‘You mean—’ Svoboda’s dulled understanding groped after significance. ‘You mean you’ve been testing those things when you should have been sleeping?’
‘I couldn’t sleep much anyway. And I’d brought my kit along because … for the same reason … Leigh wants to promote that expedition. The highlands and lowlands are separate ecological zones. The few lowland species he’s studied so far have given him hope that there may be many down here which are fit to eat. I’m beginning to think that must be true. These specimens here I gathered within a hundred meters of camp. All are safe.’ The close-cropped bony head bowed low. ‘Father,’ Coffin murmured, ‘I thank Thee.’
‘You sure?’ Svoboda asked, open-mouthed.
‘I tried them myself, a couple of hours ago. Haven’t gotten sick yet. They taste quite good, in fact’ Coffin smiled. It seemed to hurt his face, but was a smile nevertheless. ‘Now, in autumn, the woods must be full of such fruit. I found poisonous ones too, of course, but they were obviously kin to highland forms we already know about. You can see that from the leaves alone.’
‘Jumping Judas!’ Svoboda’s knees gave way. He sat down on the grass. ‘You tried it yourself—’
An odd serenity grew in the other man. ‘On the basis of the tests, the chance of these things being safe is good. But the final test was to eat them. If it’s God’s will that we find Danny alive, they are indeed safe.’
‘But… if you keel over … I can’t pack you out. You’ll die!’
Coffin ignored the protest. ‘You get my idea, don’t you?’ he said earnestly. ‘By the time he got this far, Danny must have been ravenous. He’s so small, too. He’d forget the prohibition and pluck something from a tree. But I think … I trust… God would strengthen his common sense, so he’d leave those fruits alone that he could tell by their appearance must be poisonous. Instead, he’d eat things like these before me.
‘If I don’t get sick, he hasn’t. And – we needn’t worry about food supplies, you and I. We can live off the country and continue the search for days.’
‘Are you insane?’ Svoboda breathed.
Coffin began to dismantle the apparatus. ‘Why don’t you make chow while I pack?’ he asked mildly.
‘Look here. Just a minute. You look here. I’ll carry on till nightfall, since we do have proper stores for that long. But then we’ll make camp for the dark hours —’
‘Why? We have flashlights. We can also search by night, however slowly.’
‘Because it’d be as fatal to break a leg in some animal burrow as it would be to trust ourselves to your neolithic God,’ Svoboda exploded. ‘Tomorrow at dawn I head back.’
Coffin reddened but suppressed a retort. ‘Let’s not argue about that now,’ he said after a moment. ‘We may find him before sunset, you know. Come, do start some breakfast.’
They ate in silence. Trying to forget the ache in his head and muscles and to stop wearing himself out with tension, Svoboda looked at the woodland.
However oppressive the air, he could not deny that he saw majesty. They sat in a little meadow where a slow wind tossed the grass in bluish-green waves. Here and there stood dense bushes with berry clusters the color of rubies. The trees round about were tall and thick. One species resembled live oak – a trifle – the boles covered with what might on Earth have been called moss. Another was reminiscent of juniper, but the bark a deep red. A third was slim and white, crowned by leaves that were not solid but an intricate lacework. Between the trunks was underbrush, primitive plants whose leafage was a fringe along a thin flexible stalk. When wind or a foot passed through, a whispering rippled outward. Looking down high archways of branches, the human eye soon found darkness; but not unrelieved, for luminous fungi glimmered purple and gold out there.
The sky overhead was milky. It diffused radiation till you could not tell where the sun was, and no shadows were cast. Yet the light was ample: soothing, in fact, after years of the brilliance that bathed High America. A few weather clouds scudded beneath the permanent layer. (Which was not really permanent; there were often rifts, wonderfully blue.) The wind lulled in the trees.
If I could only stand the air! Svoboda thought.
If, as Coffin’s findings suggested, indigenous lowland species actually were more beneficial than harmful to man, then man on Rustum was doubly tantalized. No doubt a settler here would have to supplement his diet with a few Terrestrial plants, but they need only be a few. Corn and potatoes, say, which ought to thrive under these conditions. For the rest, one might range freely over the planet….But the damned atmosphere; forbade it.
Svoboda stole a glance at Coffin. The other’s long body was more at ease than Svoboda remembered ever seeing; a raptness lay on the lantern-jawed countenance. No doubt he saw his discovery as a special dispensation, a chance to redeem his sin of letting Danny run away in the first place. How long will he keep blundering around before he accepts that the boy is dead at the foot of that cliff? Till one or the other of us is dead, too? That won’t take many Rustum days, in a chaos of unknown life forms, with our bodies poisoned by each breath we draw.
I will not stay down here with a lunatic.
Svoboda touched the pistol at his side and looked toward Coffin’s. But will he let me go back?
Resolution came. No need to provoke a quarrel yet, when twenty-odd hours of daylight remained. But tomorrow morning, or tonight if he insisted on proceeding in the dark, Coffin must somehow be disarmed and brought home at gun point.
I wonder if Teresa will thank me. Or forgive me.
Svoboda stubbed out his cigaret. ‘Let’s go,’ he said.
7
The crisis came late in the afternoon.
They had lost all sense of time. Now and then they looked at their watches and noticed, in a dull far-off way, that the hands stood at a different angle. They took rest periods which became ever more frequent, but those were merely intervals of lying and staring upward. Once or twice they bolted some food and gulped some tea, hardly noticing it. Appetite had dwindled with the growth of physical wretchedness.
Narcosis, Coffin knew. His brain dragged the thought out word by word. Too much carbon dioxide. Now there’s starting to be too much nitrogen. The extra oxygen doesn’t help appreciably. It’s raw in the lungs.
Thy will be done. But God’s help was withdrawn. It had not been mercy when the fruit was found edible. It had looked that way at the time – that He who fed the children of Israel in the wilderness would not let Danny die – but as he fought through a wall of vines and staggered into a thorn-bush, Coffin understood that the food was a command. Since God had made it possible to search this kettle of hell in detail, His servant Joshua must do so.
No, I’m not that crazy. Am I? To think the Lord would remake a planet – or design it from the beginning, five billion years ago – to punish my one self.
I’m only trying to do my duty.
O Teresa, comfort me now! But her eyes and hands and voice were lost behind the clouds. There was only this forest, which fought him, and the breath that whined in his gullet. Only heat, and thirst, and pain, and thick alien smells, and a creeper that snared his feet so he crashed into a tree.
Somewhere a creature cawed, like laughing.
Coffin shook his head to clear it. That was a mistake. The top of his skull seemed to tear off. He wondered if he dared swallow another aspirin. Better not. Save them.
It flashed in him: how queerly life worked out! Had it not been for that message sent after the fleet, he might be a spaceman yet. He might at this moment stand with Nils Kivi under a new sun, on a clean new world. Perhaps not, of course. Perhaps Earth had finally abandoned the star argosies, and the ships swung hollow about a planet that had ceased to breed men who wondered. But Coffin liked to think his old friends were still pursuing their trade. Vicarious pleasure, after a day breathing dust on a tractor.
To be sure, I would never have married Teresa.
Suddenly the commonplace observation, which he had ma
de daily since he renounced his hopes, exploded. It struck him, so hard that he stopped and gasped, that she was not a consolation prize. If he could go back and undo those years, he wouldn’t.
‘What’s the matter?’ Svoboda croaked.
Coffin glanced back. The other face, dark-haired, hooknosed, stubbly and sweaty and gaunt, seemed to waver in a fog of heat and silence, against a cosmos of blue-green leaves. ‘Nothing,’ he said.
‘I think we’d better change course.’ Svoboda gestured to the compass clipped on his belt. ‘If we want to maintain the spiral.’
‘Not immediately,’ Coffin said.
‘How come?’
Coffin didn’t feel like explanations. He turned and lurched onward. He was too full of his own reassessment for speech.
But his body lacked strength to preserve the wonder. He began considering the immediate problem, how to bring Danny back for her. A lost and frightened boy would tend to follow the present sharp downgrade rather than go in a circle. Hence a straight line was a better search pattern than a spiral. Wasn’t that so? One had to guess. God wouldn’t condemn you for guessing wrong. Or anyhow, He might forgive you for Teresa’s sake. The object of life was not to avoid a Jonathan Edwards hellfire, but to be upright and honorable.
Not that men ever achieved that object. Himself, Joshua Coffin, least of all. But he tried – sometimes. And he tried to teach his children the same ideal. They’d need it, not only for its own sake but as an added strength on this cruel planet. No, wrong; Rustum was not cruel. Rustum was simply big. And Teresa had said to him so often, honor wasn’t enough. Survival wasn’t enough. You had to be kind as well. Christ knew she had been kind to him, kinder than he deserved, kindest on those nights when the remembrance of his guilt came back. He had been too demanding, because he was afraid. The small grubby hands that plucked at his clothes were not a duty. Well, naturally they were, but duty and pleasure weren’t necessarily separate. He’d always understood that. His duty as the captain of a ship had been his pleasure. But when it came to people, he had only understood it with the top of his mind. Which didn’t count. He had to come down into this thick and silent forest before the knowledge really entered him. The Buddhists talked about living in the moment, unburdened by past or future. He had scorned it as an excuse for self-indulgence. But here, now, in some fashion he could see how difficult a way that was to travel. And was it so unlike the Christian’s ‘born again’?
His thoughts swirled into total confusion and were lost. Nothing remained but the tanglewood.
Until they emerged at the canyon.
Coffin had gotten so used to pushing through underbrush and climbing over logs that the sudden lack of resistance threw him to one knee. The pain jabbed tears from his eyes but called his mind back to lame life. Beside him, Svoboda drew a sharp breath, a sound quickly scattered by the wind that went booming under the sky.
Here the mountainside became so steep so fast that the slope was almost a cliff. The forest made a wall along its top. Down the sides, where the soil was eroded, there grew only grass and a few stunted trees. Boulders lay strewn about and crags lifted weather-gnawed heads toward the rim. The opposite side was considerably lower, dim and blue to the eye, easily twenty kilometers away. The same vagueness of sheer distance blurred the ends of the gorge. Coffin had an impression it was stupendously long, whole mountains riven asunder, but could make out no details. He thought he glimpsed a river at the bottom, but of that he was also unsure. Too many pinnacles and bluffs, too much space, lay between.
He knew he should look on this masterwork of God with awe, but his head throbbed and his eyeballs felt ready to burst. He seated himself by Svoboda. Each movement was a separate task. His hands and feet were like chunks of lead.
Svoboda had struck a cigaret. The remaining rational part of Coffin thought, I wish he wouldn’t poison himself like that. He’s too good a fellow. The wind ruffled Svoboda’s hair, as it did the leaves at their backs and the grasses beneath.
‘Another Cleft,’ the miner said inanely, ‘at right angles to the one we know.’
‘And we are the first of the human race to see it,’ Coffin answered, wishing he were not too miserable to savor the fact.
Svoboda seemed equally blunted. ‘Yeh. We’ve come further than the previous ground expedition, and the airborne trips to sea level never went in this direction. They have noted a lot such gashes elsewhere, though. Some tectonic process must cause them. A denser planet than Earth can hardly have identical geology. We certainly do get higher mountains here.’
‘This isn’t as sheer as the Cleft,’ Coffin heard himself reply. ‘The sides can retain soil, you notice. It’s wider and longer, of course.’
‘You’d expect that, where the topography is a bit less vertical.’ Svoboda sucked smoke, coughed, and stubbed out the cigaret. ‘Damn! I can’t take tobacco any more, in this air. What’re we mumbling about, anyhow?’
‘Nothing important.’ Coffin leaned against his pack. The wind blew the sweat out of his clothes so fast that he was soon chilled. The forest roared with wind. Its velocity was not great, but the pressure made it a near gale.
Windpower would be valuable when men were finally able to move down off the plateaux. When would that be? Not for many generations, surely. The mills of the gods grind slowly, but they grind exceedingly small. Not always slowly, though. The mills of change had ground faster than the dinosaurs could adapt to an altering climate, faster than science and technology could evolve to keep Earth’s ex ploding population civilized. All Rustum was a millstone, turning and turning among the stars, and the seed of man was ground to powder, for it repented the Lord that He had made man ‘Well,’ said Svoboda, ‘he’d scarcely have entered this ditch, so we’d better modify our search pattern.’
His words were such a welcome interruption, jarring Coffin from half-awake nightmare, that their meaning didn’t penetrate at once. ‘Eh?’
Svoboda scowled at him. ‘By heaven, you look like a reclaimed corpse. I don’t think you can even last out this day.’
Coffin struggled to sit up straight. ‘Yes, yes. I’ll get by,’ he said thickly. ‘What are you suggesting, though? About our course,’ he added with care, to make sure Svoboda understood. Communication seemed intolerably difficult. Sand in my synapses. I can’t think any more. Neither can he. But I can keep going after my brains have quit. I’m not sure he can, or will.
‘I was about to propose we follow the verge of this canyon southward till dark, then tomorrow morning cut directly back toward the Cleft. That way we’ll have described a large triangle.’
‘But what if he went north? We have to work northward also.’
Svoboda shrugged. ‘We can head north instead of south if you’d rather. It’s a toss-up. But not both directions. We are not staying at this level past tomorrow. That’s too big a risk. We haven’t the right to take it. Not with families to support.’
‘But Danny isn’t dead,’ Coffin pleaded. ‘We can’t abandon him.’
‘Look,’ said Svoboda. He sat cross-legged, ran a hand through his hair, gestured with an open palm. The horror was his trying to be reasonable, Coffin thought, and making nothing but empty noises. ‘Let’s assume the kid did not go off that cliff by the waterfall. Let’s assume he reached the woods and did not eat something poison, or starve for fear of eating anything. Let’s assume he did not drown in a pond, or get stung by one of the giant venom bees that’ve been seen in this country, or get attacked by some local equivalent of a catling. Those are damned big assumptions, too big for men to stake their lives on, but I’ll grant them for the sake of argument. I’ll assume he went blindly on in the forest, trying to find his way back but getting more and more lost, gradually slipping further and further down the mountainside. Well, then, do you realize how this air would weaken him? It’s all I can do to move. After three or four days breathing this stuff, I wouldn’t be fit for anything but to he down and die. Danny’s – he was – a child. Higher metabolism. Greater
lung area relative to weight. Less muscular endurance.
‘Coffin, he’s dead.’
‘No.’
Svoboda struck the ground with his fist till he had mastered himself. ‘Have it your way.’ The wind harried his words. ‘I said I’d humor you – and Wolfe – to the extent of making that zigzag return tomorrow. That’s the end, however. Savvy?’
‘We could use a part of the night,’ Coffin urged. ‘Can you sit idle by a fire, thirty mortal hours, knowing Danny may be—’
‘That’s enough! Shut up before I belt you one!’
Coffin locked eyes with him. Svoboda’s mouth grew taut. The last sense of his own righteousness drained from Coffin. Nothing remained but regret, that he could not stop what must now happen. For a moment the sadness almost overrode his headache. He crawled to his feet. The wind pushed at his back, he must lean into it, the wind hooted and tried to push him southward along the canyon, which resounded with its noise. Svoboda still sat. Forgive me. Judith was always good to Teresa. Forgive me, Jan.
Coffin reached for his pistol.
‘Oh, no, you don’t!‘ Svoboda surged to his knees and threw himself forward. They went over together.
Svoboda’s hand clamped on Coffin’s gun arm. Coffin struck at him with his left fist. The younger man took the blow on the top of his head. Anguish lanced through Coffin’s knuckles. Svoboda got his body across his opponent’s stomach. His right shoulder jammed itself under Coffin’s chin. He had him pinned, and both hands went to work, trying to pry the gun from the other man’s fingers.
Coffin hit ribs and back with his half-crippled fist. Svoboda didn’t seem to notice. Darkness whirled in Coffin’s skull. I am old, I am old. He couldn’t reach around the pack on Svoboda’s shoulders, to help his right hand keep the pistol. Was it the wind that shouted in his ears, or was he about to faint?
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