Critical Threshold

by Brian Stableford

  “See anything?” I asked.

  “No,” she said, tiredly. “I get a faint feeling of unease. Could be something I ate. There’s something weird, but I can’t begin to fathom it. If only I hadn’t cracked up when I had the chance....”

  “Take it easy,” said Karen.

  “Do we go closer?” asked Mariel.

  “Not yet,” I said. “I want to think this through, first. It’s no good charging in there and running our necks into a noose. There must be some way that this whole stupid thing makes sense, and we have to be able to come up with some ideas. Let’s for God’s sake have some kind of plan of action.”

  “If it were up to me,” mused Karen, “I’d say there’s only one sensible thing to do.”

  We both waited, expectantly.

  “Back home,” she said, when the pause had had its dramatic effect, “we call it kidnap.”

  She was probably right. If we were ever going to get close enough to one of these people to figure out exactly what had put his mind through the mangle we were going to have to get him away from the bow-and-arrow-brigade. But the thought of a forced march all the way back to the ship with a tribe of angry savages trailing us wasn’t very funny. It could happen, no matter how clever we were in securing our specimen.

  “Brute force isn’t the only way,” said Mariel. “Not necessarily. If I can make contact....”

  “It’d take a miracle,” I said. “The moment you make eye contact the sparks start flying. Even if you can keep hold of yourself, they aren’t going to be so determined.”

  “So what do you want us to do?” put in Karen. “Sit here and pray for inspiration?”

  I couldn’t do anything but shrug, annoyed and frustrated.

  “On the other hand,” said Mariel, who was still doggedly thinking away. “We could combine the two.”

  There was a moment’s pregnant silence.

  “If I could just have an hour,” she said, carefully, when she saw that we knew what she meant. “If I could just muster everything into one big effort. I could do it. And we could be away before the rest knew that anyone was missing.”

  “Not necessarily,” I said. “If these people are genuinely telepathic—the last rescue party arrived in double quick time, remember.”

  She shrugged. “We’re not going to get anywhere without taking risks.”

  I looked at her pensively. She was determinedly calm, determinedly logical. She was trying with all her might to put what had happened earlier in the day behind her. She was bitterly ashamed of what she obviously considered her failure. She was forcing herself hard, now. But child or adult, that was a dangerous policy. In this mood, she was a poor risk. Maybe she could do it, but there are some risks which are never worth taking.

  “Before we go into another confrontation,” I said, in a deadly serious tone, “I think we should do a little more work on the last one. Whatever state you were in, you got into their heads then, for just a few moments. All right, maybe you couldn’t make any sense of it then and maybe you can’t when you look back from your present state of mind. But you did see, just for a moment, whatever it was that frightened the hell out of you. You’re feeling brave enough now for a repeat performance, but are you brave enough to go back into your own memory and try and sort it out inside yourself? It might be the harder way.”

  She looked at me hard, then looked away. I didn’t press the point.

  “Evening’s coming on,” I said, this time to Karen as well as to the girl. “We aren’t going to do anything tonight. I don’t think there’s much point in moving back upriver to camp, we’ll pitch the tent here where there’s a reasonable amount of open space. Someone will have to stay on watch all night. We’ll use the hand lamp inside the tent, no light out here. In the meantime, we watch and we think—all right?”

  The sun was sitting atop the water in the west. A thin black line, the shore, formed a bar between the ruddy globe and the sea of yellow fire reflected in the still surface of the lake. The sky overhead was a deep blue. For the moment, the forest seemed almost silent. Even the wind was momentarily quiet.

  The instant was crystallized. Time seemed to have frozen in its tracks. I studied the top of Mariel’s bowed head, trying to imagine the turmoil within. It was impossible—like trying to figure out what was going on in the heads of these naked savages.

  Parasites, I thought. Worms inside brains, gnawing away, filling their gray cocoons with alien consciousness. It was a strong image. But it wasn’t real.

  “Hey,” said Karen, breaking up the petrified moment. “Trouble—I think they’ve seen us.”

  I looked round, quickly, and grabbed the binoculars. Something was going on, for sure. People were looking our way, and one or two were pointing.

  When I had the glasses focused, though, I realized that they weren’t looking directly at us. They were looking somewhere to our right, further round the crater’s rim. There were trees in our way, but after five or six seconds I was able to catch a glimpse of what was really exciting them.

  It was a group of men walking down the slope. Six of them, one no more than a boy, about Mariel’s age.

  “It’s the bunch we met earlier,” whispered Karen.

  “They should have been back hours ago,” I muttered. “Long before us.”

  “They had business in the forest,” she replied. “They weren’t just out looking for a fight.”

  “If they were out hunting,” I commented, “they had a bad time.” They weren’t carrying so much as a bird. They just had their bows and arrows, and the curious spherical things. I focused the glasses on one of the round things, which was being held very carefully by one of the older men. I couldn’t see through the wickerwork, but I knew there had to be something inside it. What?

  “It’s a cage!” I said, suddenly—still whispering, although there was no real need.

  “For what?” asked Karen. “Canaries?”

  I couldn’t see. But I could guess. “Butterflies!” I hissed.

  A crowd was gathering around the five men and the boy as they reached the nearest of the rounded huts. The whole tribe was alert by now to the fact that they were back. I glanced at the boats on the lake, and saw the men reeling in their nets, ready to go home.

  The sun was dipping into the bar of black shadow that sat atop the fiery water.

  The two men carrying the cages went into one of the huts near the center of the group. The children had stopped playing. Men and women alike stopped working. They were gathering, gradually, around that particular hut. They came quickly but unhurriedly, most sitting down, or even lying down, as and when they arrived.

  “Looks like a prayer meeting,” said Karen.

  “More like a union meeting,” I replied. I still had the binoculars pressed to my eyes. “Looks like we arrived at the right time. I don’t suppose this happens every evening.”

  “Who knows?” she said.

  Minutes drained by. Mariel raised her head to watch along with us. She wasn’t happy, but she was interested. We waited.

  So did they.

  They tended to be grouped in knots of five or six—families, perhaps. They did nothing. They seemed quite patient. They looked at one another, but they didn’t fidget much. Like a queue at a supermarket till—quietly philosophical.

  The wind seemed to have died, temporarily. Such breeze as there was blew waywardly, as much in our faces as at our backs. I caught faint traces of a weird smell—like nothing I had encountered before. Without the wind to carry it away it hung in the air, drifting and diffusing.

  I concentrated on the smell. I concentrated so hard that I didn’t notice at first what was happening. I was watching the people. I had got so used to the perennial presence of butterflies and their kin that I hardly saw them any more.

  But soon there were so many that I had to see. They were all over: on the slope where the huts were, on the ridge around the crater, in the rocks where we crouched, even over the surface of the lake.

&n
bsp; They were gathering—gathering into a flock of incalculable size. And the focal point of their gathering was the village below us. In particular, the hut into which the two cages had been taken. They were the species I’d already picked out as being abundant here. Black and yellow wings, with orange eye flashes. They were everywhere. They didn’t seem to arrive in vast hordes, they were just there. Everywhere that the eye could see. And the numbers were growing.

  Butterflies don’t fly fast. They duck, they weave, they drift on the air. They meander along with a seeming total lack of purpose. They didn’t seem to be in any hurry now, but they had a purpose all right.

  The smell grew stronger, not because it was drifting in the almost-still air but because it was being generated around us now. The butterflies were producing it. And the more there were to produce it, the more arrived in response—positive feedback that would eventually bring every member of the species from miles around, gathered together into one great swirling cloud. Millions—billions of insects, gathering to mate.

  This was springtime....

  And then I dived for the pack that was six feet away, resting on an apron of rock. I tore open its fastenings brutally, hauling out the medical kit and spilling its contents all over the stones as I ripped it open. I picked up three masks—small gauze filter-masks with self-sealing adhesive edges.

  There wasn’t time for explanations or apologies. I grabbed Mariel’s arm and jerked her up from her crouching position, slapping the mask over her mouth and nose. I ran my thumb rapidly round the seal to make sure it was tight. I thrust one at Karen and trusted her not to make any mistakes while I put my own on. She hesitated for a bare second, then realized the urgency of the matter and clapped the thing on to her face. Her expression told me she didn’t know what the danger was, but she had the sense not to wait for explanations.

  I knew as soon as I had the mask fitted that I was at least half a minute too late.

  My head was already reeling as the air I had taken into my lungs before fitting the mask leaked through into my blood. I exhaled it as fully as possible and dragged new air through the filter. I was safe from further harm, but not from the effects of what I’d already taken in. No more than a few million molecules—perhaps thousands—but enough to take effect.

  I was dizzy, and my legs were already beginning to give way. I clapped my hands to my head as the organs of balance in my ears began to go crazy. There were tears in my eyes.

  I blinked furiously, and went down on one knee because I could no longer hold myself upright. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. The world was hurling itself at me in a chaotic mass of color and shape. A hammer was driving my eyes deep into my skull and my sense of sight was imploding, sensations crowding in, crushed, intense, and then flowering again deep inside, within me somewhere....

  My brain burned as the assault overwhelmed me.

  And the butterflies....

  They settled on my body, on my face, crawling on my skin.

  I fell back, and my head came to rest on bare stone. The feel of the insects was like a thousand needles thrusting into my flesh, the feel of the rock and the pressure of my clothes was an unbearable sheet of fire, a sea of pain. When I waved a hand to stir the butterflies, to make them go away, the very sensation of moving my arm, electrifying the nerves and flexing the muscles, was a sensory overload that seemed to shatter in my brain. It seemed worse than any pain I had ever encountered. But I didn’t faint, and I didn’t die.

  Dragging clouds of flame into my lungs, breathing in and out as deeply as I could, trying to force clean oxygen into my bloodstream, I tried to fight the drug, but its effects were too profound.

  It had me, and it wasn’t letting go.

  And the butterflies clustered on my body, and wouldn’t go away.

  I still had the presence of mind to wonder if I could take the stuff in through my skin.

  I had only a few seconds in hand. I groped for the rifle. It had to be within reach. I knew where Karen had let it rest.

  The visual images were still inside me, falling like a cataract through the tunnel that had been my eyes, dazzling my mind.

  Somewhere in the prismatic chaos was Karen, and next to her was Mariel. But how to find them when every slightest touch was like being skinned alive? I found the stock of the gun, like a great cluster of razor blades. I dared not grope at random.

  Somehow, I found Mariel with my eyes, and pointed the gun. I fired into the web of bloody redness that had to be her tunic. I couldn’t remember, while my brain boiled, what color Karen had been wearing, but as I moved the gun I felt it grabbed, and there was something like a bomb going off in my ears.

  Someone was shouting.

  She was trying to force the gun away. She thought I’d gone mad. But she wasn’t ready for the feel of the barrel, and the river of agony it must have sent up her arm prevented her from deflecting the weapon.

  I pressed it toward her—into what I thought must be her body.

  Then I fired, and fired again.

  The recoil threw me back, squirming over the rock shelf. I was convinced that I was dying. The whole universe was an irresistible deluge of pain and light and sound smashing into my skull.

  The gun was between my legs, and one leg was crooked so that the muzzle lay up against the soft flesh of my calf. That accident of fortune was one hell of a lucky break.

  I fired twice more.

  And then I had to wait.

  It all went on.

  I didn’t see how it could. I didn’t understand how my being didn’t just disintegrate, spread out like a water splash all over the rocks, liquefied and foaming.

  But it wasn’t poison. It wasn’t a destroyer. I couldn’t even lose consciousness until the anesthetic darts got to work. The experience, agonizing and utterly horrifying, possessed me and had me at its mercy for seconds which seemed eternal.

  It was ripping my mind apart.

  The sheer vastness of the internal sensory world opened by the drug was beyond comprehension. I felt myself involved with cosmic forces which flooded through me, forces that I had never known before. I felt utterly and hopelessly vulnerable—and yet godlike, for my inner being was the core, the focus of this new universe of perception.

  It was in me, and of me.

  The pain was unbearable and became meaningless.

  The sight seemed to have been burned right out of my optic nerves, and yet I could see somehow, somewhere else.

  The forces wrenching at my mind wanted to twist it, to change it, to make it something new—something else.

  And I spun, like a crazy top, into an abyss where walls of nothing folded about me and accepted me into a deep, infinite hell.

  The other drug—the drug in the darts—claimed me for its own, and it was all over.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  It was pitch dark.

  The sound of the waterfall filled the air.

  I felt as bad as you usually feel coming out from under anesthetic. No better, but no worse. The effect of the other drug had worn off. I was slightly sick and completely disorientated, but alive and, so far as I was competent to judge, sane.

  It took me a few moments to locate my memory and a few minutes more to sort things out into the right order. Then I began to grope around.

  The first thing I found was a body. It was fairly large, female and alive. It was also sound asleep. I hauled myself up alongside it, and then had to pause as daggers of pain went into my leg. I reached down, searching with tentative fingers for the little darts embedded in the soft flesh. There were a couple of nasty rents in my clothing, and the wounds where the darts were felt ragged, caked with dry blood. You aren’t supposed to fire those things at point blank range. My leg was going to be sore for a long time. I only hoped that I wouldn’t be laid up.

  My leg began to bleed again as I plucked out the darts, but I was surprised by the ease with which they came out. It was a good sign.

  I turned my attention to Karen, then, pr
aying that she had been as lucky. I knew that I’d fired into her body rather than her face, but I could still have done some pretty nasty damage if I’d hit the wrong spot. I passed my fingers rapidly over her prostrate form, and found one dart in her thigh. That was no trouble. When I whipped it out she twitched, but she didn’t wake up. Her body weight was a good deal less than mine and the two darts would have had that much more effect. I knew she’d come round in her own good time.

  I couldn’t find the other dart immediately, and so I began feeling around for the packs. I needed some light.

  I found the pack whose contents I’d spilled in extracting the masks from the medical kit, and was fortunate enough to locate the flashlight almost immediately. I flipped it on, shielding my eyes momentarily against the glare. The stab of light recalled, just for an instant, the incredible sensory hell that the swarming butterflies had brought. I shone the beam on Karen’s inert body.

  The other dart was in her side, between two of the lower ribs. She had fallen partly on top of it. The wound was messy but neither of the ribs was broken. We’d both been lucky. After I’d extracted the dart I directed the light toward the contents of the medical kit, and picked up antibiotics and dressings. I was half way through attending to Karen when it suddenly struck me that something was very wrong.

  Something was missing.

  Mariel.

  I scanned the whole rock shelf with the beam of the torch. There was rock, and dirt, and a handful of dead butterflies. Beyond, there was grass and flowers.

  Quickly, I finished dressing Karen’s injuries. Then, just as swiftly, I bound up my leg. Then I stood up, and moved slowly around the immediate vicinity. She was definitely gone, and so were the insects.

  Carefully, I broke the seal that held the filter-mask to my face. I sniffed cautiously, and then breathed deep in relief. The scent was gone. The wind, reasserting its mastery here at the edge of the forest, had carried it away with the butterflies themselves.

  I walked to the water’s edge and dipped the soft filter from the inside of the mask into the water. I carried it back to Karen and ran the small piece of damp material across her forehead. Slowly, I stripped off her own mask. She was beginning to stir, but I had to work hard on her to bring her round. While I worked, I tried to weigh up the situation. I had fired only one dart into Mariel. She was so much lighter—somehow, without thinking, I had assumed that one would be enough. But she wasn’t that light. Forty-five kilos, at a guess. And I was just over seventy. She would have recovered first. She might, then, have left under her own steam.