by Chad Oliver
“Strangers! It is not easy for a man to think against his people. I am only a man. My courage is weak. Soon I will go. Will you not speak with me?”
Silence.
Then—sound.
Movement.
Charlie hurtled out of the mouth of the cave as though shot from a cannon. He was screaming like a madman. His swollen suit was encrusted with filth, his face was contorted into a grimace of fury. He had a sharp rock in his hand.
Before Monte could move, Charlie had thrown himself on the old man. He knocked him down, leaped on top of him. He struck with the rock. The old man jerked his head away and the rock grazed his shoulder, cutting a red gash.
The wolf-thing snarled and circled, its belly low. The old man cried out to him, waved him away. Charlie lifted the rock to strike again.
There was no time to think. Monte jumped down from where he was hidden, fell, and scrambled forward. He grabbed Charlie’s arm, twisted it.
“You damn fool! Let him alone!”
“Come to kill us! Get him, get him, don’t let him get away!”
Charlie twisted free. He kicked the old man in the head with his boot, stunning him. The wolf-thing growled, fangs bared.
Monte leaped to his feet, threw a punch with his right hand. He connected with the chest plate of Charlie’s suit, almost breaking his fist. Charlie swayed off-balance.
“Stop it! He came to help us!”
Charlie shook his head, his eyes wild. He lifted the rock. “Stay away! Keep out of it!” He turned toward the helpless man.
Monte felt as though he were back in the nightmare again, fighting his own kind, fighting himself. But he knew what he had to do.
“Let him alone, Charlie,” he said quietly. “Let him alone or I’ll kill you.”
Charlie hesitated. He took a step toward Monte, then stopped. A look of utter bewilderment passed over his sweating face. The rock fell out of his hand. “No,” he said. “I can’t—I don’t—I don’t know…”
Then a strangled sob broke loose from him. He turned and ran down the trail, not even looking where he was going. It was a miracle that he didn’t fall.
“Charlie! Come back!”
The awkward figure thrashed its way down the cliff, never pausing for a second. It ran full tilt into the grasslands and vanished.
Monte was caught in the middle. He didn’t know what to do. He ignored the whining wolf-thing and knelt by Volmay’s side. The old man’s eyes were open. His naked body was trembling with shock.
“Are you well?” Monte asked, fumbling with the native language. “I am so—regretful. My friend—he is sick…”
“I know. I will live.”
“I must go after him, bring him back. Will you wait?”
The old man spoke slowly. “It always comes to this, to sadness. I tried very hard.”
“Yes, yes. I understand you. It is not too late—”
“Who knows? My dreams have been uneasy. We have both done wrong. We cannot trust one another. My dreams told me that we might have a beginning-again, but the dreams are so strange since you have come…”
“Volmay, will you wait? Will you wait?”
“It was not easy for me to come here. I do not know. I will try, I will try…”
Monte touched the old man’s shoulder. “We are grateful for what you have done. I will be back soon. Wait for me.”
“We will do what we must, all of us.”
Monte couldn’t wait any longer. Charlie was sick; there was no telling what he might do.
He left the old man where he was and ran back down the trail, toward the green world that had swallowed the man who had been his friend, toward the river.
Monte plunged into the tall grasses. It was easy to follow the trail left by Charlie’s heavy boots—but it was not necessary. He knew where Charlie was going, knew it as certainly as he had ever known anything in his life.
He did not waste his breath in calling. It was too late for words and he needed to conserve what strength he had left. He was weak with hunger. The nervous energy that had sustained him was beginning to falter.
He was covered with sweat when he reached the river. He saw Charlie at once: a squat, bulbous figure on a rock in the middle of the stream. A pathetic, broken man smothering in the shell of his mechanical suit, looking down at the cool, clean water.
Why did he wait for me? Was it too hard to die alone?
“Charlie! Don’t do it!” His voice was very small, lost in the immensity of the sky, drowned by the rush of the river.
Charlie Jenike looked back at him and said nothing.
Monte started across the rocks toward him.
Charlie smiled a little, a strangely peaceful smile, and jumped. He hit the water feet first and dropped like a stone. He came up again once, caught in the current.
His clumsy body thrashed in the water. He seemed to be trying to swim.
Monte dove into the water, knowing that it was no use. The river was swift and cold. He struck out for the struggling figure but he never had a chance.
Charlie went down again and stayed down.
Monte fished down from the surface, peering through the cool green depths. He stayed down until his lungs were bursting, surfaced, and went down again. He couldn’t find him. There were deep pools in the river and the current was swift, swift…
He kept at it until there was no longer any hope and then fought his way to shore. He dragged himself out on the yellow bank and caught his breath. The river looked calm and untroubled under the arch of the sky. There was no sign of Charlie.
He felt empty, completely drained of all emotion. He was exhausted by everything he had been through. He tried to remember Charlie as Charlie had been: a brusque, unkempt man, a man devoted to his subject, a man of integrity, a funny little guy who looked like a penguin…
But that Charlie was far away, far away. He had died—when? Days ago, a lifetime ago. The sick, frightened, bewildered man that had thrown himself into the river had not been Charlie. He had been someone else, a broken man, a man who could not face the dark depths of his own being.
I brought him here. I brought all of them here. Charlie, Louise, Helen, Ralph.
And now I am alone.
And I too have changed…
He looked up into the cloudless blue sky. Somewhere up there a ship still sailed. A mighty ship that had crossed the gulfs between the worlds. A ship that held his people, wondering, waiting… It always came down to human beings. Small, afraid, uncertain, powerless—but it was up to them. It was always up to them.
Monte turned his back on the river and began to retrace his steps. He was desperately tired. The white sun was dropping down toward the edge of the mountains and the day was hot and still and empty.
He climbed the trail that wound up the cliff. He reached the cave. He thought of it as his home; it was the only home he had.
The old man was gone. The wolf-thing was gone.
The dead animal was still there.
Monte sighed. He made himself go back down and gather wood. He built a small fire by the mouth of the cave and broiled a chunk of meat on a stick. The fat sizzled when it dropped into the fire. The smell of the cooking meat was a good smell. That, at least, had not changed.
He ate until the pain left his belly. He stood on the rocky ledge and watched the great night paint its shadows across the world of Walonka. He took a final swallow of water from his canteen and crawled into his cave.
15
The sunrise was a glory.
Light flooded the cave and Monte woke up instantly. There was no transition, no fuzziness. He was fresh and alert the moment he opened his eyes, as though just being alive was a great gift and there was no time to waste.
And I was the guy who always needed three cups of coffee to get going!
He stepped out of the cave, drinking in the beauty of the dawn.
The white ball of the sun was draped in clouds. It burned through the mist, shining like a rainbow. It reach
ed down with fiery fingers and painted colors on the land: vivid green, flame red, jet black. It bounced its light off the mountains, making them gleam like glass. Its warmth sent a pleasant tingle through his body.
Monte hauled up more wood and built himself a fire. He took a long drink from his canteen and hacked out another chunk of meat from the dead animal. He used a sharp rock to clean the hide away and cooked an ample breakfast. The meat tasted like venison. It was tough and wild and juicy.
When he had eaten, he found a hard rock to use as a hammerstone and chipped out a reasonably good hand axe. He put a sharp edge on it, leaving the core of the original stone for a grip. He looked at it and grinned. He was making progress. Hell, he was in the Lower Paleolithic already! Another week or two and he could invent pressure flaking…
He went to work on what left of the meat. He cut it into long narrow strips and put it in the sun to dry. He walked down into the grasslands and found some of the red berries. He pounded the berries into the meat, melted some fat and poured it over the dry meat. He smiled with satisfaction. It probably wasn’t the best pemmican in the world, but it would last him for a couple of days.
That was all he needed.
He sat cross-legged in front of his cave, looking down on the land below. The time had come. It was now or never.
He closed his mind to everything except the problem before him. He had all the facts he needed, all the facts he could possibly expect. He had all the pieces of his puzzle. All he had to do was to put them together.
Only—where did you start?
Well, take it from the beginning. Go over it step by step. Think it through.
There must be a key.
There had to be a key.
Start with Mark Heidelman who had first told him about Sirius Nine. Was that the beginning? No—go back still further. Go back to the dawn of man on the planet Earth. Go back…
Suddenly, he got to his feet. He looked around him, his eyes staring.
I’ve been blind. Blind. Here it is, right in front of me!
Yes.
A cave.
A fire.
And a chipped-stone tool.
He picked up the chunk of flaked rock that had become a hand axe. He held it in his hand, held it so tightly that his knuckles whitened.
A chipped stone tool.
The beginning.
The key.
EXTRACT FROM THE NOTEBOOK OF MONTE STEWART:
This journal looks like something dug up out of a tomb. It’s a miracle that it still hangs together.
I suppose that no one will ever read what I write here, but somehow that doesn’t seem to matter very much. Or does it? Maybe a man always needs to try to communicate—with himself, if necessary.
Communication.
In a way, that’s what this whole thing is all about.
I’m excited now. I think I see the answer. I must try to get it down. And then perhaps…
Once you see this thing in perspective, it’s not difficult. The trick is to back off; take a long look down the corridors of time. Lord! Isn’t it odd how a man can teach an idea for half of his life and then not apply it when the chips are down? I tossed it off every semester in my introductory lecture: “If you want to understand the human animal, you must go back to the beginning. Written records are very recent in the story of man—they only take you back a few thousand years. Man himself has been around for close to a million years. In order to get an insight into what he is like today, you must look back down that long road and see where he has been. You must go back to the beginning…”
The beginning?
After all, how do we know the story of man on Earth? How did we unravel the past?
We did it by digging up tools. Stone tools.
Paleolithic: Old Stone Age.
Mesolithic: Middle Stone Age.
Neolithic: New Stone Age.
We’re so used to it we don’t even think about it. It’s a part of us. Of course! Who questions the basic dictates of his culture? It always seems so natural, so inevitable.
From the very first, as soon as man became man, he made tools. He chipped artifacts out of stone. This was how he lived. This was how he hunted, how he defended himself, even how he expressed himself. (Who can look at a Solutrean blade and not know that it is a work of art?)
Obvious?
Maybe. But consider this. When man on Earth first started down that trail, there was no turning back. When he chipped his first tool, he determined his destiny. All the rest flowed from that one creative act: spears, harpoons, bows and arrows, the plow, wheels, writing, cities, planes, bombs, spaceships…
It was a way of life, a way of thinking.
It was man’s path on Earth.
(It is not for me to say whether that path was good or bad. I don’t know whether or not the terms have meaning in this context. But it is a fact, surely, that man saddled himself with a heavy load when he chipped that first stone tool. Only a moron can fail to read the lesson that is written in our story. An emphasis on external power carries a built-in penalty. Read our novels, listen to our music, look at our art. Visit an insane asylum. Count the suicides. Count the graves of all the wars. Weigh the boredom, if you can—the emptiness, the frustration, the weariness, the desperate search for diversions. We have power over things: we can build bridges, houses, ships, planes. But have we been fulfilled as a people? Have we even found a measure of happiness? Why do we need pills to ease the knot in our guts? Is our yearning for the stars only an expression of inner poverty? Was there a toll bridge on the path we walked? Was there a hidden joker in the deck we opened?)
A way of life, yes.
But was it the only way?
What if man on Earth had never taken that first step?
What if he had turned down another trail, a different trail?
What if he had never chipped that first stone tool?
What other path had been open to him?
Consider the Merdosi, back in the mists of dawn on Sirius Nine. See them with their long ape-like arms, their naked bodies, their dark and intelligent eyes. See them with the word-magic in their mouths, huddled together under a great white sun…
They had taken a different turning. They had started down a different trail.
What had it been?
Well, what were the key facts about the Merdosi now? How had they behaved? What techniques had they used?
Item: They had little or no visible material culture; they didn’t make things.
Item: They had a close and pivotal relationship with some of the animals of their world, the Merdosini and the saucer-eyed creatures that looked like tarsiers. They seemed to control them.
Item: It was possible that they could influence growth patterns to some extent. For example, those hollow trees did not seem to be completely natural. And perhaps they could grow other things…
Item: They had been completely baffled by the men from Earth. They had not been able to adjust to a contact situation. They had been confused, upset, afraid. They had attacked, first with the Merdosini and then…
Item: They had attacked their minds. They had driven Charlie mad. While the men from Earth slept, they had induced a sickness into their brains. They had worked through their dreams…
Item: The baffling thing about their culture was the fact that there was nothing to see. All the visible clues were lacking.
Item: What had the old man said? What had Volmay told him? “We will do what we must, all of us. We cannot trust one another. My dreams told me that we might have a beginning-again, but the dreams are so strange since you have come…”
Dreams.
Yes, and was there not a parallel among many of the primitive peoples of Earth, the peoples who had not yet been smothered by the mechanical monster? Did not all of them place great faith in dreams? Did they not use dreams to see into the future, to give meaning to their lives, to touch the unknowable? Did they not trust their dreams as sources of deep wisdom? Did not some o
f them, like the Iroquois, develop the idea of the subconscious long before Freud, and recognize that illness might be caused by a conflict between the inner man and supposedly rational thought?
(And how about our own dreams? Did we not speak of dreams as symbols of hope and ideals? And were not our attitudes toward them very much like those of the Merdosi toward artifacts? Weren’t we great ones for giving lip-service to dreams? “Never lose your illusions, my boy! Always keep your dreams before you! But of course we must be practical, take a good course in Business Administration…”)
What did it all add up to?
Clearly, the Merdosi had developed a different aspect of the human personality. Their culture had centered on a different cluster of human possibilities. They had turned inward. They had tapped the hidden resources of the human mind. They worked in symbols, dreams, visions.
Telepathy? No, not quite. Rather, they seemed to have perfected a technique of projecting emotional states. That would account for their control over animals. That would account for what happened to Charlie—and to me.
But it must be more than that, far more. It must permeate every aspect of their lives. They must live in a world of symbolic richness, they must see the world in vivid colors, tones, shadings. They must be able to open their minds, share them. They must have techniques that we have never imagined—they must understand the growth of trees, the unfolding of life.
Yes, but the Merdosi were people too. They were not supermen. They were not idealized figments of the imagination. They were only different.
