The Short Stories of Edmond Hamilton: Volume II Page 11

  "What does he do next?" whispered Kieran to Paula. "Scratch their ears? I used to tame squirrels this way when I was a kid."

  "Shut up," she warned him. Webber beckoned and she nudged him to move out of the flitter. "Slow and careful."

  Kieran slid out of the flitter. Big glistening eyes swung to watch him. The eating stopped. Some of the little ones scuttled for the trees. Kieran froze. Webber hooted and whuffled some more and the tension relaxed. Kieran approached the group with Paula. There was suddenly no truth in what he was doing. He was an actor in a bad scene, mingling with impossible characters in an improbable setting. Webber making ridiculous noises and tossing his dried fruit around like a caricature of somebody sowing, Paula with her brisk professionalism all dissolved in misty-eyed fondness, himself an alien in this time and place, and these perfectly normal-appearing people behaving like orang-utans with their fur shaved off. He started to laugh and then thought better of it. Once started, he might not be able to stop.

  "Let them get used to you," said Webber softly.

  Paula obviously had been here before. She had begun to make noises too, a modified hooting more like a pigeon's call. Kieran just stood still. The people moved in around them, sniffing, touching. There was no conversation, no laughing or giggling even among the little girls. A particularly beautiful young woman stood just behind the chief, watching the strangers with big yellow cat-eyes. Kieran took her to be the man's daughter. He smiled at her. She continued to stare, deadpan and blank-eyed, with no answering flicker of a smile. It was as though she had never seen one before. Kieran shivered. All this silence and unresponsiveness became eerie.

  "I'm happy to tell you," he murmured to Paula, "that I don't think much of your little pets?"

  She could not allow herself to be sharply angry. She only said, in a whisper, "They are not pets, they are not animals. They -"

  She broke off. Something had come over the naked people. Every head had lifted, every eye had turned away from the strangers. They were listening. Even the littlest ones were still.

  Kieran could not hear anything except the wind in the trees.

  "What?" he started to ask.

  Webber made an imperative gesture for silence. The tableau held for a brief second longer. Then the brown-haired man who seemed to be the leader made a short harsh noise. The people turned and vanished into the trees.

  "The Sakae," Webber said. "Get out of sight." He ran toward the flitter. Paula grabbed Kieran's sleeve and pushed him toward the trees.

  "What's going on?" he demanded as he ran.

  "Their ears are better than ours. There's a patrol ship coming, I think."

  The shadows took them in, orange-and-gold-splashed shadows under strange trees. Kieran looked back. Webber had been inside the flitter. Now he tumbled out of the hatch and ran toward them. Behind him the hatch closed and the flitter stirred and then took off all by itself, humming.

  "They'll follow it for a while," Webber panted. "It may give us a chance to get away." He and Paula started after the running people.

  Kieran balked. "I don't know why I'm running away from anybody."

  Webber pulled out a snub-nosed instrument that looked enough like a gun to be very convincing. He pointed it at Kieran's middle.

  "Reason one," he said. "If the Sakae catch Paula and me here we're in very big trouble. Reason two, this is a closed area, and you're with us, so you will be in very big trouble." He looked coldly at Kieran. "The first reason is the one that interests me most."

  Kieran shrugged. "Well, now I know." He ran.

  Only then did he hear the low heavy thrumming in the sky.

  CHAPTER VI

  The sound came rumbling very swiftly toward them. It was a completely different sound from the humming of the flitter, and it seemed to Kieran to hold a note of menace. He stopped in a small clearing where he might see up through the trees. He wanted a look at this ship or flier or whatever it was that had been built and was flown by non-humans.

  But Webber shoved him roughly on into a clump of squat trees that were the color of sherry wine, with flat thick leaves.

  "Don't move," he said.

  Paula was hugging a tree beside him. She nodded to him to do as Webber said.

  "They have very powerful scanners." She pointed with her chin. "Look. They've learned."

  The harsh warning barks of the men sounded faintly, then were hushed. Nothing moved, except by the natural motion of the wind. The people crouched among the trees, so still that Kieran would not have seen them if he had not known they were there.

  The patrol craft roared past, cranking up speed as it went. Webber grinned. "They'll be a couple of hours at least, overhauling and examining the flitter. By that time it'll be dark, and by morning we'll be in the mountains."

  The people were already moving. They headed upstream, going at a steady, shuffling trot. Three of the women, Kieran noticed, had babies in their arms. The older children ran beside their mothers. Two of the men and several of the women were white-haired. They ran also.

  "Do you like to see them run?" asked Paula, with a sharp note of passion in her voice. "Does it look good to you?"

  "No," said Kieran, frowning. He looked in the direction in which the sound of the patrol craft was vanishing.

  "Move along," Webber said. "They'll leave us far enough behind as it is."

  Kieran followed the naked people through the woods, beside the tawny river. Paula and Webber jogged beside him. The shadows were long now, reaching out across the water.

  Paula kept glancing at him anxiously, as though to detect any sign of weakness on his part. "You're doing fine," she said. "You should. Your body was brought back to normal strength and tone, before you ever were awakened."

  "They'll slow down when it's dark, anyway," said Webber.

  The old people and the little children ran strongly.

  "Is their village there?" Kieran asked, indicating the distant mountains.

  "They don't live in villages," Paula said. "But the mountains are safer. More places to hide."

  "You said this was a closed area. What is it, a hunting preserve?"

  "The Sakae don't hunt them anymore."

  "But they used to?"

  "Well," Webber said, "a long time ago. Not for food, the Sakae are vegetarians, but -"

  "But," said Paula, "they were the dominant race, and the people were simply beasts of the field. When they competed for land and food the people were hunted down or driven out." She swung an expressive hand toward the landscape beyond the trees. "Why do you think they live in this desert, scraping a miserable existence along the watercourses? It's land the Sakae didn't want. Now, of course, they have no objection to setting it aside as a sort of game preserve. The humans are protected, the Sakae tell us. They're living their natural life in their natural environment, and when we demand that a program be -"

  She was out of breath and had to stop, panting. Webber finished for her.

  "We want them taught, lifted out of this naked savagery. The Sakae say it's impossible."

  "Is it true?" asked Kieran.

  "No," said Paula fiercely. "It's a matter of pride. They want to keep their dominance, so they simply won't admit that the people are anything more than animals, and they won't give them a chance to be anything more."

  There was no more talking after that, but even so the three outlanders grew more and more winded and the people gained on them. The sun went down in a blaze of blood-orange light that tinted the trees in even more impossible colors and set the river briefly on fire. Then night came, and just after the darkness shut down the patrol craft returned, beating up along the winding river bed. Kieran froze under the black trees and the hair lifted on his skin. For the first time he felt like a hunted thing. For the first time he felt a personal anger.

  The patrol craft drummed away and vanished. "They won't come back until daylight," Webber said.

  He handed out little flat packets of concentrated food from his pockets. They mu
nched as they walked. Nobody said anything. The wind, which had dropped at sundown, picked up from a different quarter and began to blow again. It got cold. After a while they caught up with the people, who had stopped to rest and eat. The babies and old people for whom Kieran had felt a worried pity were in much better shape than he. He drank from the river and then sat down. Paula and Webber sat beside him, on the ground. The wind blew hard from the desert, dry and chill. The trees thrashed overhead. Against the pale glimmer of the water Kieran could see naked bodies moving along the river's edge, wading, bending, grubbing in the mud. Apparently they found things, for he could see that they were eating. Somewhere close by other people were stripping fruit or nuts from the trees. A man picked up a stone and pounded something with a cracking noise, then dropped the stone again. They moved easily in the dark, as though they were used to it. Kieran recognized the leader's yellow-eyed daughter, her beautiful slender height outlined against the pale-gleaming water. She stood up to her ankles in the soft mud, holding something tight in her two hands, eating.

  The sweat dried on Kieran. He began to shiver.

  "You're sure that patrol ship won't come back?" he asked.

  "Not until they can see what they're looking for."

  "Then I guess it's safe." He began to scramble around, feeling for dried sticks.

  "What are you doing?"

  "Getting some firewood."

  "No." Paula was beside him in an instant, her hand on his arm, "No, you mustn't do that."

  "But Webber said -"

  "It isn't the patrol ship, Kieran. It's the people. They -"

  "They what?"

  "I told you they were low on the social scale. This is one of the basic things they have to be taught. Right now they still regard fire as a danger, something to run from."

  "I see," Kieran said, and let the kindling fall. "Very well, if I can't have a fire, I'll have you. Your body will warm me." He pulled her into his arms.

  She gasped, more in astonishment, he thought, than alarm. "What are you talking about?"

  "That's a line from an old movie. From a number of old movies, in fact. Not bad, eh?"

  He held her tight. She was definitely female. After a moment he pushed her away.

  "That was a mistake. I want to be able to go on disliking you without any qualifying considerations."

  She laughed, a curiously flat little sound. "Was everybody crazy in your day?" she asked. And then, "Reed -"

  It was the first time she had used his given name. "What?"

  "When they threw the stones, and we got back into the flitter, you pushed me ahead of you. You were guarding me. Why?"

  He stared at her, or rather at the pale blur of her standing close to him. "Well, it's always been sort of the custom for the men to - But now that I think of it, Webber didn't bother."

  "No," said Paula. "Back in your day women were still taking advantage of the dual standard, demanding complete equality with men but clinging to their special status. We've got beyond that."

  "Do you like it? Beyond, I mean."

  "Yes," she said. "It was good of you to do that, but -"

  Webber said, "They're moving again. Come on."

  The people walked this time, strung out in a long line between the trees and the water, where the light was a little better and the way more open. The three outlanders tagged behind, clumsy in their boots and clothing. The long hair of the people blew in the wind and their bare feet padded softly, light and swift.

  Kieran looked up at the sky. The trees obscured much of it so that all he could see was some scattered stars overhead. But he thought that somewhere a moon was rising.

  He asked Paula and she said, "Wait. You'll see."

  Night and the river rolled behind them. The moonlight became brighter, but it was not at all like the moonlight Kieran remembered from long ago and far away. That had had a cold tranquility to it, but this light was neither cold nor tranquil. It seemed somehow to shift color, too, which made it even less adequate for seeing than the white moonlight he was used to. Sometimes as it filtered through the trees it seemed, ice-green, and again it was reddish or amber, or blue.

  They came to a place where the river made a wide bend and they cut across it, clear of the trees. Paula touched Kieran's arm and pointed. "Look."

  Kieran looked, and then he stopped still. The light was not moonlight, and its source was not a moon. It was a globular cluster of stars, hung in the sky like a swarm of fiery bees, a burning and pulsing of many colors, diamond-white and gold, green and crimson, peacock blue and smoky umber. Kieran stared, and beside him Paula murmured, "I've been on a lot of planets, but none of them have anything like this."

  The people moved swiftly on, paying no attention at all to the sky.

  Reluctantly Kieran followed them into the obscuring woods. He kept looking at the open sky above the river, waiting for the cluster to rise high so he could see it.

  It was some time after this, but before the cluster rose clear of the trees, that Kieran got the feeling that something, or someone, was following them.

  CHAPTER VII

  He had stopped to catch his breath and shake an accumulation of sand out of his boots. He was leaning against a tree with his back to the wind, which meant that he was facing their back-trail, and he thought he saw a shadow move where there was nothing to cast a shadow. He straightened up with the little trip-hammers of alarm beating all over him, but he could see nothing more. He thought he might have been mistaken. Just the same, he ran to catch up with the others.

  The people were moving steadily. Kieran knew that their senses were far keener than his, and they were obviously not aware of any danger other than the basic one of the Sakae. He decided that he must have been seeing things.

  But an uneasiness persisted. He dropped behind again, this time on purpose, after they had passed a clearing. He stayed hidden behind a tree-trunk and watched. The cluster-light was bright now but very confusing to the eye. He heard a rustling that he did not think was wind, and he thought that something started to cross the clearing and then stopped, as though it had caught his scent.

  Then he thought that he heard rustlings at both sides of the clearing, stealthy sounds of stalking that closed in toward him. Only the wind, he told himself, but again he turned to run. This time he met Paula, coming back to look for him.

  "Reed, are you all right?" she asked. He caught her arm and pulled her around and made her run. "What is it? What's the matter?"

  "I don't know." He hurried with her until he could see Webber ahead, and beyond him the bare backs and blowing hair of the people. "Listen," he said, "are there any predators here?"

  "Yes," Paula said, and Webber turned sharply around.

  "Have you seen something?"

  "I don't know. I thought I did. I'm not sure."

  "Where?"

  "Behind us."

  Webber made the harsh barking danger call, and the people stopped. Webber stood looking back the way they had come. The women caught the children and the men fell back to where Webber stood. They looked and listened, sniffing the air. Kieran listened too, but now he did not hear any rustlings except the high thrashing of the branches. Nothing stirred visibly and the wind would carry away any warning scent.

  The men turned away. The people moved on again. Webber shrugged.

  "You must have been mistaken, Kieran."

  "Maybe. Or maybe they just can't think beyond the elementary. If they don't smell it, it isn't there. If something is after us it's coming up-wind, the way any hunting animal works. A couple of the men ought to circle around and -"

  "Come on," said Webber wearily.

  They followed the people beside the river. The cluster was high now, a hive of suns reflected in the flowing water, a kaleidoscopic rippling of colors.

  Now the women were carrying the smaller children. The ones too large to be carried were lagging behind a little. So were the aged. Not much, yet. Kieran, conscious that he was weaker than the weakest of thes
e, looked ahead at the dim bulk of the mountains and thought that they ought to be able to make it. He was not at all sure that he would.

  The river made another bend. The trail lay across the bend, clear of the trees. It was a wide bend, perhaps two miles across the neck. Ahead, where the trail joined the river again, there was a rocky hill. Something about the outlines of the hill seemed wrong to Kieran, but it was too far away to be sure of anything. Overhead the cluster burned gloriously. The people set out across the sand.