The Human Edge

by Gordon R. Dickson

  The Lugh's sharp, tooth-studded jaws were more than a match for the jaws of any one of his attackers, but—here on land—they had many times his speed. No matter which way he turned, one was always at his back, and harrying him. But, like the envoy when he had been knocked into the sea, Binichi made no sound; and, although his eyes met those of Chuck, standing at the clearing edge, he gave no call for help.

  Chuck looked about him desperately for a stick or stone he could use as a club. But the ground was bare of everything but the light wands of the bushes, and the trees overhead had all green, sound limbs firmly attached to their trunks. There was a stir in the bushes beside him.

  Chuck turned and saw the envoy. He pushed through to stand beside Chuck, and also looked down at the fight going on in the clearing.

  "Come on!" said Chuck, starting down into the clearing. Then he halted, for the envoy had not moved. "What's the matter?"

  "Matter?" said the envoy, looking at him. "I don't understand."

  "Those things will kill him!"

  "You"—the envoy turned his head as if peering at Chuck—"appear to think we should interfere. You people have this strange attitude to the natural occurrences of life that I've noticed before."

  "Do you people just stand by and watch each other get killed?"

  "Of course not. Where another Tomah is concerned, it is of course different."

  "He saved your life from those fish!" cried Chuck.

  "I believe you asked him to. You were perfectly free to ask, just as he was perfectly free to accept or refuse. I'm in no way responsible for anything either of you have done."

  "He's an intelligent being!" said Chuck desperately. "Like you. Like me. We're all alike."

  "Certainly we aren't," said the envoy, stiffening. "You and I are not at all alike, except that we are both civilized. He's not even that. He's a Lugh."

  "I told him he'd promised to sit down at Base and discuss with you," cried Chuck, his tongue loosened by the fever. "I said he was dodging his promise if he let you die. And he went out and saved you. But you won't save him."

  The envoy turned his head to look at Binichi, now all but swarmed under by the predators.

  "Thank you for correcting me," he said. "I hadn't realized there could be honor in this Lugh."

  He went down the slope of the hollow in a sudden, blurring rush that seemingly moved him off at top speed from a standing start. He struck the embattled group like a projectile and emerged coated by the predators. For a split second it seemed to Chuck that he had merely thrown another life into the jaws of the attackers. And then the Tomah claw glittered and flashed, right and left like a black scimitar, lightning-swift out of the ruck—and the clearing was emptied, except for four furry bodies that twitched or lay about the hollow.

  The envoy turned to the nearest and began to eat. Without a glance or word directed at his rescuer, Binichi, bleeding from a score of superficial cuts and scratches, turned about and climbed slowly up the slope of the hollow to where Chuck stood.

  "Shall we go on?" he said.

  Chuck looked past him at the feeding envoy.

  "Perhaps we should wait for him," he said.

  "Why?" said Binichi. "It's up to him to keep up, if he wants to. The Tomah is no concern of ours."

  He headed off in the direction they had been going. Chuck waggled his head despairingly, and plodded after.

  IV

  The envoy caught up to them a little further on; and shortly after that, as the rays of the setting sun were beginning to level through the trees, giving the whole forest a cathedral look, they came on water, and stopped for the night.

  It seemed to Chuck that the sun went down very quickly—quicker than it ever had before; and a sudden chill struck through to his very bones. Teeth chattering, he managed to start a fire and drag enough dead wood to it to keep it going while they slept.

  Binichi had gone into the waters of the small lake a few yards off, and was not to be seen. But through the long, fever-ridden night hours that were a patchwork of dizzy wakefulness and dreams and half-dreams, Chuck was aware of the smooth, dark insectlike head of the Tomah watching him across the fire with what seemed to be an absorbing fascination.

  Toward morning, he slept. He awoke to find the sun risen and Binichi already out of the lake. Chuck did not feel as bad, now, as he had earlier. He moved in a sort of fuzziness; and, although his body was slow responding, as if it was something operated by his mind from such a remote distance that mental directions to his limbs took a long time to be carried out, it was not so actively uncomfortable.

  They led off, Chuck in the middle as before. They were moving out of the forest now, into more open country where the trees were interspersed with meadows. Chuck remembered now that he had not eaten in some time; but when he chewed on his food, the taste was uninteresting and he put it back in his pack.

  Nor was he too clear about the country he was traversing. It was there all right, but it seemed more than a little unreal. Sometimes things, particularly things far off, appeared distorted. And he began remarking expressions on the faces of his two companions that he would not have believed physically possible to them. Binichi's mouth, in particular, had become remarkably mobile. It was no longer fixed by physiology into a grin. Watching out of the corner of his eye, Chuck caught glimpses of it twisted into all sorts of shapes; sad, sly, cheerful, frowning. And the Tomah was not much better. As the sun mounted up the clear arch of the sky, Chuck discovered the envoy squinting and winking at him, as if to convey some secret message.

  "S'all right—s'all right—" mumbled Chuck. "I won't tell." And he giggled suddenly at the joke that he couldn't tell because he really didn't know what all the winking was about.

  "I don't understand," said the envoy, winking away like mad.

  "S'all right—s'all right—" said Chuck.

  He discovered after a time that the other two were no longer close beside him. Peering around, he finally located them walking together at some distance off from him. Discussing something, no doubt, something confidential. He wandered, taking the pitch and slope of the ground at random, stumbling a little now and then when the angle of his footing changed. He was aware in vague fashion that he had drifted into an area with little rises and unexpected sinkholes, their edges tangled with brush. He caught himself on one of the sinkholes, swayed back to safety, tacked off to his right . . .

  Suddenly he landed hard on something. The impact drove all the air out of his lungs, so that he fought to breathe—and in that struggle he lost the cobwebs surrounding him for the first time that day.

  He had not been aware of his fall, but now he saw that he lay half on his back, some ten feet down from the edge of one of the holes. He tried to get up, but one leg would not work. Panic cut through him like a knife.

  "Help!" he shouted. His voice came out hoarse and strange-sounding. "Help!"

  He called again; and after what seemed a very long time, the head of the envoy poked over the edge of the sinkhole and looked down at him.

  "Get me out of here!" cried Chuck. "Help me out."

  The envoy stared at him.

  "Give me a hand!" said Chuck. "I can't climb up by myself. I'm hurt."

  "I don't understand," said the envoy.

  "I think my leg's broken. What's the matter with you?" Now that he had mentioned it, as if it had been lying there waiting for its cue, the leg that would not work sent a sudden, vicious stab of pain through him. And close behind this came a swelling agony that pricked Chuck to fury. "Don't you hear me? I said, pull me out of here! My leg's broken. I can't stand on it!"

  "You are damaged?" said the envoy

  "Of course I'm damaged!"

  The envoy stared down at Chuck for a long moment. When he spoke again, his words struck an odd, formalistic note in Chuck's fevered brain.

  "It is regrettable," said the envoy, "that you are no longer in perfect health."

  And he turned away, and disappeared. Above Chuck's straining eyes, th
e edges of the hole and the little patch of sky beyond them tilted, spun about like a scene painted on a whirling disk, and shredded away into nothingness.

  * * *

  At some time during succeeding events he woke up again; but nothing was really clear or certain until he found himself looking up into the face of Doc Burgis, who was standing over him, with a finger on his pulse.

  "How do you feel?" said Burgis.

  "I don't know," said Chuck. "Where am I?"

  "Back at Base," said Burgis, letting go of his wrist. "Your leg is knitting nicely and we've knocked out your pneumonia. You've been under sedation. A couple more days' rest and you'll be ready to run again."

  "That's nice," said Chuck; and went back to sleep.

  V

  Three days later he was recovered enough to take a ride in his motorized go-cart over to Roy Marlie's office. He found Roy there, and his uncle.

  "Hi, Tommy," said Chuck, wheeling through the door. "Hi, Chief."

  "How you doing, son?" asked Member Thomas Wagnall. "How's the leg?"

  "Doc says I can start getting around on surgical splints in a day or two," Chuck looked at them both. "Well, isn't anybody going to tell me what happened?"

  "Those two natives were carrying you when we finally located the three of you," said Tommy, "and we—"

  "They were?" said Chuck.

  "Why, yes." Tommy looked closely at him. "Didn't you know that?"

  "I—I was unconscious before they started carrying me, I guess, "said Chuck.

  "At any rate, we got you all back here in good shape." Tommy went across the room to a built-in cabinet and came back carrying a bottle of scotch, capped with three glasses, and a bowl of ice. "Ready for that drink now?"

  "Try me," said Chuck, not quite licking his lips. Tommy made a second trip for charged water and brought it back. He passed the drinks around.

  "How," he said, raising his glass. They all drank in appreciative silence.

  "Well," said Tommy, setting his glass down on the top of Roy's desk, "I suppose you heard about the conference." Chuck glanced over at Roy, who was evincing a polite interest.

  "I heard they had a brief meeting and put everything off for a while," said Chuck.

  "Until they had a chance to talk things over between themselves, yes," said Tommy. He was watching his nephew somewhat closely. "Rather surprising development. We hardly know where we stand now, do we?"

  "Oh, I guess it'll work out all right," said Chuck.

  "You do?"

  "Why, yes," said Chuck. He slowly sipped at his glass again and held it up to the light of the window. "Good scotch."

  "All right!" Tommy's thick fist came down with a sudden bang on the desk top. "I'll quit playing around. I may be nothing but a chairside Earth-lubber, but I'll tell you one thing. There's one thing I've developed in twenty years of politics and that's a nose for smells. And something about this situation smells! I don't know what, but it smells. And I want to find out what it is."

  Chuck and Roy looked at each other.

  "Why, Member," said Roy. "I don't follow you."

  "You follow me all right," said Tommy. He took a gulp from his glass and blew out an angry breath. "All right—off the record. But tell me!"

  Roy smiled.

  "You tell him, Chuck," he said.

  Chuck grinned in his turn.

  "Well, I'll put it this way, Tommy," he said. "You remember how I explained the story about Big Brother Charlie that gave us the name for this project?"

  "What about it?" said the Member.

  "Maybe I didn't go into quite enough detail. You see," said Chuck, "the two youngest brothers were twins who lived right next door to each other in one town. They used to fight regularly until their wives got fed up with it. And when that happened, their wives would invite Big Brother Charlie from the next town to come and visit them."

  Tommy was watching him with narrowed eyes.

  "What happened, of course," said Chuck, lifting his glass again, "was that after about a week, the twins weren't fighting each other at all." He drank.

  "All right. All right," said Tommy. "I'll play straight man. Why weren't they fighting with each other?"

  "Because," said Chuck, putting his glass back down again, "they were both too busy fighting with Big Brother Charlie."

  Tommy stared for a long moment. Then he grunted and sat back in his chair, as if he had just had the wind knocked out of him.

  "You see," said Roy, leaning forward over his desk, "what we were required to do here was something impossible. You just don't change centuries-old attitudes of distrust and hatred overnight. Trying to get the Lugh and the Tomah to like each other by any pressures we could bring to bear was like trying to move mountains with toothpicks. Too much mass for too little leverage. But we could change the attitudes of both of them toward us."

  "And what's that supposed to mean?" demanded Tommy, glaring at him.

  "Why, we might—and did—arrange for them to find out that, like the twins, they had more in common with each other than either one of them had with Big Brother Charlie. Not that we wanted them, God forbid, to unite in actively fighting Big Brother: We do need this planet as a space depot. But we wanted to make them see that they two form one unit—with us on the outside. They don't like each other any better now, but they've begun to discover a reason for hanging together."

  "I'm not sure I follow you," said Tommy dryly.

  "What I'm telling you," said Roy, "is that we arranged a demonstration to bring home to them the present situation. They weren't prepared to share this world with each other. But when it came to their both sharing it with a third life form, they began to realize that the closer relative might see more eye-to-eye with them than the distant one. Chuck was under strict orders not to intervene, but to manage things so that each of them would be forced to solve the problems of the other, with no assistance from Earth or its technology."

  "Brother," Chuck grunted, "the way it all worked out I didn't have to 'manage' a thing. The 'accident' was more thorough than we'd planned, and I was pretty much without the assistance of our glorious technology myself. Each of them had problems I couldn't have solved if I'd wanted to . . . but the other one could."

  "Well," Roy nodded, "they are the natives, after all. We are the aliens. Just how alien, it was Chuck's job to demonstrate."

  "You mean—" exploded Tommy, "that you threw away a half-million-dollar vehicle—that you made that crash-landing in the ocean—on purpose!"

  "Off the record, Tommy," said Chuck, holding up a reminding finger. "As for the pot, it's on an undersea peak in forty fathoms. As soon as you can get us some more equipment it'll be duck soup to salvage it."

  "Off the record be hanged!" roared Tommy. "Why, you might have killed them. You might have had one or the other species up in arms! You might—"

  "We thought it was worth the risk," said Chuck mildly. "After all, remember I was sticking my own neck into the same dangers."

  "You thought!" Tommy turned a seething glance on his nephew. He thrust himself out of his chair and stamped up and down the office in a visible effort to control his temper.

  "Progress is not made by rules alone," misquoted Chuck complacently, draining the last scotch out of his glass. "Come back and sit down, Tommy. It's all over now."

  The older man came glowering back and wearily plumped in his chair.

  "All right," he said. "I said off the record, but I didn't expect this. Do you two realize what it is you've just done? Risked the lives of two vital members of intelligent races necessary to our future! Violated every principle of ordinary diplomacy in a harebrained scheme that had nothing more than a wild notion to back it up! And to top it off, involved me—me, a Member of the Government! If this comes out nobody will ever believe I didn't know about it!"

  "All right, Tommy," said Chuck. "We hear you. Now, what are you going to do about it?"

  Earth District Member 439 Thomas L. Wagnall blew out a furious breath.

&
nbsp; "Nothing!" he said, violently. "Nothing."

  "That's what I thought," said Chuck. "Pass the scotch."

  THE GAME OF FIVE

  This may start out like a straightforward adventure yarn (though with a healthy dash of humor) about a reluctant hero who has to make a trek across a considerable expanse of a dangerous planet's landscape against heavy odds . . . and it is all those things, but there's a lot more going on. You'll expect by now that the aliens had better watch their backs, but this time, that's also good advice for some of the humans.

  "You can't do this!" The big young man was furious. His blunt, not-too-intelligent looking features were going lumpy with anger. "This is—" He pounded the desk he sat before with one huge fist, stuck for a moment as to just what it could be—"it's illegal!"

  "Quite legal. A Matter of Expediency, Mr. Yunce," replied the Consul to Yara, cheerfully, waving a smoke tube negligently in his tapering fingers. The Consul's name was Ivor Ben. He was half the size of Coley Yunce, one third the weight, twice the age, fifteen times the aristocrat—and very much in charge.

  "You draft me all the way from Sol Four!" shouted Coley. "I'm a tool designer. You picked me off the available list yourself. You knew my qualifications. You aren't supposed to draft a citizen anyway, except you can't get what you want some other way." His glare threatened to wilt the Consul's boutonniere, but failed to disturb the Counsul. "Damn Government seat-warmers! Can't hire like honest people! Send in for lists of the men you want, and pick out just your boy—never mind he's got business on Arga IV ten weeks from now. And now, when I get here you tell me I'm not going to design tools."

  "That's right," said the Consul.

  "You want me for some back-alley stuff! Well, I won't do it!" roared Coley. "I'll refuse. I'll file a protest back at Sol—" He broke off suddenly, and stared at the Consul. "What makes you so sure I won't?"