Typically stolid, Molders said nothing, contenting himself with listening to Jepson and me. Molders had helped me do the dragging and now neither of us could let go. We’d become fixed to the original victim, bonded like brothers but not talking like brothers, nor full of anything resembling brotherly love.
So we could do nothing but carry Jepson bodily, with our hands sealed to the most inconvenient parts of his anatomy. This meant he had to be borne horizontally and face downward, like a drunken sailor being frogmarched back to ship. He was still adorned with the leaf.
The task wasn’t made any easier or more enjoyable by that young fool Wilson who thought there was something funny in other people’s misfortunes. He followed us tee-heeing and steadily snapping his accursed camera which I could have stuffed down his gullet with the greatest pleasure. He was indecently happy at having no goo on himself.
Jay Score, Brennand, Armstrong, Petersen and Drake met us as we lumbered awkwardly across the sward. They stared curiously at Jepson, listened to him with much respect. We warned them not to touch. The pair of us were far from sprightly by the time we reached the Marathon. Jepson’s weight was only two-thirds normal but after five hundred yards he seemed like the last remains of a glutinous mammoth.
We dumped him on the grass below the open airlock, perforce sitting with him. The faint booming sound continued to throb out of the forest. Jay went into the ship, brought out Sam and Wally to see what they could do about the super-adhesive. The stuff had stiffened and grown hard by now. My hands and fingers felt as though they’d been set into glassite gloves.
Sam and Wally tried cold water, hike-warm water, fairly hot water and very hot water, but none of it did any good. Chief Engineer Douglas had a try with a bottle of rocket-fuel which he frequently used for removing stains, polishing brasses, killing bugs and as a vapour-rub to relieve his lumbago. It could do eighteen other things, too-according to him. But it couldn’t dissolve goo.
Next they tried some specially refined gasoline which Steve Gregory keeps for the crew’s cigarette lighters. They wasted their time. That gasoline could eat up rubber and one or two other things, but not this stuff. Molders sat blue-eyed and placid, his hands fastened in yellow-green glass.
“You sure are in a fix,” said Wilson, with false sympathy. “By gum!”
Sam reappeared with iodine. It didn’t work but it did cause a queer foaming on the surface of the adhesive and made a terrible stench. Molders permitted his face to look slightly pained. Some diluted nitric acid brought bubbles on the surface of the hard goo but achieved no more than that. It was risky stuff to use, anyway.
Frowning to himself, Sam went back to look for some other possible solvent, passed Jay Score coming out to see how we were doing. Jay stumbled as he got near to us, a very strange thing for him to do considering his superhuman sense of balance. His solid bulk accidentally nudged young Wilson between the shoulder blades and that grinning ape promptly flopped against Jepson’s legs where the goo must have remained soft enough to catch hold.
Wilson struggled, started to tie himself up in it, changed his tune when he found it futile. Jepson gave him the sardonic ha-ha as fair swap for a look of sudden death.
Picking up the dropped camera, Jay dangled it from one powerful hand, said with dead-pan contriteness, “I never missed a step before. It was most unfortunate.”
“Unfortunate, nothing!” bawled Wilson, wishing Jay would melt down to a tin puddle.
Just then Sam returned bearing a big glass jar, dribbled some of its contents over my imprisoned hands, the sickly green coating at once thinned to a weak slime and my mitts came free.
“Ammonia,” remarked Sam. He need not have told me: I could smell the pungent stuff. It was an excellent solvent and he soon had us cleaned up.
Then I chased Wilson three times round the ship. He had the advantage of fewer years and was too fast for me. I gave up the pursuit, breathless. We were about to go aboard and tell our tale to the skipper when that tree started threshing again. You could see its deadly branches beating the air and hear the violent swoosh/ of them even from this distance. Pausing beneath the airlock we studied the spectacle wonderingly. Then Jay Score spoke, his tones harsh, metallic.
“Where’s Kli Yang?”
None of us knew. Now I came to trunk of it, I couldn’t recall him being with us as we dragged Jepson home. The last I remembered of him was when he stood beside me right under that tree and his saucer eyes gave me the creeps by carefully scanning two opposite branches at once.
Armstrong dived into the ship, came out with the report that Kli Yang definitely wasn’t among those present. His own eyes as bulgy as the missing Martian’s, young Wilson said he couldn’t recall Kli Yang coming out of the forest. Upon which we snatched our needlers and made for that tree on the run. All the while it continued to larrup around like a crazy thing tied down by its own roots.
Reaching the monstrous growth, we made a circle just beyond the sweep of its leaves, had a look to see where the Martian was enveloped with glue.
He wasn’t.
We discovered him forty feet up the trunk, five of his powerful tentacles clamped around its girth, the other five embracing the green native. The captive struggled wildly and futilely, all the time yelling a high-pitched scream of gibberish.
Carefully Kli Yang edged down the trunk. The way he looked and moved made him resemble an impossible cross between a college professor and an educated octopus. His eyes rolling with terror, the native battered at Kli’s head-and-shoulder harness. Kli blandly ignored this hostility, reached the branch that had trapped Jepson, didn’t descend any further. Retaining a tight hold on the furiously objecting green one, he crept along the whipping limb until he reached its leafless end. At that point he and the native were being waved up and down in twenty-foot arcs.
Timing himself, he cast off at the lowermost point of one downward sweep, scuttled out of reach before another vengeful branch could swat him. Came a singing howl from a near part of the forest and something vaguely like a blue-green coconut soared out on the shadows and broke at Drake’s feet. The queer missile was as thin and brittle as an empty eggshell, had a white inner surface and apparently contained nothing whatever. Taking no notice of the howls or the bomb that wasn’t a bomb, Kli Yang bore his still struggling captive toward the Marathon.
Drake hung back a moment, had a curious look at the coconut or whatever it was, contemptuously kicked its fragment of shell with his boot. At the same time he caught the full benefit of something floating invisibly from the splinters, sucked in his cheeks, screwed up his eyes and backed away fast. Then he retched. He did it with such violence that he fell over as he retreated. We had the sense to pick him up and rush him after Kli Yang without getting too nosey about what had bitten htm. He continued to regurgitate all the way across the grass, recovered only when we came under the ship’s bulging side.
“Holy smoke!” he wheezed, nursing his middle. “What an abominable stench. It’d make a skunk smell like the rose of the animal world!” He wiped his lips. “It made my stomach turn right over.”
We went to see Kli Yang, whose captive now had been conducted to the galley for a peace-making feed. Dragging off his helmet, Kli said, “That tree wasn’t so difficult to mount. It walloped around as I went up but couldn’t get at anything on its own trunk.” He sniffed with displeasure, rubbed his flat, Red Planet face with the flexible tip of a great tentacle. “Don’t know how you primitive bipeds can swallow this soup you call air. I could swim!”
“Where did you find the greenie, Kli?” asked Brennand. “He was stuck to the trunk more than forty feet up. His entire front fitted perfectly into an indentation in the bark, and his back matched the fibrous trunk so well that I couldn’t see him until he moved uneasily as I got close.” He picked up the helmet. “A most remarkable example of natural camouflage.” Using one eye to look at his helmet, he fixed the other on the interested Brennand, made a gesture of disgust. “How about pulling d
own the pressure someplace where higher forms of life can live in peace and comfort?”
“We’ll pump out the port lock,” Brennand promised.
“And don’t be so high and mighty with me, you outsize caricature of a rubber spider.”
“Bah!” retorted Kli Yang, with great dignity. “Who invented chess yet cannot tell a white pawn from a black rook? Who can’t even play duck-on-the-rock without grabbing a load of grief?” With this reference to Terrestrial inexpertness, he slapped his helmet on again and gestured to me to pump it down, which I did. “Thanks!” he said through the diaphragm.
Now to find out something about the greenie.
Captain McNulty himself interviewed the native. The boss sat grandly behind his metal desk, eyed the jittery captive with a mixture of pomposity and kindliness. The native stood before him, his black eyes jerking around with sheer fright. At this close range I could see that he wore a loincloth matching his skin. His back was several shades darker than his front, coarser, more fibrous, with little nodules here and there-perfect simulation of the surface of the tree-trunk on which he had sought refuge. Even his loincloth was darker at the back than the front. His feet were broad and unshod, the toes double-jointed and as long as the fingers of his hands. Except for the loincloth he was completely naked and had no weapons. The peculiar chrysanthemum on his chest attracted general attention.
“Has he eaten?” asked the skipper, full of solicitude.
“He was offered a meal,” Jay told him. “He refused it. He wouldn’t touch it. As far as I can make out, all he wants is to get back to his tree.”
“Hm-m-m,” grunted McNulty. “All in good time.” Assuming the expression of a benevolent uncle, he said to the native, “What is your name?”
Grasping the note of interrogation, the green one waved his arms, broke into an untranslatable tirade. On and on and on he went, helping his gabble with many emphatic but incomprehensible gestures. His language was liquid, his voice singsong.
“I see,” murmured McNulty as the flood of talk petered out. He blinked inquiringly at Jay Score. “Do you suppose this fellow might be telepathic, like those lobster-things were?”
“It is much to be doubted. I’d put him at the mental level of a Congo pygmy-and maybe lower. He doesn’t possess so much as a simple spear, let alone bow and arrow or a blowgun.”
“I think you’re right. His intelligence doesn’t seem in any way remarkable.” Still maintaining his soothing paternal air, McNulty went on, “There’s no common basis on which we can gain his understanding at this stage, so I guess we’ll have to create one. We’ll dig up our best linguist, set him to learning the rudiments of this fellow’s language and teach him some of ours.”
“Let me have a try,” Jay suggested. “I have the advantage of a mechanical memory.”
He lumbered nearer the green native, his huge, well-proportioned body moving silently on the sponge-rubber cushions of his feet. The native didn’t like his size nor his quietness, neither did he approve of those brightly lit eyes. He edged away from Jay, edged right to the wall, his optics darting hither and thither as vainly he sought an avenue of escape.
Ceasing his approach as he noted the other’s fear, Jay slapped his own head with a hand that could have knocked mine clean off my neck. “Head,” he said. He did it half a dozen times, and repeated, “Head, head!”
The green one couldn’t have been so stupid; he caught on, faltered, “Mah.”
Touching his own bean again, Jay inquired, “Mah?”
“Bya!” lilted the other, starting to regain his composure.
“See, it’s dead easy,” approved McNulty, beginning to fancy his own linguistic abilities. “Mah-head; bya-yes.”
“Not necessarily,” Jay contradicted. “It all depends upon how his mind translated my action. Mah might mean head, face, skull, man, hair, god, mind, thought, or alien, or even the colour black. If he’s thinking of my hair as contrasted with his own then mah probably does mean black while bya may mean not yes, but green.”
“Oh, I hadn’t thought of that.” The skipper looked crushed.
“We’ll have to carry on with this performance until we’ve picked up enough words to form structurally simple sentences. Then we should be able to deduce further meanings from contexts. Give me two or three days.”
“Go ahead, then. Do your best, Jay. We can’t expect to be able to talk turkey in the first five minutes-it isn’t reasonable.”
Taking the captive to the rest-room, Jay summoned Minshull and Petersen. He thought three might as well learn something as one. Minshull and Peterson both excelled at languages, speaking Ido, Esperanto, Venusian, high Martian and low Martian-especially low. They were the only ones aboard the ship who gave the chess-maniacs a boiling in their own jargon.
I found Sam in the armoury waiting to hand in the stuff he’d taken out, and I asked, “What did you see from the lifeboat, Sam?”
“Not so much. We weren’t out long enough. Didn’t get more than a hundred and twenty miles away. Forest, forest, nothing but forest with a few glades scattered here and there. A couple of the glades were large, the size of counties. The biggest in view lay at the end of a long blue lake. We saw several rivers and streams.”
“Any signs of superior life?”
“None.” He gestured down the passage toward the rest-room where Jay and the others were cross-examining the native, or trying to. “It seems that there must be higher life but you can detect no signs of it from above. Everything remains hidden under thick foliage. Wilson is processing his reel in the hope of finding something our eyes missed. I doubt whether his camera caught anything remarkable.”
“Oh, well,” I shrugged, “One hundred twenty miles in one direction is nothing by which to estimate an entire world. I don’t let myself be deluded, not since that drummer sold me a can of striped paint.”
“Didn’t it come out?”
“I laid it wrong side up,” I told him.
It was right in the middle of that hoary banter that a powerful idea smote me. Following Sam out of the armoury, I made a rush for the radio-room. Steve Gregory sat by his instruments and tried to look busy doing nothing. I was all set to paralyse him with the sheer brilliance of my brainwave.
As Steve cocked an eyebrow at me, I said, “Hey, how about combing the wave-bands?”
“How about combing your hair?” he gave me, frowning.
“My hair is nit and tiddy,” I retorted. “Remember those weird whistles and waterfalls we picked up on Mechanistria? Well, if there are any high-lifes on this ball of dirt they may know how to make noises. They’d radiate and you could detect it.”
“Sure.” He kept his bushy eyebrows still for once, but spoiled it by wiggling his large ears. “If they were radiating.”
“Then why not go ahead and find out? It would tell us something. What’re you waiting for?”
“Look,” he said, somewhat deliberately, “have you kept the needlers cleaned, charged and ready for action?”
I stared at him. “You bet I have. They’re always ready. That’s my job.”
“And this one’s mine!” He waved the ears again. “You are approximately four hours behind the times. I scoured the ether right after we landed, found nothing but a faint, unmodulated hiss on twelve point three metres. That is Rigel’s characteristic discharge and it came from the same direction. D’you think I’m like that snake-armored snorer Sug Farn?”
“No, I don’t. Sorry, Steve-it just struck me as a bright idea.”
“Oh, it’s all right, sergeant,” he said amiably. “Every man to his job and every tail-mechanic to his dirt.” Idly he twiddled the dials of his slow-motion selectors.
The loudspeaker coughed as if clearing its throat and announced in sharp tones, “Pip-pip-whop! Pip-pip-whop!”
Nothing could have been better calculated to upset the determined serenity of his brows. I’ll swear that after they’d climbed into his hair they continued over the top, down the back and lodged
someplace under his collar.
“Morse,” he said in the complaining tone of a hurt child.
“I always thought Morse was an earth-code, not an alien code,” I commented. “Anyway, if it is Morse you’ll be able to translate it.” I paused while the loudspeaker shouted me down with, “Pip-pipper-pee-eep-whop!” then concluded, “Every cat to its ash-can.”
“ ‘Tain’t Morse,” he contradicted himself. “But it’s spark signals.” He might have frowned if it hadn’t taken too long to drag the eyebrows back to his face. Giving me one of those tragic looks you get sometimes, he snatched a pad and started recording the impulses.
The spacesuits, pom-pom chargers and other things had to be serviced, so I left him, returned to the armoury, carried on with my own work. He was still fiddling around when darkness fell. So were Jay and his gang, but not for long.
The sun went down, its long, greenish streamers gradually fading from the sky. A velvet pall came over the forest and glade. I was ambling along the passage toward the galley and near the rest-room when its door jerked open and the green native burst out. His face expressed desperation, his legs were moving as if there were a thousand international smackers tied to the winning tape.
Minshull yelped back in the room as the native went full tilt into my arms. The greenie squirmed like an eel, beat at my features, used his bare feet to try to kick my legs off my torso. His rough, harsh body exuded a weak odour of pineapple-cinnamon.
The others came out at the run, got him tight, talked to him in halting words until he relaxed at least a little. His shifty eyes full of anxiety, he jabbered excitedly at Jay Score, making urgent gestures and waving his woody arms around in a way that reminded me of branches beating the air. Jay managed to soothe him with fair if faltering speech. They had picked up enough words to get along though not enough for perfect understanding. Still, they were managing, after a fashion.
Adventures in Time and Space Page 30
