by Chad Oliver
Nobody explained it.
“O.K. Second, there’s the little matter of the Nern language. For purposes of communication, they taught me—and I tried to teach you—a simplified jargon, on about the this is a book—the book is brown level. All very well—the complexity of a language tells you very little about the complexity of a culture. But the kicker is that the jargon isn’t their language! They actually have an extremely intriguing linguistic set-up that I’m just now beginning to get the drift of. Basically, they’ve got about ten different verb classes—and the type of verb you use indicates your authority for making the statement you make. That is, it tells whether your information comes from first-hand knowledge, or from a reliable authority, or from hearsay, or what-have-you. Neat, eh? This sort of thing has popped up before, of course—there was an American Indian language called Wintu that was set up along much the same lines. But the important thing is that they edited their language when they taught it to me—they revised it down to my level to make it easy for me. That just plain doesn’t happen. Explanation, please?”
He puffed smoke in a blue cloud at the ceiling.
Bob Chavez was silent and shifted uncertainly on his wooden stool. His eyes had a tired, distant look about them. The eyes bothered Ashley, vaguely. Where had he seen eyes like that before?
Ernie said, “So what? So they’re unusual. So they elude your keen scientific mind. They’re still savages, Martin, and all your books won’t change that. As for the cigarette, I say cross that bridge when we come to it—if we come to it.”
Ashley smiled. “O.K., Ernie. Just close your eyes and maybe it will all go away. You asked for my opinion and you got it. I may be wrong—I’ve been wrong before. You go play Og, Son of Fire.” He pointed, out into the wet village streets. “Go on out and tell them all about the wheel.”
Silence then, for a long time.
“Let’s don’t argue anymore,” Bob Chavez said suddenly, in a voice that was fuzzy with weariness. “I … I don’t feel so good.”
Martin Ashley put down his pipe in alarm and stepped over to the kid. He looked at him, remembering now. He felt the kid’s forehead. It was icy cold. Even as his hand rested there, the heat flowed back again and the chill became a fever.
“Get to bed, Bob,” he said slowly.
Martin Ashley and Ernie Gallen stared wordlessly at each other in the gray light. There was no need to speak, and nothing to say. They both remembered the Juarez.
Outside, the rain came hammering down in dull gray sheets.
Six hours later and it was night. The driving rain had once more become a drizzle.
Bob Chavez, obviously, was dying. He was unconscious now, and did not stir on his bed. His face was alternately too pale and flushed red with blood.
The disease had struck again. They had found the planet safe as far as they could tell, and that probably meant that they had carried the disease with them from the Juarez. It had waited, dormant, biding its time.
And now—
And now it had come back, in a little cabin on a new world. Bob was very sick, which was bad enough, but that wasn’t all. Martin Ashley and Ernie Gallen had exchanged no words, but they both knew. Each man could already feel the symptoms in himself. Gallen had had the disease once, and Ashley had watched fifty-one people die of it.
He remembered: Fifty-one down and three to go.
“It’s faster this time,” Ernie said, breaking the long silence. “A lot faster.” He sat down on his bed and wiped the sweat from his forehead with a handkerchief.
The rain pattered gently on the roof, eternal and unconcerned.
Martin Ashley licked lips that were suddenly dry and parched. He felt his blood pounding through his veins, heavy and sluggish and sick. He listened to Bob Chavez, breathing in short, harsh gasps in the darkness. So quickly, then, did death come in and win all arguments—
The night was slow and very long.
An hour passed. Without a word, Martin Ashley went over and picked up Bob Chavez in his arms.
“What are you doing?”
“Going for a walk.”
“In the rain?”
“I’m taking the kid to see a doctor.” His brain was spinning now, and it was hard to hold on to it.
Ernie Gallen surged weakly to his feet. “You crazy fool—to that witch doctor?”
“He got his M.D. at Johns Hopkins,” Ashley said, feeling giddy.
“You’re crazy! I won’t let you do it.”
“He can only die, Ernie.”
“I won’t let you!”
Martin Ashley smiled slowly. His mind, suddenly, was crystal clear. Calmly, he put the kid back on the bed. “Ernie,” he said, “if we don’t get out of this, I want you to remember one thing: you give me a pain.”
He moved in fast, on dancing feet. He swung just once, his fist coming up in a long arc almost from the floor. It had every ounce of Ashley’s strength behind it, and it landed with a crunch on the point of Gallen’s jaw.
Ashley didn’t even look at him. He picked Bob Chavez up again and staggered out into the drizzle and the darkness. The kid was terrifically heavy, like a lead sack in his arms. His feet slipped and sloshed in the mud and his hair plastered itself down over his eyes.
The fever was getting him now. He was burning up. Insanely, he wondered why the drops of rain on his forehead didn’t boil away into steam. He couldn’t think clearly and his feet got all tangled up when he tried to walk.
He fell twice, and the mud felt cool.
Where was the Juarez now, he wondered, out there beyond the rain? He thought he could hear it: THIS IS THE JUAREZ, SURVEY SHIP FROM EARTH, SEPTEMBER TWENTY, TWO THOUSAND AND SIXTY-SEVEN. UNKNOWN DISEASE HAS KILLED FIFTY-ONE, OF FIFTY-FOUR. THREE REMAINING MEN HAVE TAKEN SHUTTLE TO FOURTH PLANET, SYSTEM OF CARINAE. CONDITIONS THERE UNKNOWN—”
He began to laugh. He heard himself, and stopped.
He saw the dark structure before him and fell through the door of Rondol’s cabin. He twisted as he fell, breaking the kid’s fall with his body.
“Sick,” he said from a thick, oily blackness. “Sick. Needs a doctor—”
From somewhere, from nowhere, strong hands touched his shoulder and he knew nothing more. There was only the rain, the warm and soothing rain, forever.
V
Martin Ashley woke up.
The sky was over his head and it was a brilliant, astonishing blue. He lay very still, not trying to move, just looking at it, drinking it in. The air around him was warm and clean and filled with the sharp sweetness of pine.
He was well. He knew that instantly; no trace of disease was left in his body. Very vaguely, he seemed to remember long chants and singing and herbs in his mouth. But all of that was long ago, and now there was only the blue sky, and the lazy delight in just being alive.
He glanced to one side, and there was Bob Chavez. Like himself, he was lying on a bed of leaves, covered with a light blanket. His face was clear, his eyes unclouded, and he was smiling weakly.
“Tell ’em about the wheel,” Bob Chavez whispered.
Ashley smiled back at him. He tried to think, but the effort didn’t seem worth the trouble. He relaxed and let the soft air wash over him as he drowsed.
“Feeling better?” asked a voice out of a great distance.
He opened his eyes again. It was evening. Rondol was crouching by his side. The shaman had lost much of his earlier brashness, and now seemed almost gentle.
“Much better,” he said sleepily. “Thank you, Rondol.”
Rondol frowned. “The other one,” he said, “the one who was always so certain about things—”
“Ernie?”
“Yes. He would not let me help him. I went to him as soon as I found the nature of your trouble. We started to sing him well, to call on the good forces to assist him, but he cursed us and demanded that we leave.” Rondol shrugged. “We left. He is dead. We have disposed of the body.”
Dead. Fifty-four had boarded the Juarez, and n
ow two were left.
Martin Ashley was still foggy with sleep. Undoubtedly, he thought, he had been drugged. Rondol’s voice drifted down to him from a great and misty height.
“Soon now you will leave us, Martin. We have studied you enough; we would not endanger your lives further and have you think badly of us.”
Studied us? Studied US?
He tried to think, but he was too tired. It was good just to lie quietly, listening to the wind and the sounds of the coming night. He slept.
It was morning when he opened his eyes again—a bright clear morning that hurt his eyes. And the morning was filled with sound—a thundering, splitting crack that swept down from the skies and reverberated through the hard-packed village streets. He caught a glimpse of it, silver in the sun, flashing high above the trees in a deceleration orbit.
A spaceship.
And a big one.
The ship stood on her tail and came down. Martin Ashley watched it lose altitude, hanging in the air like a skilled swimmer treading water, until the tall pinelike trees hid it from view.
A whining hum continued for a long minute, and then the silence came again, even louder in his ears. The world rushed in to fill the emptiness, with whispers of wind and trickles of water rushing over rocks and murmurs of village life.
The ship had landed—obviously out in the grass field, near the empty shuttle from the Juarez.
Rondol helped Ashley to his feet, and kept a hand on his shoulder to steady him. Catan himself, the “chief” of the Nern, assisted Bob Chavez. A girl, whose name was Lirad, led the way out of the village and down the pathway under the trees.
Still a little confused and uncertain about what was happening, Martin Ashley turned once, back to the village of the Nern, to bid it a silent farewell. At his side, Rondol seemed about to speak, but said nothing.
Unbelievably, they were leaving. Going where?
They walked along under the pines until the forest ended and the field of tall grass was before them. There in the sun rested the mighty spaceship that he had seen as a silver speck in the air, and beyond it lay the shuttle that had carried them to Carinae IV. The shuttle was dwarfed into insignificance by the towering giant that dominated the field.
The three Nern eyed the great ship neither with envy nor curiosity. Ashley watched them closely. There was, he decided, a certain affection in their eyes, but that was all. As a man might look back on the well-remembered toys of childhood.
“They are more of our star-brothers,” Catan said quietly. “Do not fear them. They will take you to your homes.”
Martin Ashley started. Everything was happening so fast that he could not organize his thoughts. He had given up the Earth as forever beyond his reach, and now suddenly Catan spoke of home. Ashley felt conflicting emotions chase themselves through his brain, and he tried desperately to say something—something for which he knew no words, in any language. He felt that he had caught a glimpse, a mere suggestion, of something fine—and now it was to be taken from him, and he was free to go home.
He said nothing, because he did not know how. Bob Chavez, too, was silent at his side.
“We will miss you, Martin,” Rondol said. “You are a good man.”
And then the girl, Lirad, was before him. She was not beautiful by ordinary standards, but her dark hair framed the most sensitive face that Ashley had ever seen—sensitive and at the same time firm with strength and humor. Why had he never noticed her before? Gently, she touched his shoulder with her hand. She looked deep into his eyes, smiled faintly, and said nothing.
So few words, so little time remaining now. But Ashley knew that something had passed between himself and the Nern, something new, something that was his if he could just reach out and grasp it.
Too late.
Two men, crisp and uniformed and efficient, came out of the ship, exchanged friendly greetings with the Nern, and took charge of the two men from Earth. Carefully, they led them through the fields of grass and up into the ship that towered into the heavens.
The sun was gone, and the village, and the pines. Now, again, there were the metals and the machines and the hummings and buzzings and clickings. And the alert faces, the ordered activities, the jokes and the skills of men in uniforms.
“Welcome aboard, gentlemen,” said the captain, speaking to them in the language of the Nern. “Make yourselves at home.”
The cushioned take-off and the smoothly compensating gravity pull told Martin Ashley that here was a ship that made the old Juarez look like a crude experiment, a toy for the Fourth of July.
“Tell them about the wheel!” enthused Bob Chavez, his face alive with pleasure.
Martin Ashley smiled back, still trying to organize his thoughts. It had all happened so quickly—
He knew only that he was in space again, and the Nern were gone.
One “day” later they landed on Carinae V.
They stepped out into an enormous concrete spaceport, the biggest that either of them had ever seen, with green gardens on top of the walls and the towers of a white and gleaming city sparkling in the sun beyond.
“This, I believe, was the planet that had no technology,” Bob Chavez said wryly. “Looks like our initial survey made a slight miscalculation.”
“They did indicate two planets that seemed ecologically O.K., if you’ll remember,” Ashley pointed out. “But they seem to have gotten their decimal point in the wrong place. In fact, they didn’t even have a decimal point.”
It was all very swift and very courteous. A smooth, fast copter picked them up and flashed into the city, depositing them on a tower roof. A silent elevator plunged them down into the depths of the building and let them out on the twenty-fifth floor. The door opened directly into a large office—cool and tasteful, with remarkable paintings on the walls and a window that looked out on a roof garden that was a riot of color.
A man got up quickly from behind a desk and came toward them, hand outstretched in true Earth-fashion. He was a big man, well over six feet tall and weighing an easy two hundred pounds, with unruly brown hair, sloppy clothes, and open, friendly eyes.
“Very happy to have you with us,” he boomed in flawless English, his big voice filling the big room. “Very happy indeed! Smoke? Drink?” He laughed, and his laugh was as big as he was. “Sit down.”
Martin Ashley sat. He was still a little weak, and beginning to feel painfully like a small and rather stupid child. The big man’s personality was like a blow in the face, but Ashley liked the man on sight. To cover his nervousness, he fished out his pipe, took his time loading it, and lit it with a stick match.
“My name is Shek,” the big man said. He shook out a cigarette, and one mystery was solved. It was identical to the one that Ashley had found that night, so long ago, outside the village of the Nern. It puffed into a spark as Shek held it in his fingers, and he promptly hung it miraculously in the corner of his mouth and went on talking. “Name sounds moronic I know, but Martin Ashley is a howl too, or would be if you were me.”
Shek paced the floor, puffing up clouds of smoke which the air conditioner valiantly tried to blow out the window. He had plenty of room to pace in, and he needed it. “Look here,” Shek said, “I know what you guys must be thinking, so let’s get the questions out of the way so we can enjoy ourselves.” He jabbed a big finger at Martin Ashley. “Matter of fact, you already know the answers, if you’d just get up on your hind legs and dredge ’em up.”
Ashley smiled dubiously and concentrated on his pipe.
“I’ll show you,” Shek said. “I’ll ask the questions. One, how come you didn’t pick us up on the Juarez survey?”
Ashley hesitated. “You’re screened, I guess,” he said.
“Of course! Only possible answer. See—you know more than you thought you knew already. Long story, and probably very dull to you, but the upshot of it is that we prefer to contact others instead of having strangers barge in on us all the time.” He slammed his fist into his hand with a
resounding whack. “You’ve no idea the creeps there are batting around in space, present company excluded of course. Why, would you believe it, one crummy outfit came down here before we had the screen set up and tried to colonize the joint!”
He boomed his big laugh again, and Martin Ashley felt a bit uncomfortable. That shot had come just a trifle too close to home.
“Yes, sir,” Shek hurricaned on, shooting off words like strings of firecrackers. “Next question: How did we know where you were, and when to pick you up?”
“Well, you could have picked up the message from the Juarez,” suggested Bob Chavez.
“Or the Nern got in touch with you somehow,” Ashley added. He was feeling a little better and essayed a smoke ring that wobbled across the room and out the window.
“Nice smoke ring!” complimented Shek. He blew one himself and beamed proudly. “Both of your answers are right, of course. We picked up the message from the Juarez right away, and we knew you’d be O.K. if you didn’t pull anything stupid. Then Rondol gave us a buzz.”
“How?” asked Ashley, beginning to feel dumb again.
“Usual way,” Shek laughed, still pacing up and down, trailing smoke. “We do a little … ummm … trading with Rondol and the boys, you see, and we have to contact them occasionally. So there’s a good transmitter down there—Rondol’s is in the club house in the middle of the plaza; I don’t guess you got in there.”
Ashley shook his head.
“You’re doing fine,” Shek assured them. “Next question: How about my English? Good, huh?” He grinned boyishly.
