Anywhen (10 page)

And my flamer was locked to my suit. We were under no circumstances to use them to defend ourselves, and couldn't have gotten them unlocked in time to disobey the order. They were only for afterwards, in case the flaming circuit inside the airlock had been knocked out for some reason. As weapons, they were as useless tonight as a tightly laced boot.

After at least a thousand million increasingly ponderous, sweating steps, the PPI scope told me I had walked out the prescribed two and a half miles, I switched to rebroadcast, and got the picture as the gig saw it. My set had a few pips that might have been Marines, but it was impossible for my suit sweeper to see all around the circle. On repeat from the gig, the scope showed several men still coming into line on the far side, which gratified me for no reason I could pin down.

They straggled in, and then each pip in the circle turned red, one by one, showing me that they too were now getting the rebroadcast and, hence, were aware of where all the rest of us were. I ran a nose count: . . . ten, eleven, and twelve, counting me. Okay.

So far, no sign of savages. But they too were present and accounted for. The radar didn't show them, and neither by eye nor by sniperscope could I see anything more than the night and the waves going over the grass. But Dr. Roche had assured us that they would be there—and
games theory penetrates the strategic night far better than any sensing instrument, alive or dead.

I cut out of the rebroadcast and cut in again, making my own pip blink green for a moment. At once, all eleven other pips went green and stayed that way. They had seen the warning.

It was time for human vision.

I snapped shut the lock switch on my little device. The gig came glaring into blue-white, almost intolerable existence in the middle of our circle. A triplet of star shells stitched across the sky above her. I could almost read the hateful legend on her side.

And there were the savages.

For those crucial three seconds they sat transfixed on their six-legged mounts, knees clenched across pommels, disproportionately long spines stiff, long bald heads thrown back, staring up at the star shells. The hairy, brown, cruelly beaked creatures they were sitting on stared too, stretching out necks as long as those of camels.

There were four of them inside my part of the circle. One was so near that I could even see that his skin, though bright yellow-red predominantly, had a faint greenish cast. He was barefoot, but he was wearing rough cloth, and a metallic belt with clear shadowings of totemistic designs worked into it.

Of course, I can't vouch for the veracity of the colors I saw. Star-shell light is lurid and chemical; and I had been in darkness a long time before it burst over all this. But the colors, true or not, were vivid after long blackness.

I also saw the crossbow, loaded and cocked; and the quiver full of quarrels. If he were to turn and see me, hardly ten yards away from him, and as rooted to the ground as a melting snowman—

But the shells dimmed and fell, leaving behind rapidly fading trails which twisted and flowed almost horizontally into the jetstream aloft before they vanished. Precisely three seconds later, all the gig's searchlights went on, right here on the ground.

The long, rounded heads snapped down. At the same time the beasts screamed and leapt so high that they seemed all at once to be flying.

They charged the gig without a moment's hesitation. They were a wild and impossibly moving sight. At a full gallop the llama-like hexapods seemed to soar over the grass almost all the way, passing above the veldt in long graceful undulations like flurries of night wind. The savages bestrode them easily, just over the beasts' middle pelvis, high-stirruped but without reins, and indeed fax too far from the slashing, screaming heads to make reins even possible—rode so easily that in silhouette, savage and beast flowed into one teratological myth, like Siamese-twin centaurs. The front horse-and-head was for leaping and screaming. The back one, merged with it, was for winding and firing the arablast. The leaping was beautiful; the screaming was fearful—and the bowmen didn't miss.

One of the port lights went out, and then the other. For a few seconds I could see the two farthest riders on my side in the glow of one of the starboard lamps, and then that was gone too. They had a little more trouble with the sweep searchlight atop the gig, which was just forward of the vertical stabilizer and slightly protected both by its motion and by the curve of the fuselage. But they got it, and they got it the hard way: They shot at its junction with the hull every time it looked away from one or another of them, and after that had jammed it to a
standstill, one more quarrel at point-blank range blinded it for good.

Blackness. Worse than blackness, for it was swimming with amoeboid purple after-images.

I stood where I was, certain that by now I had sunk into the soil almost up to my waist. After I thought I might be able to see the PPI scope again. I tried to get a rebroadcast from the gig, though I was pretty sure most of the savages would now be protected from that kind of spotting by being in the lee of the hull. But as it turned out, I didn't even get a scanning sweep. Evidently they had shot off the antennae, too, the instant they had gotten close enough to see that they rotated. If it moves, shoot it!

So I waited. There was nothing else to do. Roche had been right thus far, in general at least, and so the next step was to be dictated strictly by the clock. After the fury and beauty of the attack, this second wait seemed to go on forever. I have been in ground battles before, battles in which I was in more danger and had more to do, battles in which I had to defend myself, and did; but I have never seen anything like that attack on Savannah, and never hope to again.

Inside one of the purple splotches, I saw the word CONESTOGA in wavering white letters. It made me grind my teeth. As Roche had said, there was such a thing as pushing an analogy too far. But the worst of it was, nobody on
this
mission had so pushed it. It had just been somebody else's feeble joke—and it turned out to be horribly, entirely appropriate.

My clock went out. Time to start slogging back. It took an eternity, but at least I gradually got back my sight of the stars. At half a mile away from the gig, I reluctantly
had to give that up again. I touched the gadget, and the gig responded with a fourth star shell.

Most of the beasts were loose and grazing. There were two savages on guard outside the gig, holding their mounts, one at her needle nose, the other by the airlock. At this distance Sergeant Lea's men had no trouble gassing them both. When I touched the gadget still a third time, the gig let loose with a twenty-decibel, wavering honk which catapulted the remaining hexapods for the horizon as though they had never been domesticated at all. I resented it, a little. Dammit, couldn't Roche have been a
little
bit wrong?

But he wasn't, not then. The other six savages were inside the gig, as soundly gassed at my signal as their two guards had been by the Marines' grenades. They had been wrecking things, but hadn't had time to get past the fragile, hyperactive dummies Roche had had us set up for them to wreck. Nor had they gotten beyond the dummy chamber into the sterile areas of the ship, where the business is conducted. We stacked them right there according to directions and sealed them in. Then we flamed each other off and sealed ourselves in.

It didn't do us much good. There were no less than sixty-four crossbow-bolt heads sticking through the inner wall of the gig. Not one savage could have missed it more than twice. We seared them off and slapped patches over the remains of the holes, but we had to go back to the
Chisholm
inside our suits. The gig was airtight again; but gnotobiotically, she had been breached, and thoroughly.

Roche had her destroyed, except for the dummy chamber where the sleeping savages were, before he would let any one of us back into the
Chisholm
and again, I think he had planned all along to do exactly that. It was
all right with me; I hated the CONESTOGA. The trouble is, I can't forget her—or, rather, I can't forget her name. It's stupid to have the memory of a great affair marred by something so small—like the food, Captain Motlow would say—but I can't help that. It's the way I remember it.

Besides, it wasn't so small, after all.

We had lost all the rest of the night sealing up the holes the arrows had made, and damned near didn't make rendezvous at all; but Roche didn't seem to worry about that. When we had finally been flamed and destroyed clean enough to satisfy him, and Lea and I were let into the control cabin of the
Chisholm,
he barely groused at us at all. He was watching the films—not for the first time even this soon, I could see—and he looked sick, Captain Motlow was transparently puzzled, and also annoyed. Both of them were too busy to speak to us, which made me furious, and made Lea look more and more like the front side of the Mountains of Mitchell on Mars before the cap thaws.

"There is something about this situation that's all wrong," Dr. Roche said at last, mostly to himself. "And yet I can't quite put my finger on it."

"Everything was on schedule," Lea said shortly. I gathered that he felt he was being criticized.

"Yes, yes, it's not that. They responded to the stimuli exactly as you'd expect people in this kind of a culture to do. The games equations fall only when you haven't enough data about the enemy to fill in the parameters."

Sergeant Lea wore the expression of a Marine who suspects, quite rightly, that his own role in the action was being dismissed as also just part of the equations. Roche didn't notice.

"No, this isn't a question of behavior. At least, I don't think it is. The trouble is, I don't know what it
is
a question of." He turned away from the screen as Bixby came in. "Ah. You were watching the action. Did you notice anything—peculiar? Would you like to see the films?"

"No," Doc Bixby said. He too was wearing a very odd expression. "I know what you're talking about, and I know the answer too. I've just been examining the patients. They're conscious and in good shape, so whenever you're ready to talk to them—"

"I'm ready now," Roche said, getting up. "But I'd better know what it is I'm missing. Please explain."

"It's a question of evolution," Doc Bixby said. "By what possible course of selection and mutation can a four-limbed vertebrate occupy the same planet as a six-legged one?"

Roche was stunned. He drew a long, slow breath.

"That's it," he said finally. "That's what threw me. I was looking at it, but I wasn't seeing it. The long torsos! They've got vestigial middle limbs folded under their clothing! Is that it?"

"Yes," Doc Bixby. "Only they aren't vistigial. They're functional."

"Interesting. Well, I'm glad that's cleared up—I was afraid it was going to turn out to be something that made a difference."

"It
does,"
Doc Bixby said. His expression was still very strange. Roche shot him a quick glance and hurried out toward the recovery room. Lea and the surgeon followed.

I stayed where I was for a while. I had to set up a departure orbit sooner or later, and it might as well be now. It would keep me occupied during the dry period of the interviewing, while Roche was perfecting his command of
the language. Current heuristics can get a man through a language in about eight hours, but it's a deadly technical process, an ordeal to the student and absolutely unendurable to the bystander.

Captain Motlow watched my admittedly unusual display of forehandedness with considerable suspicion, but for once I didn't care. Doc Bixby's discovery may have resolved what had been bothering Dr. Roche—though from Bixby's expression it looked like Roche was due another discombobulation sooner or later—but it hadn't gotten past what was bothering me. That was the CONESTOGA business, of course.

As I have mentioned, the name came about by an accident unrelated to the Savannah affair. Ship's boats ordinarily aren't named at all, unless they bear the name of the parent ship. But when the
Chisholm
was on her shakedown cruise, some junior officer had made a joke about "hitting the Chisholm Trail"; and somebody else had remembered that the Conestoga wagon had been a machine with large, broad-rimmed wheels which had been specifically designed to ride well over soft soil.

And that's what a ship's gig is: a vessel designed to ride well in an atmosphere, not in a hard vacuum. It's essentially an airplane, not a spaceship. So they named the gig CONESTOGA; and after a while they got tired of it, as anyone tires of a joke that comes up again every time you look at a commonplace object, and forgot about it. But here it was back again.

Why did this bother me? I couldn't say. Partly, I suppose, because the
Chisholm
herself wasn't named after the Chisholm Trail, but after the first director of the World Medical Association, and perhaps the greatest. But that wasn't all; there was something else. And like Dr. Roche, I couldn't put my finger on it.

And even if I could, there would be nothing I could do about it. I was only an astrogator—and even if I had been Dr. Roche, the thing I was bothered about was too far in the past to be corrected, even by the theory of games.

So I thought; but like most people, I underestimated the viability of the past, the one thing the poets have been trying to pound into our corporate pinheads since words were invented:

We learn from words, but never learn much more

than that from time to time the same things happen.

But I wasn't then thinking about
The Folded and the Quiet;
the quotation didn't become attached to the Savannah affair in my mind until long afterward, when I encountered the poem during one of my dead-space reading jags. Now, I didn't really know what was the matter, and so all I could do was to continue to set up the tab board.