by Chad Oliver
Roger was only half conscious. He whispered and muttered incoherently to himself. He made no effort to help.
Alston tugged him back to the trunk of the tree. He pulled him up into a sitting position. He slapped the biologist in the face, hard. “Stand up, Roger. Put your hands on the vine.”
“Can’t. Tired, sick—”
“Stand up!”
Somehow, Alston got him back to his nest. He got under him and practically lifted him up on his shoulders. He dumped him into the nest and went back to his own. He sank into it, trembling.
“You bloody fool! You’ll get us all killed!” He regretted it as soon as he said it. The man didn’t know what he was doing.
“Afraid. I’m afraid. Can’t you understand that?” Roger began to whimper like a hurt child.
Alston forced himself to make soothing noises. He finally calmed Roger down, and the biologist drifted off to sleep.
Alston sat tensely in his nest, trying not to give way to despair. The sun moved slowly through the arc of the sky. The afternoon rains washed the air. Long shadows marched through the forest, and he could hear the distant roaring of the big cats.
Afraid? Alston smiled a little. He was not immune to fear. He was, he admitted to himself, scared to death. He was afraid of the long night, afraid of the trees and the wind, afraid of the great cats that prowled the grasslands. And most of all he was afraid of them.
The unknown was bad enough. The unknowable was worse.
Oh, yes, the man-things were human. They satisfied all the criteria. The boys at UNECA would welcome them into the family with open arms. The man-things could handle symbols, there was no doubt of that. They had a language. They had a culture. They were capable of rational thought. They were even primates, unless Alston himself was a cow. They could construct artifacts, they had customs and kinship systems, they were bright.
There were just two little things that made them different. Two little things that the legal definition of a man had not anticipated.
The creatures were arboreal. They lived in the trees.
The creatures were nocturnal. They were only active at night.
Two little things. And they meant—what?
Darkness was coming, the alien night. The man-things began to stir. They emerged from their nests. They looked at Alston with great yellow eyes and expressionless faces.
Alston called out, waking Tony.
He could not face them again alone.
The long weeks merged into endless months.
The three men did what they had to do. They stayed alive and they tried to find out enough about the man-things so that the creatures could help them get back to home plate more than five hundred miles away. It was hard work, tedious work, work that strained nerves and tested patience to the utmost. It was difficult enough for a trained anthropologist to understand the lifeway of a primitive tribe on Earth, even on a superficial basis, and there at least they had been dealing with men like themselves. These creatures were fundamentally different, and that made it tougher. It could not be done in a day or two. There were no convenient short cuts.
Roger Pennock recovered to some extent and did what he could to help. He was quite rational some of the time, but he was a problem. He had spells of depression when his behavior was totally unpredictable. Tony Morales held up well. He stuck to his maps with a dogged determination that surprised Alston. Tony had always been an up-and-down sort of a guy, but he obviously had the stuff when he needed it. Alston worked harder than he had ever worked in his life, trying to be simultaneously an ecologist, an anthropologist, a father confessor, and a good-humor man.
None of them were well. The fruit-heavy diet was rough on the digestive system, and the lack of sleep did not help. They survived, but their reserves of strength were low.
They made ropes, twisting them from the fibers of sisal-like plants that grew on the forest floor. The man-things gathered them at night and carried them into the trees. The animals knew more about rope-making than the men did, and they seemed eager to share their knowledge.
They worked hard on the language.
They tried to learn, to understand.
The man-things had an astounding grasp of their own past, considering that they had no written records. It was characteristic of them that they thought of life as a continuum, stretching back into remote antiquity and forward into a future that was very real to them. Indeed, the nearest thing they had to a religion was a kind of mystic conception of their species as a unity that extended from the beginning of time onward into infinity. They did not live only in the present. They could communicate some things about themselves, and other things could be guessed—
The emergence of the primates on Pollux Five had definite parallels with what had happened on Earth. There had been a time, millions of years ago, when the great reptiles had walked the land. Those ambulatory stomachs with gaping jaws had dominated the planet. The first mammals had been small ratlike creatures, arboreal for protection, nocturnal out of necessity. They had been ready and waiting when the giant lizards had been destroyed by the rise of mountain chains and the resultant ecological shifts.
Some of the mammals came down out of the trees. There had been a very rapid mammalian evolution, and the cat family had become dominant. At one time, there had been many different kinds of cats, including some tree-climbing types like leopards. The leopards had not survived—Alston suspected that the man-things had been responsible for that, although they refused to discuss the subject—but the big cats had flourished. They were formidable animals, more diurnal than the terrestrial lions, great killing machines that weighed six hundred pounds or more. They were too big for the trees, but in the grasslands they were invincible.
The primates evolved out of the first ratlike mammals, the insectivores. Some of them left the trees and became essentially ground-dwelling animals like the baboons. They were not successful, destroyed by the cats before they reached a stage where they could develop an effective technology. Others stayed in the trees. In time, they became the man-things.
In terms of the primates known on Earth, they were more like the prosimians than the apes or monkeys. In some ways, they rather closely resembled the terrestrial lemurs and tarsiers. They stuck to the trees, and they never abandoned their nocturnal way of life. Unlike the prosimians, however, they were progressive with respect to size and intelligence. It was as though they added the best features of apes and monkeys to the basic prosimian pattern. They had prehensile tails like some of the monkeys, they built nests like the apes—
And they had brains like men
They were unique. They did not fit neatly into the categories that had been established on another world many light-years away.
Their eyes were huge and night-adapted. They did not see well in bright sunlight, but their vision in the dark was better than a man’s. Even so, they relied very little on visual cues. They did not communicate by facial expressions, by postures, by gestures. Even their language was limited, not so much in its structure as in the situations where it was used. The man-things retained a wet-nosed snout, and they communicated largely by smells. They had special glands on their forearms and in their armpits. They smeared secretions from these glands on the branches where they lived, sometimes using their tails to reach the armpit glands. In the darkness it was a safe and sure method of communicating, and it was a technique that man could not share. Man had neither the glands nor the sensitive nose; he could neither send nor receive. The man-things did almost everything with smells: they marked their territories, indicated shades of feeling, reached decisions about common action. Their courtship and mating behavior was almost entirely regulated by scents. Their children did not cry—they emitted pleading smells.
The man-things had opposable thumbs on their hands, and could also oppose the big toes on their feet. Some of their digits had nails, others claws. They were clever with their hands, and they knew how to make things—nests, water containers, ropes. Sti
ll, their culture did not have a technological slant. They had few tools. They did not seem to trust tools, possibly because of the experience of the ground-dwelling primates who had not been able to compete with the big cats. It was also true that the man-things tended to be nomadic, and it was not easy to carry artifacts around in the trees.
Technology, Alston supposed, was in the last analysis one way of adapting. The man-things had taken a different route.
It was a strange culture, a culture without songs or jokes or games. It was a solemn culture, but it stayed on an even keel. It was efficient. It went on through the millennia with very little change, almost as though the man-things were waiting for something, biding their time….
The creatures never became friendly. Alston doubted that they felt compassion or pity. And yet the fact remained that they were willing to help the three men. They were willing to help to the extent of undertaking a long and difficult trip, possibly even a dangerous trip.
Why?
Through all the empty days and uneasy nights that question burned in Alston’s brain.
Why?
One day, the inevitable happened.
The men made a mistake. The time for decision was suddenly thrust upon them.
Roger Pennock began to deteriorate rapidly. Rog was all skin and bones. He was so nervous that he twitched constantly. It was hard to see in him the man he had formerly been—a balding biologist, inclined to be overweight, a man who had always been slow and methodical in his actions. Rog was very close to being mad with fear.
In the early afternoon he crawled over to Alston’s nest. His eyes were wild. “I want your knife,” he said.
Alston looked at him. “Knife? What for?”
“I want your knife!” Roger’s voice was almost a scream.
“Sure, Rog. No problem. But what are you going to do with it?” Alston was anything but eager to surrender his knife.
Roger smiled. His voice dropped to a conspiratorial whisper. “I’m going to even up the odds a little. I’m going to give us a fighting chance.”
“How are you going to do that?”
Roger stuck his head into the nest. Alston could see the muscles working in his face. “I’m going to make myself a spear.”
Brother, Alston thought. That’s all we need. “Now look, Rog. We can’t attack these things. We can’t even threaten them. You don’t have to like them, but they’re the only hope we have—”
Roger drew back, offended. “You think I’m crazy!”
“Of course not, Rog. But—”
“But nothing! You keep saying we have to use our heads. Well, I’m using mine. I don’t want to use the spear on them. We have to come down out of these trees eventually, don’t we? When we do, even if we stay in the forest, we have to be able to protect ourselves. I can make a spear. Just a nice straight shaft of wood with a sharp point on one end. I can cut it from a branch, right over there on that trail.” He waved. “It’s better than nothing, isn’t it? Isn’t it?”
Alston hesitated. It did make a kind of sense. The man-things didn’t object to weapons, even if they did not use them. If he could be sure that Roger wouldn’t flip his wig and stick the wrong animal, it might be a good idea. It would make Roger feel more secure, if nothing else.
“Okay,” he said. “You make your spear. But it stays in my nest until we go down to the ground. I don’t want you to hurt yourself if you get another fainting spell. Is that a deal?”
“It’s a deal.” The biologist grinned, more sanely this time. “Hey, we may get out of this thing yet!”
Alston gave him the knife.
Roger crawled out along the branch. He straddled the limb and reached out to test another nearby branch. It was good living wood but not big enough to support a man’s weight. The limb was situated just over one of the trails used by the man-things; Alston had seen them catch hold of it a dozen times without ever thinking of it as a possible weapon.
Roger opened the knife. It wasn’t much of a tool—just a pocket knife that Alston had used to clean his pipe—but it had a pretty good blade on it. It would get the job done if a man had plenty of time.
Roger had plenty of time.
He began to notch the limb, working around in a circle. It was slow work, more whittling than anything else. White chips of fresh wood drifted down toward the forest floor. Roger broke out in a sweat, but he looked happier than he had been in many days. He even hummed a little tune as he sawed away on the limb.
It took him hours. The sun floated down in the sky, and black shadows splashed the trees. A light breeze began to blow.
The man-things moved in their nests.
Roger got his cut deep enough so that the limb began to sag. He put the knife in his pocket and gripped the branch with both hands. He pulled, hard.
The limb cracked. It broke at the cut but did not fall.
“Timber!” Roger yelled, smiling.
He began to saw at the fibers that held the branch in place.
There was no warning, none at all. The man-things came out of their nests, full awake. Their faces were as expressionless as ever. They made no sound. Their yellow eyes gleamed.
They surrounded Roger.
They picked him up in their incredibly strong arms and threw him from the branch. This time he screamed. He screamed until he hit a limb far below. The screaming stopped. He bounced off the limb and kept on going. He hit the forest floor with a muffled, final thud.
Tony came out of his nest, his fists clenched. Alston caught him and held him. “Wait,” he hissed.
“They killed him, killed him in cold blood—”
Alston felt the blood pounding in his head. It was all he could do to hold himself in check. “Wait! We can’t help Roger now.”
“We’ll be next—”
“No. Look. They’re drawing back. They’re not angry at us. It was something he did—”
The man-things ignored the two men. Some of them reached out and fingered the broken limb. They tried to lift it back into place, but too much of the wood had been cut away. They let it drop again. They abandoned it and began to feed. They offered no word of explanation. The two men were just there, and the situation seemed to be the same as it had been before.
“Fool!” Alston said.
“He didn’t do anything to hurt them: He was just trying—”
“Not him. Not Rog. I was the fool. I should have thought, I should have seen …”
Tony shook his head, looking down.
“Oh, I was the big brain, the cool-headed thinker.” Alston groaned and pushed his hair out of his eyes. “Don’t you see, Tony? That limb he was cutting—it was a part of their trail. They used it for a hand-hold—you’ve seen them do it, and so have I. This damned forest is their home. We don’t understand them, no. But they don’t understand us either. To them what Rog did was a wanton act of destruction. It may have been more than that. Those things break off twigs. They build nests close to the trunks of the trees. But they don’t snap off limbs that they need for their pathways. They need those limbs, especially in the dark. It may be a taboo of some kind—”
“That doesn’t help. Rog is dead.”
“I know, I know. I’m responsible. I feel like hell about it, but we’ve got to try to understand.”
“Understand!” Tony snorted. “We’ll never understand, not in a thousand years.”
Alston looked at him. “Okay, Tony. Do you want to wade into them? We might get one or two before they get us. I’ll go with you if that’s what you want.”
Tony flushed. “Sorry. But that scream of his—”
“I know. I’ll hear it as long as I live. But Rog wouldn’t want us to sacrifice ourselves in a meaningless act of revenge. Rog wanted to get home. All we can do for him now is to try to make his death mean something. I’m not ready to quit. I don’t think you are, either.”
“Never mind the fine words. What can we do?”
Alston leaned against the tree, his stomach in knots. �
�We’ve got to get going. We have to take a stab at it, ready or not. We’ve been lucky, fantastically lucky. We’ll make another mistake before long. How can we help it when we don’t know the rules? It might be anything—we might just smell wrong. It’s now or never. It’s time to leave the nest.”
“We haven’t got a chance, you know. Five hundred miles—it’s impossible.”
“Do you want to stay here? Now?”
There could only be one answer to that question.
The two men got themselves ready to face the creatures that were their only hope—man-things, rescuers, killers—
Far below them, there was only silence from the night-shadowed forest floor.
The strong dry fingers released his wrists. Alston dropped the final few feet to the forest floor. He stood there in the cathedral hush, trying to catch his balance. His feet had not touched the ground in months. He felt utterly strange, an alien to his own environment.
Tony dropped down beside him. He stumbled, clutched at a tree for support.
The man-things withdrew into the upper branches. They said no word of farewell.
The two men were alone. They found Roger’s broken, swollen body. Two days on the warm forest floor had not made him a pretty sight. Alston and Tony scooped out a shallow grave in the soft soil and buried him as well as they could. Alston located his knife and put it back in his ragged pocket.
It was still early morning. The pale sunlight filtered down from the world they had left. The man-things would be going to sleep. If they missed the rendezvous—
Well, it was best not to think about that.
Alston took a deep breath. “Let’s go, amigo. Five miles a day if we’re lucky. Call it four months back to home plate. We can do it. Just take it day by day.”
Tony shrugged. “Nothing like a little exercise,” he said.
They had no compass. They were afraid to move into the open country where they could use the sun and the stars to orient themselves. The great forest looked the same everywhere. It was a maze, a green living maze.
“There,” Alston said, pointing. The marker was in place. It was a circle of yellow leaves fastened to the trunk of a tree just below where the branches began. It stood out clearly against the black bark. Each night the man-things would blaze the trail ahead. The two men only had to follow that trail—and survive.
