had located it, he could distinguish its outline with the naked eye.

  His hand reached out and slid the rifle to him. He fitted it to his shoulder and wriggled his body for closer contact with the ground. The cross-hairs centered on the faint outline on the knoll and then the beast stood up.

  It was not as large as he had thought it might be--perhaps a little larger than Earth lion-size, but it certainly was no lion. It was a square-set thing and black and inclined to lumpiness and it had an awkward look about it, but there were strength and ferociousness as well.

  Duncan tilted the muzzle of the rifle so that the cross-hairs centered on the massive neck. He drew in a breath and held it and began the trigger squeeze.

  The rifle bucked hard against his shoulder and the report hammered in his head and the beast went down. It did not lurch or fall; it simply melted down and disappeared, hidden in the grass.

  "Dead center," Duncan assured himself.

  He worked the mechanism and the spent cartridge case flew out. The feeding mechanism snicked and the fresh shell clicked as it slid into the breech.

  He lay for a moment, watching. And on the knoll where the thing had fallen, the grass was twitching as if the wind were blowing, only there was no wind. But despite the twitching of the grass, there was no sign of the Cytha. It did not struggle up again. It stayed where it had fallen.

  Duncan got to his feet, dug out the bandanna and mopped at his face. He heard the soft thud of the step behind him and turned his head. It was the tracker.

  "It's all right, Sipar," he said. "You can quit worrying. I got it. We can go home now."

  * * * * *

  It had been a long, hard chase, longer than he had thought it might be. But it had been successful and that was the thing that counted. For the moment, the vua crop was safe.

  He tucked the bandanna back into his pocket, went down the slope and started up the knoll. He reached the place where the Cytha had fallen. There were three small gouts of torn, mangled fur and flesh lying on the ground and there was nothing else.

  He spun around a
nd jerked his rifle up. Every nerve was screamingly alert. He swung his head, searching for the slightest movement, for some shape or color that was not the shape or color of the bush or grass or ground. But there was nothing. The heat droned in the hush of afternoon. There was not a breath of moving air. But there was danger--a saw-toothed sense of danger close behind his neck.

  "Sipar!" he called in a tense whisper, "Watch out!"

  The native stood motionless, unheeding, its eyeballs rolling up until there was only white, while the muscles stood out along its throat like straining ropes of steel.

  Duncan slowly swiveled, rifle held almost at arm's length, elbows crooked a little, ready to bring the weapon into play in a fraction of a second.

  Nothing stirred. There was no more than emptiness--the emptiness of sun and molten sky, of grass and scraggy bush, of a brown-and-yellow land stretching into foreverness.

  Step by step, Duncan covered the hillside and finally came back to the place where the native squatted on its heels and moaned, rocking back and forth, arms locked tightly across its chest, as if it tried to cradle itself in a sort of illusory comfort.

  The Earthman walked to the place where the Cytha had fallen and picked up, one by one, the bits of bleeding flesh. They had been mangled by his bullet. They were limp and had no shape. And it was queer, he thought. In all his years of hunting, over many planets, he had never known a bullet to rip out hunks of flesh.

  He dropped the bloody pieces back into the grass and wiped his hand upon his thighs. He got up a little stiffly.

  He'd found no trail of blood leading through the grass, and surely an animal with a hole of that size would leave a trail.

  And as he stood there upon the hillside, with the bloody fingerprints still wet and glistening upon the fabric of his trousers, he felt the first cold touch of fear, as if the fingertips of fear might momentarily, almost casually, have trailed across his heart.

  * * * * *

  He turned around and walked back to the native, reached down and shook it.