Eventually Jay said to Petersen, “I think you’d better tell the skipper that I want to let Kala go.”
Petersen cleared off, returned in a minute. “He says do whatever you think is best.”
“Good.” Conducting the native to the opening in the starboard lock, Jay yapped at him briefly and gave him the sweet release. The greenie didn’t need any second telling; he dived off the rim. Someone in the dark forest must have owed him for a loincloth because his feet made swift brushing sounds as if he fled across the turf like one who has only seconds to spare. Jay stood framed by the rim, his glowing orbs staring into outer gloom.
“Why open the cage, Jay?”
Turning, his said to me, “I’ve tried to persuade him to come back at sunrise. He may or he may not-it remains to be seen. We didn’t have much time to get much out of him, but his language is exceedingly simple and we picked up enough of it to learn that he calls himself Kala of the tribe of Ka. All members of his group are named Ka-something, such as Kalee, Ka’noo, or Ka-heer.”
“Like the Martians with their Klis, Leids and Sugs.”
“Yes,” he agreed, not caring what the Martains might think of being compared with the green aborigines. He also told us that every man has his tree and every gnat its lichen. I don’t understand what he means by that, but he satisfied me that in some mysterious manner his life depended upon him being with his tree during darkness. It was imperative. I tried to delay him but his need was pitiful. He preferred to die rather than be away from his tree.
“Sounds silly to me.” I blew my nose, grinned at a passing thought. “It would sound far sillier to Jepson.”
Jay stared thoughtfully into the deep murkiness from which came strange nocturnal scents and those everlasting pulsations suggestive of muted drums.
“We also learned that there are others in the dark, others mightier than the Ka. They have much garnish.”
“They have what?” I inquired.
“Much garnish,” he repeated. “That word defeated me. He used it again and again. He said that the Marathon has much garnish. I have much garnish, and Kli Yang has much garnish. Captain McNulty, it appears, has only a little. The Ka have none at all.” “Is it something of which he’s afraid?” “Not exactly. He views it with awe rather than fear. As far as I can make out, anything unusual or surprising or unique is chockful of garnish. Anything merely abnormal has a lesser amount of garnish. Anything ordinary has none whatever.”
“This goes to show the difficulties of communication. It isn’t as easy as people back home think it ought to be.”
“No, it isn’t.” His gleaming optics shifted to Armstrong who was leaning against the pom-pom. “Are you doing this guard?”
“Until midnight, then Kelly takes over.”
Picking Kelly for guard struck me as poor psychology. That tattooed specimen was permanently attached to a four-foot spanner and in any crisis was likely to wield said instrument in preference to such newfangled articles as pom-poms and needlers. Rumour insisted that he had clung to the lump of iron at his own wedding and that his wife was trying for a divorce based on the thing’s effect on her morale. My private opinion was that Kelly was a Neanderthal misplaced in time by many centuries.
“We’ll play safe and fasten the lock,” decided Jay, “fresh air or no fresh air.”
That was characteristic of him and what made him seem so thoroughly human-he could mention fresh air for all the world as if he used it himself. The casual way he did it made you forget that he’d never taken a real breath since the day old Knud Johannsen stood him on his feet and gave him animation.
“Let’s plug-in the turnscrew.”
Turning his back upon the throbbing dark, he started to walk into the lighted airlock, treading carefully along the cutout through the threads.
A piping voice came out of the night and ejaculated, “Nou baiders!”
Jay halted in mid-step. Feet padded outside just underneath the lock’s opening. Something spherical and glassy soared through the worm, skidded over Jay’s left shoulder, broke to shards on the top recoil chamber of the pom-pom. A thin, golden and highly volatile liquid splashed out of it and vapourised instantly.
Reversing on one heel, Jay faced the black opening. The startled Armstrong made a jump to the wall, put out a thumb to jab the stud of the general alarm. He didn’t make it. Without touching the stud he went down as though slugged by someone invisible.
My needler out, its muzzle extended, I moved cautiously forward, saw the glittering thread of the worm making metallic rings around the picture of Jay posing against the ebony background. It was a mistake; I ought to have had a stab at that stud.
Three steps and the stuff from that busted bottle got me the same way as it had caught Armstrong. The picture of Jay swelled like a blown bubble, the circle widened, grew enormous, the threads of the worm became broad and deep with Jay as a gigantic figure standing in the middle of them. The bubble burst and I went down with my mind awhirl and fading away.
Don’t know how long I remained corpselike, for when I eventually opened my eyes it was with the faint uncertain memory of hearing much shouting and stamping of feet around my prostrate form. Things must have happened over and all around me while I lay like so much discarded meat. Now I was still flat. I reposed full length on deep, dew-soaked turf with the throbbing forest close on my left, the indifferent stars peering down from the vault of night. I was bound like an Egyptian mummy. Jepson made another mummy at one side, Armstrong at the other. Several more reposed beyond them.
Three or four hundred yards away angry noises were spoiling the silence of the dark, a mixture of Terrestial oaths and queer, alien pipings. The Marathon lay that way; all that could be seen of her was the funnel of light pouring from her open lock. The light flickered, waxed and waned, once or twice was momentarily obliterated. Evidently a struggle was taking place in the shaft of light which became blocked as the fight swayed to and fro.
Jepson snored as though it were Sunday afternoon in the old home town, but Armstrong had recovered the use of his wits and tongue. He employed both with vigour and imagination. Rolling over, he started chewing at Blaine’s bindings. A vaguely human-looking shape came silently from the darkness and smote downward. Armstrong went quiet.
Blinking my eyes, I adapted them sufficiently to discern several more shapes standing around half-hidden in the bad light. Keeping still and behaving myself, I thought uncomplimentary thoughts about McNulty, the Marathon, old Flettner who invented the ship, plus all the public spirited folk who’d backed him morally and financially. I’d often had the feeling that sooner or later they’d be the death of me and now it seemed that said feeling was going to prove justified.
Deep down inside a tiny, nagging voice said, “Sergeant, do you remember that promise you made your mother about bad language? Do you remember that time you gave a Venusian guppy a can of condensed milk in exchange for a pinfire opal not as big as the city clock? Repent, sergeant, while yet there is time!”
So I laid in peace and did a bit of vain regretting. Over there by the intermittent light-shaft the pipings rose crescendo and the few earthly voices died away. There sounded occasional smashings of fragile, brittle things. More dim shapes brought more bodies, dumped them nearby and melted back into the gloom. I wish I could have counted the catch but darkness wouldn’t permit it. All the newcomers were unconscious but revived rapidly. I could recognize Brennand’s angry voice and the skipper’s asthmatic breathing.
A cold blue star shone through a thin fringe of drifting clouds as the fight ended. The succeeding pause was ghastly: a solemn, brooding silence broken only by a faint scuffle of many naked feet in the grass, and by the steady booming in the forest.
Forms gathered around in large numbers. The glade was full of them. Hands lifted me, tested my bonds, tossed me into a wicker hammock and I was borne along shoulder-high. I felt like a defunct warthog being toted in some hunter’s line of native porters. Just meat-that was me. Just a trophy of the
chase. I wondered whether God would confront me with that guppy.
The caravan filed into the forest, my direction of progress being head-first. Another hammock followed immediately behind and I could sense rather than see a string of them farther back.
Jepson was the sardine following me; he went horizontally along making a loud recitation about how he’d been tied up ever since he landed in this world. Not knowing the astronomer who had selected this planet for investigation, he identified him by giving him a name in which no man would take pride and embellished it with a long series of fanciful and vulgar titles.
Curving warily around one semivisible tree, our line marched boldly under the next, dodged the third and fourth. How they could tell one growth from another in this lousy light was beyond my comprehension.
We had just come deeply into the deepest darkness when a tremendous explosion sounded way back in the glade and a column of fire lit up the sky. Even the fire looked faintly green. Our line halted. Two or three hundred voices cheeped querulously, starting from the front and going past me to a hundred yards farther back.
“They’ve blown up the Marathon,” thought I. “Oh, well, all things come to an end, including the flimsiest hope of returning home.”
Surrounding cheeping and piping became drowned out as the noisy pillar of flame built itself up to an earth-shaking roar. My hammock tilted and swayed while those holding it reacted in alarm. The way they put on the pace had to be experienced to be believed; I almost flew along, avoiding one tree but not another, sometimes turning at safe distance from unseen growths that were not trees at all. My heart lay down in my boots.
The bellowing in the glade suddenly ended in a mighty thump and a crimson spear flung itself into the sky and stabbed through the clouds. It was a spectacle I’d seen many a time before but had thought never to see again. A spaceship going up! It was the Marathon!
Were these alien creatures so talented that they could grab a thoroughly strange vessel, quickly understand its workings and take it wherever they wanted? Were these the beings described as superior to the Ka? The whole situation struck me as too incongruous for belief: expert astronauts carrying prisoners in primitive wicker hammocks. Besides, the agitated way in which they’d jabbered and put on the pace suggested that the Marathon’s spectacular spurt of life had taken them by surprise. The mystery was one I couldn’t solve nohow.
While the fiery trail of the ship arced northward our party hurriedly pressed on. There was one stop during which our captors congregated together, but their continual piping showed that they had not halted for a meal.
Twenty minutes later there came a brief hold-up and a first-class row up front. Guards kept close to us while a short distance ahead sounded a vocal uproar in which many voices vied with a loud mewing and much beating of great branches. I tried to imagine a bright green tiger. Things went phut-phut like fat darts plonking into wet leather. The mewing shot up to a squeal then ended in a choking cough. We moved on, making a wide bend around a monstrous growth that I strove in vain to see. If only this world had possessed a moon. But there wasn’t a moon; only the stars and the clouds and the menacing forest from which came that all-pervading beat, beat, beat.
Dawn broke as the line warily dodged a small clump of apparently innocent saplings. We arrived at the bank of a wide river. Here, for the first time, we could give our guards a close examination as they shepherded burdens and bearers down the bank.
These were creatures very much like the Ka, only taller, more slender, with large intelligent eyes. They had similarly fibrous skins, grayer, not so green, and the same chrysanthemums on their chests. Unlike the Ka, their middles were clothed in pleated garments, they had harnesses of woven fibre, plus various wooden accoutrements like complicated blowguns and bowl-shaped vessels having a bulbous container in the base. A few also bore small panniers holding glassy spheres like the one that had laid me flat in the airlock.
Craning my head I tried to see more but could discern only Jepson in the next hammock and Brennand in the one behind that. The next instant, mine was unceremoniously dumped by the water’s brink, Jepson’s alongside me, the rest in a level row.
Turning his face toward me, Jepson said, “The smelly bums!”
“Take it easy,” I advised. “If we play it their way they may give us more rope.”
“And,” he went on, viciously, “I don’t care for guys who try to be witty at the wrong time.”
“I wasn’t trying to be witty,” I snapped back. “We’re bound to hold our own opinions, aren’t we? You’re all tied up.”
“There you go again!” He did some furious writhing around and strove to stretch his fastenings. “Some day I’ll tie you, and for keeps!”
I didn’t answer. No use wasting breath on a man in a bad mood. Daylight waxed stronger, penetrating the thin green mist hanging over the green river. I could now see Blaine and Minshull supine beyond Armstrong and the portly form of McNulty beyond them.
Ten of our captors went along the line opening jackets and shirts, baring our chests. They had with them a supply of the bowls with bulbous containers. A pair of them pawed my uniform apart, got my chest exposed, and stared at it. Something about my bosom struck them as wonderful beyond the power of telling, and it wasn’t the spare beard I kept there.
It didn’t require overmuch brains to guess that they missed my chrysanthemum and couldn’t figure how I’d got through life without it. Calling their fellows, the entire gang debated the subject while I lay bared before them like a sacrificial lamb. Finally they decided that they had struck a new and absorbing line of research and went hot along the trail.
Seizing Blaine and the boob who’d played duck-on-the-rock, they untied them, stripped them down to the raw, studied them like prize cattle at an agricultural exhibition. One of them prodded Blaine in the solar plexus where his whatzis ought to have been, whereat he jumped on the fellow with a savage whoop and brought him down. The other nudist promptly grabbed the opportunity to join in. Armstrong, who never had been a ninety pound weakling, made a mighty effort, burst his bonds, came up dark-faced with the strain and roared into the fray. Fragments of his mangled hammock swung and bounced on his beefy back.
All along the line we made violent attempts to burst out of bonds but without avail. Green ones centred on the scene of the struggle, brittle spheres plopped all around the three fighting Earthmen. The tail-mechanic and Blaine collapsed together. Armstrong shuddered and bawled, teetered and pulled himself together, held out long enough to toss two natives into the river and slug the daylights out of a third. Then he too went down.
Dragging their fellows from the river, the green ones dressed the slumber-wrapped Blaine and the other, added Armstrong, securely tied all three. Once more they conferred. I couldn’t make head or tail of their canary-talk but conceived the notion that in their opinion we had an uncertain quantity of gamish.
My bonds began to irk. I’d have given a lot for the chance to go into action and bash a few green heads. Twisting myself, I used a lacklustre eye to study a tiny shrub growing near the side of my hammock. The shrub jiggled its midget branches and emitted a smell of burned caramel. Local vegetation was all movement and stinks.
Abruptly the green ones ended their talk, crowded down the bank of the river. A flotilla of long, narrow, shapely vessels swept round the bend, foamed in to the bank. We were carted on board, five prisoners per boat. Thrusting away from the bank, our crew of twenty pulled and pushed rhythmically at a row of ten wooden levers on each side of the boat, drove the vessel upstream at fair pace and left a narrow wake on the river’s surface.
“I had a grandfather who was a missionary,” I told Jepson. “He got into trouble of this kind.”
“So what?”
“He went to pot,” I said.
“I sincerely hope you do likewise,” offered Jepson, without charity. He strained futilely at his bindings.
For lack of anything better to occupy my attention I watched the w
ay in which our crew handled their vessel, came to the conclusion that the levers worked two large pumps or maybe a battery of small ones, and that the vessel made progress by sucking water in at the bow and squirting it out at the stern.
Later, I found I was wrong. Their method was much simpler than that. The levers connected under water with twenty split-bladed paddles. The two flaps of each blade closed together on one stroke, opened on the return stroke. By this means they got along rather faster than they could have done with oars since the subsurface paddles moved forward and back with only their own weight on the boat-they didn’t have to be raised, turned and lowered by the muscles of the rowers.
The sun climbed higher while we made way steadily upriver. At the second bend the waterway split, its current flowing at increased pace on either side of a rocky islet about a hundred yards long. A group of four huge, sinister-looking trees stood at the upstream end of the islet, their trunks and limbs a sombre green verging on black. Each of them bore a horizontal spray of big branches above which the trunk continued to soar to a feathery crest sixty feet higher. Each of these branches ended in half a dozen thick, powerful digits that curved downward like the fingers of a clutching hand.
The crews speeded up their levers to the limit. The string of boats headed into the right-hand channel over which reached the biggest and most menacing of those branches. As the first boat’s prow came underneath it, the branch hungrily twitched its fingers. It was no illusion: I saw it as clearly as I see my trip bonus when they slide it toward me across the mahogany. That mighty limb was getting all set to grab and from its size and spread I reckoned it could pluck the entire boatload clean out of the water and do things of which I didn’t care to think.
But it didn’t do it. Just as that boat came into the danger area its helmsman stood up and yelled a stream of gibberish at the tree. The fingers relaxed. The helmsman of the next boat did the same. And the next. Then mine. Flat on my back, as ready for action as a corpse, I gaped at that enormous neck-wringer while all too slowly it came on, passed above and fell behind. Our helmsman went silent; and the one in the following boat took up the tale. There was dampness down my spine.
Adventures in Time and Space Page 31
