by Chad Oliver
It was magic, of course.
The headman did not understand it, but he had not gotten to be headman by being stupid. He kept his mouth shut and took the credit.
If the ancestors wished to help him, that was as it should be. He would take all the help he could get. He only wished that the ancestors had not been asleep when the raiders had come. A man could not always rely on the ancestors.
It had been hard to find women with milk for the babies. There might not be enough for all of them. Some might have to be eaten.
The headman put the problem out of his mind. He did not have to make that decision yet. Anyway, it was not crucial.
There would be more babies.
Some lived, some died.
That was the way.
He got up from the rock and walked to the edge of the cliff. He checked to see that his lookouts were in position. He smiled. They were there. He would have no trouble with the lookouts, not for many suns. As long as the memory of the raid was fresh they would keep watch. In time, they would grow careless.
Then he would have to do it all.
He could not order the People to do anything.
He could only suggest, and if his leg went bad on him—
He frowned and shaded his eyes. Was that a figure approaching Little River?
It was. One solitary figure, walking slowly. The lookouts, lower down, had not spotted him yet.
The headman shivered. All of the hunters were in. There was no other band camped nearby. No man of the People would come that way, alone and with no spear.
It was one of the Strong Ones.
The headman did not hesitate. He cupped his hands and called out to his lookouts. He grabbed his spear and ran into the cave, ignoring the pain in his leg.
He knew what he had to do.
The Strong One was alone.
This time, the People would be ready.
Alex Norfolk waded into the stream and stopped. He was covered with sweat and he was tired. The walk from the sled had been more difficult than he had expected. The sun was very hot and the big blue sky made him dizzy.
The water was cool and pleasant. He splashed some on his face and on the back of his neck.
Last night, on the sled, he had been in a philosophical mood. He had looked out at the stars in the great vault of the night and he had been comforted. The thought had come to him that there was more than one way to get close to the stars.
Now, he was weary. He felt his years. He knew that it was a quixotic gesture he was making, and he remembered thinking that one of man’s troubles was that he no longer made quixotic gestures very often. But it was hard to think now. He had done his thinking, made his decisions.
He wanted to get it over with.
He waded on across the stream and climbed out on the bank. He began to walk slowly but steadily through the grass. He could see the dark caves in the cliffs ahead.
Damn it, where were they? Did he have to go all the way up there and knock on the door?
He kept walking. His heart hammered in his chest.
Where were they?
He took another step, and another, and another—
There!
Silent as shadows, they rose up all around him out of the tall grass. Their teeth were bared, their spears ready. He could see the bugs crawling in their dirty hair, he could smell the rank odor of their bodies….
He stood up straight. He kept his eyes open.
He hardly felt it when the stone points of the spears ripped into his flesh.
It could not be said that Alex Norfolk died happily, but his was a more useful death than most.
JUST LIKE A MAN
The storm hit the aircraft with shocking suddenness.
The great red sun of Pollux disappeared. The blue sky vanished. A solid wall of turbulent black clouds struck the ship with the impact of a massive metal fist. Sheets of wind-driven rain rattled like hail against the cabin windows. Jagged forks of blinding white light split the sky, and thunder cracked and boomed with nerve-shattering intensity.
The storm was nothing special. It would hardly have rated a line in a regular survey report. It was just an ordinary cloudburst, a gully-washer of the sort common enough back on Earth. It was a good one, a frog-choker, but nothing really unusual.
It got the job done, though.
It picked the airship up and threw it. The ship was a small one, a slow copter-and-prop job of the kind normally used for close-in survey work, and it couldn’t handle the wind. It tossed and blew like a leaf in a hurricane.
The three men in the ship weren’t even strapped down. They had been scanning the forest below, trusting to their computer to fly the ship. None of them had seen the storm coming. When it hit they were thrown against the cabin walls as though they had been hurled from catapults.
“Hellfire!” gasped Alston Lane. He crawled through the bucking cabin and pulled himself into the pilot’s seat. “What the devil hit us—a mountain?” He grabbed the controls.
Anthony Morales tried to steady himself against his chart table. “Whatever it was,” he said, “don’t try to hit it back.”
Roger Pennock, the biologist, was sprawled out full length on the cabin floor, his body flopping about like a fish out of water. He was still conscious but he was definitely hurt. Tony Morales reached out with one hand and tried to steady him.
Alston Lane fought the controls. He wanted to lift the ship over the storm, but it was like attempting to float a lead sinker. He was a big man, and a powerful one, but his strength was useless now. The howling wind buffeted the little ship with hammer blows. He had no choice except to run with the current. He could see nothing in front of him except a wild blackness split with broken white trees of lightning. The heavy rain was a hissing river on his windshield, and the thunder struck at him like the cracking of a monstrous whip.
There was a sudden explosion of light, an instantaneous clap of thunder. The ship lurched in the air. There was a sharp smell of ozone.
Alston felt the flabbiness in the controls. He couldn’t handle the ship, couldn’t even keep it level. He still had plenty of air under him but he was losing altitude. He checked his copter blades. They did not respond. He had his prop but that was all. He could not possibly land, not in the middle of a forest with that storm whistling around him.
He didn’t think he could fly out of it, either.
Alston Lane started to sweat.
“Tony,” he said. He spoke loudly but clearly, resisting the impulse to scream. “Can Roger get to the radio?”
“Don’t think so. He’s coming around very quickly, but—”
“Haven’t got much time. You had better handle it yourself. Get on that thing and call home plate. Give them a position fix and tell them we may have to ditch.”
“Position fix,” muttered Tony Morales. “Are you kidding?” He left the relative security of the chart table and lunged for the radio seat. He worked fast. He wasn’t as good as Roger, but all of them could handle the equipment.
The ship lurched again as though it had hit some invisible object in the sky. Something cracked.
“Radio’s out,” Tony called finally. His voice sounded very thin.
“Great,” said Alston. “Ain’t modern science wonderful?” The aircraft reared under him like a living thing. He checked carefully. They were still losing altitude. The storm was as fierce as ever. “Roger?”
“I’m back with you,” the biologist said weakly. “What the hell—”
“Can you jump, Rog?”
“If I have to.” Roger Pennock sounded anything but enthusiastic.
Alston wasn’t too keen on the idea himself. Even on Pollux Five, which was as close to a twin of Earth as man had yet found, the most basic rule of survey work was to stay with the ship if at all possible. The world below them, however familiar, was no bed of roses. Sure, the air was fine, the gravity was Earth-normal. There were no supermen to fight, no monsters left over from some creative nightmare. St
ill, there were problems. Some of the great rain forests were thick and impenetrable. The open grasslands were prowled by packs of catlike carnivores; the men had had to shoot hundreds of them before they could establish their base. There were rivers, thick and swollen …
Pollux Five was by no means an open book yet, either. A planet is a big place. It is one thing to map a world from the air, and it is something else to go down there and poke around. There was only one small base on the planet, and that was a good five hundred miles away. Pollux Five still held its share of surprises. In twenty years as an ecologist on four different worlds, Alston Lane had learned to expect the unexpected.
It didn’t take something with ALIEN stamped all over it to kill a man. Men had died quite successfully on Earth for a long, long time. A big cat could do the job very nicely.
So could a plane crash.
Alston did not want to leave the ship. He knew it was dangerous. But if there were an alternative, he couldn’t see it. If they stuck with the ship, they were headed for a smash-up that would be a corker. If they jumped, their floaters would probably land them safely.
They had filed a flight plan, of course. Survey ships do not just hare off into the unknown with a crew of transplanted soda-jerks singing jolly songs of high adventure. Unhappily, it was also true that survey ships were notorious for making slight deviations from their anticipated courses—say a few hundred miles or so. If the biologist saw something interesting, he wanted to get a good look at it. If the resource cartographer spotted an unusual formation, he wanted to get in close. Yes, and the ecologist might get intrigued by a pattern of vegetation, a twist in a river, a scattering of a herd of grazers …
Nevertheless, the boys at home plate would know approximately where they were. The automatic beam signals should have been operating at least until the storm hit. They might have to hold out for a day or two down there, but surely they would be picked up before long—
Unless …
There was another burst of white light, another shocking explosion of thunder that rocked the ship.
Alston smelled smoke, heard a crackling, licking noise—
“End of the line,” he yelled. “Everybody out. Keep together!”
The port slid open. The roar of the storm was suddenly very loud and very near.
The three men jumped into the darkness.
The aircraft kept going somehow, limping through the wild lightning-streaked sky.
The men started down with the rain, falling toward the waiting world of Pollux Five.
They were lucky.
They came down in open savanna country, missing the great trees of the rain forest by nearly a mile. They landed close together, and they were unhurt.
The three men huddled together in the driving rain and waited. There was nothing else to do. Gradually, the storm blew itself out. The rain eased off into a misty drizzle and then stopped entirely. Within two hours the black clouds had broken, and patches of warm blue sky appeared above the dripping grass. The reddish sun came out, sinking now toward the western horizon. The world smelled fresh and clean, and the sound of thunder was faint and far away.
Alston Lane stripped off his sodden shirt and wrung it out to dry. The sun felt good on his bare skin. His gray-flecked brown hair was plastered down around his face, and he had a cut on his right leg. His tall, lean body ached in every muscle. He was damned glad just to be alive, but he had no illusions about the pickle he was in.
They were five hundred miles away from the base. They were on a planet that was largely unexplored, except from the air. They might be picked up within a few hours. Then again, it was entirely possible that they would not be picked up at all.
The stock of equipment.
“Tony. Did you get a gun?”
Tony Morales—small, wiry, mercurial—managed a smile. “No gun, Alston. I grabbed a couple of maps. There wasn’t much time—”
“Rog?”
The biologist—balding, a bit overweight, slow and cautious in his actions—shook his head. Ruefully, he held up a small emergency packet. The thing contained basic medicines, four mini-flares, a week’s supply of food capsules. “I got one of these. I wasn’t thinking too clearly, I’m afraid. I just grabbed the first thing I saw and jumped.”
Alston fumbled in his pocket and produced a singularly unimpressive knife. He carried it to clean out his pipe, which he was already beginning to miss. “This is my contribution to the arsenal. With my usual genius, I didn’t get anything except what I had on me. We may get into the textbooks with this one, gentlemen. Here we are, three trained men from one of the most technologically sophisticated cultures in the galaxy, and we’ve got a map, a glorified first-aid kit, and a pocket knife between us. That takes some doing.”
Tony Morales grinned again. “You remember old Doc Knapp at the Institute, don’t you? ‘It’s not what you’ve got in your hand that counts; it’s what you’ve got in your head.’ How many times did we hear him say that?”
“Too many times,” Alston said. “It sounded good, but you can’t eat your own brain.”
“You and your stomach.” Tony spread his hands expressively. “A couple of hours without food and already you’re starving to death.”
Alston had to smile. He wasn’t a prodigious eater, but he always liked to know where his next meal was coming from. There was nothing like uncertainty in the food situation to make him really hungry.
“I hate to mention it,” Roger Pennock said, “but it seems to me that our most immediate problem has a slightly different slant to it. The question isn’t, What are we going to eat? The question is, Are we going to be eaten?”
Alston nodded. He put his shirt back on in a kind of reflex action, as though it might offer some protection. He looked around carefully. On the surface, there was nothing alarming: a sea of damp wind-rippled grass, a few scattered trees, the dark curve of the rain forest to the south. That peaceful-seeming savanna was an illusion, though. The equation was a simple one, quite possibly the oldest maxim in ecology. Where there was abundant grass, there were herds of animals that lived on the grass. Where there were herds of grass-eaters, there were carnivores that preyed on the herds.
In short, they were in classic hunting country—and they weren’t the hunters.
The big cats were out there; he was certain of that. He knew enough about those cats to respect them. They rather closely resembled the old terrestrial lions, although, of course, they were not identical. They weren’t as lazy as the African lions had been, and they did not seem to be active at night. They had no natural enemies on Pollux Five: they were utterly fearless. Like the African lions, though, they hunted in packs. They usually made their kills in the late afternoon, just before darkness fell. And they were tough, tough and quick and strong.
There was one other thing. They liked to eat men. When the base had first been established a little over a year ago, it had been necessary to shoot out the cats in the area. An earthlike planet had its advantages: you can eat the animals. It also poses certain problems: the animals can eat you too.
The cats weren’t much of a danger to a properly armed man. But a man without weapons was another matter entirely. A man has no troublesome horns. He has no claws, no teeth worthy of the name. He can’t even run away, not for long.
Alston sat down in the grass and pushed his hair back out of his eyes. “Anybody got any bright ideas?”
There was a long silence.
Alston took a stab at it, thinking out loud. “I figure we’ve got about two hours of daylight left. Even if they knew our exact position back at home plate, they wouldn’t be able to pick us up before morning. And they don’t know our exact position. We may not even be missed yet—those automatic signals have conked out before. We’ve got to stay clear of the cats, and this is the time they do their hunting. We’d be crazy to try to walk out of here, at least until we’re sure that we won’t be picked up. We’re five hundred miles from the base—”
“More l
ike five hundred and fifty miles,” Tony broke in, studying his maps. “And that includes an awful lot of thick jungle and about two million fat rivers. Look here—you could go almost all the way back to home plate and never get out of the rain forest. It would take us forever. If we tried to stick to the open country, it would add a couple of hundred miles and we’d have the cats to deal with. And some of these rivers—well, we’d have to build some boats, that’s all.”
“I’m not about to try to walk five hundred and fifty miles through a jungle,” Roger Pennock said flatly. “I’ll stay here and rot first.”
Alston cocked his head, listening. Was that thunder he heard? It might have been, or …
He stood up. “Okay,” he said. “We stay put, at least for now. That’s only common sense anyway. The more we move, the less chance there will be of finding us. But do we stay here—out in the grass with the cats?”
“No thanks,” Tony said. “I vote we head for that rain forest. We can be in it in half an hour. The cats wouldn’t come in there, would they?”
Alston considered. “No, I don’t think so. That stuff is pretty thick. A big cat likes open country—that’s where his food is. We could climb trees, too. Those cats couldn’t get to us if we got up high enough. That’s one thing a man can do, by God—he can climb a tree better than a lion.”
“We don’t know the first thing about those forests,” Roger objected. “The work on them has hardly begun, except from the air. There could be anything in that jungle.”
“We know what’s out here,” Tony pointed out. “That’s good enough for me.”
Alston heard the sound again. It was closer now. A roaring, yes, like an echo from the thunder. But that was no thunder …
“I’m with Tony,” he said. “Looks like you’re outvoted, Rog.”
Roger heaved himself to his feet. “I’m too damned big for the trees. If I wanted to play Tarzan, I wouldn’t have to go twenty-nine light-years to do it.”
“It beats playing Daniel in the kitty-cage,” Alston said.
The three men started off toward the south, moving toward the shadowed bulk of the rain forest. It was slow going. The ground was soggy under their feet, and the grass was slick and knife-edged.
