The Big Book of Science Fiction

by The Big Book of Science Fiction (retail) (epub)

  “About the otarks? He said that they were a very interesting scientific experiment. Very challenging. But he’s not involved with them at the moment. He’s doing something to do with cosmic rays….He said that he was sorry for the victims.”

  “And why did they do all this? What for?”

  “How can I put it?” Betly thought for a moment. “Something that happens a lot in science is what if. It’s led to a lot of discoveries.”

  “What do you mean, what if?”

  “Well, for example, What if we put an electrified wire into a magnetic field? And then you get the electric motor….I suppose what if just means experimentation.”

  “Experimentation.” Meller ground his teeth. “They did an experiment: they let man-eaters out among people. And now no one thinks about us. You’ll get by as best you can. Fidler’s given up on the otarks and on us as well. And they’ve bred and there are hundreds of them now, and no one knows what they’re plotting against us people.” He stopped talking and sighed. “The things these scientists think up! Making wild animals cleverer than people. They’ve gone crazy, the people who live in cities. Atom bombs and now this. They must really want to bring the human race to an end.”

  He stood up, took his loaded rifle, and laid it beside him on the floor.

  “Listen, Mr. Betly. If there is an alarm, if someone starts knocking or trying to break the door down, you just lie there. Or else we’ll shoot each other in the dark. You lie there; I know what to do. I’m so well trained I’m like a dog, I’ll wake up just from instinct.”

  In the morning, when Betly left the barn, the sun was shining so brightly and the rain-washed greenery was so fresh that the conversation they had last night seemed no more than a scary story.

  The black-bearded farmer was already out in his field—the white patch of his shirt showed on the other side of the river. For a moment the journalist thought that this might be happiness—to get up at sunrise, not to know the worry and bustle of a difficult city life, to do business only with the handle of your spade, with the clods of dark brown earth.

  But the forester quickly brought him back to reality. He appeared from behind the barn with his rifle in his hand.

  “Come on, I want to show you something.”

  They walked around the barn and came out into the kitchen garden that backed up against the house. Here Meller behaved strangely. Bent double, he rushed past the bushes and stopped in a ditch next to the potato beds. Then he made a sign for the journalist to do the same.

  They started to follow the ditch around the kitchen garden. At one point a woman’s voice could be heard in the house, but it was impossible to hear what she said.

  Meller stopped.

  “Look here.”

  “What is it?”

  “You said you were a hunter. Look!”

  On a patch of bare earth among the tangled grass was a clear five-toed footprint.

  “A bear?” Betly said hopefully.

  “What bear? There haven’t been bears here for a long time.”

  “So is it an otark?”

  The forester nodded.

  “It’s fresh,” the journalist whispered.

  “From last night,” Meller said. “You see it’s damp. They were in the house before it rained.”

  “In the house?” Betly felt a cold shiver down his spine, as if something metal had pressed against it. “Right in the house?”

  The forester did not answer, he jerked his head in the direction of the ditch, and both of them went back the way they had come.

  When they got to the barn, Meller waited while Betly got his breath back.

  “I thought as much last night. When we got here last night and Steglich started to pretend that he couldn’t hear. He just wanted us to speak more loudly so that the otark could hear everything. The otark was in the other room.”

  The journalist’s voice was hoarse.

  “What are you saying? People are taking sides with the otarks? Against real people?”

  “Keep your voice down,” the forester said. “What do you mean, ‘taking sides’? Steglich couldn’t do anything else. The otark came and it stayed. That happens a lot. An otark comes and lies down, for example, in the bedroom. Or else they just throw people out of their houses and live there for a day or two.”

  “And what about the people? Do they just put up with it? Why don’t they shoot them?”

  “How are they going to shoot them, if the woods are filled with other otarks? The farmer has children, and cattle that he wants to pasture in the fields, and a house that could burn down….But the children are the most important. The otarks can take them. Can you really keep an eye on your children? And they’ve taken all the rifles anyway. That happened right at the start. In the first year.”

  “And people just gave them up?”

  “What could they do? The ones who didn’t surrender their weapons were sorry…”

  He did not finish his sentence and suddenly stared at the willow coppice about fifteen paces away from them.

  What happened next took only two or three seconds.

  Meller lifted up his rifle and cocked it. At the same time a dark brown mass rose from the bushes, its large eyes sparkling, wicked and frightened, and said:

  “Hey, don’t shoot! Don’t shoot!”

  Instinctively the journalist grabbed Meller’s shoulder. A shot rang out but the bullet just nicked a tree. The brown mass bent double and rolled like a ball into the forest and disappeared between the trees. For a few moments all that could be heard was the cracking of twigs, then everything fell silent.

  “What the hell!” The forester turned around in a fury. “Why did you do that?”

  The journalist, turning pale, whispered:

  “He spoke just like a human….He asked you not to shoot.”

  For a second the forester looked at him, then his anger turned into a tired indifference. He lowered his rifle.

  “All right…The first time it causes quite an impression.”

  There was a rustle behind them. They both turned.

  The farmer’s wife said:

  “Come and eat. I’ve already laid the table.”

  While they ate they all pretended that nothing had happened.

  After breakfast the farmer helped them saddle their horses. They left without saying anything.

  When they had ridden off, Meller asked:

  “What’s your plan, then? I didn’t catch it. All they said was that I should ride you around the mountains, and that was it.”

  “What’s my plan? Well, I want to go around in the mountains, yes. To see people, the more the better. To get to know the otarks, if the opportunity presents itself. In a word, to get a sense of the atmosphere.”

  “Were you getting it back on the farm?”

  Betly shrugged.

  The forester suddenly reined in his horse.

  “Shush…”

  He listened.

  “Someone’s running after us….Something’s happened on the farm.”

  Betly had no time to wonder at the forester’s hearing when a shout came from behind them:

  “Hey, Meller! Hey!”

  They turned their horses and the farmer, panting, came up to them. He almost fell over, and grabbed the pommel of Meller’s saddle.

  “The otark took Tina. He’s dragged her off to Moose Canyon.”

  He gulped at the air; drops of sweat fell from his forehead.

  With a single movement, the forester pulled the farmer up onto his saddle. His stallion rushed forward, throwing up mud high from beneath his hooves.

  Betly had never thought that he could travel so fast on a horse. Potholes, the trunks of fallen trees, bushes, and ditches all slid by under him, forming some kind of patchy mosaic. At some point a branch whipped off his cap, and he didn’t even notice.

  This speed largely did not depend on him. In the heat of the competition, his mare tried her hardest not to be left behind by the stallion. Betly grabbed on to he
r neck. Every second he thought that he would be killed.

  They galloped through the forest, across a wide meadow, down a slope, passed the farmer’s wife and headed down into a big ravine.

  The forester leaped down from his horse and, with the farmer following him, rushed down the narrow path into a grove of sparsely planted pine trees.

  The journalist left his horse as well, throwing the rein over her neck, and rushed after Meller. He hurried after the forester and his mind automatically noted the surprising transformation that had taken place. There was nothing left of Meller’s former apathy and indecisiveness. He moved with light and collected gestures, never pausing to think; he jumped over pits, slid under low-hanging branches. He moved as if the trail of the otark was sketched out for him in a thick chalk line.

  For a while Betly kept up with the pace, then he started to tire. His heart leaped in his chest, he felt tightness and burning in his throat. He slowed down to a walk, and for a few minutes walked alone among the bushes, then heard voices ahead of him.

  The forester stood in the narrowest part of the ravine with his gun cocked and pointing at a thick grove of hazel trees. The girl’s father was there as well.

  The forester spoke with emphasis:

  “Let her go. Or I will kill you.”

  He was talking to what was in the grove.

  He was answered by a growl, mingled with the sobs of a child.

  The forester repeated what he had said:

  “Or I will kill you. I will give my life to track you and kill you. You know me.”

  The growl came again, and then a voice, but not a human voice, somehow like a gramophone record, running all the words together, said:

  “And if I do this, then you won’t kill me?”

  “No,” Meller said. “You will walk out of here alive.”

  There was silence in the thicket. The only noise was the child’s crying.

  Then there was a cracking noise of branches, and something white appeared among the trees. The thin girl came out into the long grass. One of her hands was covered in blood and she supported it with the other.

  Still crying, she walked past the three men, not turning to look at them, and wandered staggering toward her house.

  The three men looked as she walked away.

  The black-bearded farmer looked at Meller and Betly. There was something so harsh in his wide-open eyes that the journalist could not bear it and bent his head.

  “That’s that,” the farmer said.

  —

  They stopped to spend the night in a little empty watchman’s hut in the forest. They were only a few hours away from the lake with the island where the laboratory had once been, but Meller refused to travel in the dark.

  This was the fourth day of their journey, and the journalist thought that his tried and tested optimism was starting to crack. Previously he had had a little saying prepared for every time he met with any unpleasantness: “But all the same, life itself is wonderful!” But now he understood that this was a standby phrase, one that worked perfectly when you were traveling in a comfortable train from one city to the next or when you walked through the glass door that leads into a hotel reception, ready to meet with some famous person—this phrase was entirely inadequate to deal with what had happened to Steglich, for example.

  The whole region seemed to be wracked with illness. The people were apathetic, unwilling to talk. Even the children didn’t laugh.

  Once he asked Meller why the farmers didn’t leave the place. The forester explained that the only thing that the inhabitants owned was their land. But now there was no way to sell it. The land was worthless now because of the otarks.

  Betly asked:

  “Why don’t you leave?”

  The forester thought. He bit his lips in silence, then replied:

  “I can still be of some use. The otarks are afraid of me. I don’t have anything here. No family, no home. There’s no way they can put pressure on me. They can only fight me. But that is risky.”

  “Do you mean that the otarks respect you?”

  Meller lifted his head uncertainly.

  “The otarks? How could they? They don’t know respect either. They are not people. They are just afraid. And they’re right. I kill them.”

  But the otarks still took a certain amount of risk. The forester and the journalist both recognized it. They had the impression that a ring was gradually tightening around them. They had been shot at three times. Once the shots had come from the windows of an abandoned house, and twice they had come straight out of the forest. After each of the three attacks they had found fresh tracks. And every day they found more and more marks made by the otarks….

  In the watchman’s hut, in the little stone fireplace, they lit a fire and prepared their supper. The forester lit his pipe and looked sadly into space.

  They had left their horses opposite the open door to the hut.

  The journalist looked at the forester. All the time he had been with him, his respect for him had increased every day. Meller was uncultured, he had spent all his life in the forests, he had barely read anything, you couldn’t speak to him for two minutes about art. And even so the journalist felt that he couldn’t ask for a better friend. The forester’s opinions were always healthy and independent: if he didn’t have anything to say, then he didn’t say anything. To begin with the journalist had thought him somehow nervy and irritably weak, but now Betly understood that this was a long-standing bitterness that he felt on behalf of the inhabitants of this large abandoned region, which had been brought low by the actions of the scientists.

  For the last two days Meller had been feeling ill. He had swamp fever. It covered his face with red patches.

  The fire was dying in the grate, and the forester unexpectedly said:

  “Tell me, is he young?”

  “Who?”

  “The scientist, Fidler.”

  “He is young,” the journalist replied. “About thirty. No more. Why?”

  “It’s not good that he’s young,” the forester said.

  “Why?”

  Meller was silent for a while.

  “Well, they take them all, the talented people, and lock them away in a closed space. And they coddle them. And they don’t know anything about life. And that’s why they have no compassion for people.” He sighed. “You need to be a person first of all. And only then a scientist.”

  He stood up.

  “It’s time to go to sleep. We’ll take turns. Or else the otarks will kill our horses.”

  The journalist ended up taking the first watch.

  The horses were chewing hay from a small hayrick left over from the previous year.

  He sat in the doorway of the hut, his rifle laid across his knees.

  The darkness fell fast, like a cover. Then his eyes gradually became accustomed to the gloom. The moon came out. The night was clear and starry. Calling out to one another, a flock of little birds flew overhead. Unlike the larger birds, they were afraid of predators and so carried out their autumn journey by night.

  Betly stood up and walked around the hut. The forest closely surrounded the clearing where the hut stood, and this was where the danger lay. The journalist checked his rifle to see if it was cocked.

  He started to muse over the last few days, the conversations he had had, the faces he had seen, and he thought about how he would tell the story of the otarks when he got back to the newspaper. Then he thought that it was precisely the idea of his return that constantly appeared in his mind and gave a peculiar coloring to everything that he met with here. Even when they were tracking the otark after it had taken the child, he, Betly, had not forgotten that however bad things got here, he could always turn around and leave it all behind.

  “I’ll go back,” he said to himself. “But Meller? And the others?”

  But this was too harsh a thought for him to work out all its ramifications now.

  He sat in the shade of the hut and started to think abou
t the otarks. He remembered the headline from some newspaper: “Intelligence without compassion.” It was like what the forester said. For him the otarks could not be human, because they had no “compassion.” Intelligence without compassion. Was that possible? Could intelligence even exist without compassion? What came first? Isn’t kindness a result of intelligence? Or is it the other way around? It had already been established that the otarks were more capable than humans of logical thought, that they understood abstractions better, had better memories. The rumors were already flowing that some of the first-generation otarks were held in the Ministry of Defense and used to help decide certain particular problems. But electronic “reasoning machines” were also used to solve certain particular problems. What was the difference?

  He remembered that one of the farmers had told him and Meller that he had recently seen an almost completely naked otark, and the forester had replied that the otarks had recently started to become ever more like people. Would they conquer the world one day? Could intelligence without compassion be stronger than human intelligence?

  “But that won’t happen any time soon,” he said to himself. “If it ever does happen. In any case, I’ll be long gone by then.”

  But then he thought: what about the children? What sort of world would they live in—the world of the otarks or the world of cybernetic robots, also inhuman and also, according to some people, cleverer than humans?

  His son appeared in his mind’s eye and said to him:

  “Listen to me, Dad. We are who we are, right? And they are who they are. But don’t they think to themselves that they are a ‘we’ too?”

  “You’re growing up too fast,” Betly thought. “When I was seven I wouldn’t have asked such questions.”

  Somewhere behind him a twig snapped. The boy disappeared.

  The journalist carefully looked around and listened. No, everything was fine.

  A bat crossed the clearing in its angular wavering flight.

  Betly straightened up. The thought came to him that the forester was hiding something from him. He still hadn’t said who the horseman was who had overtaken them on the broken road that first day.