Selected Stories (7 page)

From the blackness came Carl’s resonant whisper, “We’re awake. Teague? …”

The lights flashed on, dim first, brightening swiftly, but not so fast as to dazzle unsuspecting eyes. Tod sat up and saw Teague at the table. On it was the lizard, dissected and laid out as neatly as an exploded view in a machine manual. Over the table, on a gooseneck, was a floodlamp with its lens masked by an infrared filter. Teague turned away from the table, pushing up his “black-light” goggles, and nodded to Tod. There were shadows under his eyes, but otherwise he seemed the same as ever. Tod wondered how many lonely hours he had worked while the two couples slept, doing that meticulous work under the irritating glow so that they would be undisturbed.

Tod went to him. “Has my playmate been talking much?” He pointed at the remains of the lizard.

“Yes and no,” said Teague. “Oxygen-breather, all right, and a true lizard. He had a secret weapon—that tail-segment he flips over his head toward his victims. It has primitive ganglia like an Earth salamander’s, so that the tail-segment trembles and squirms, sounding the rattles, after he throws it. He also has a skeleton that—but all this doesn’t matter. Most important is that he’s the analog of our early Permian life, which means (unless he’s an evolutionary dead-end like a cockroach) that this planet is a billion years old at the least. And the little fellow here—” he touched the flying thing—“bears this out. It’s not an insect, you know. It’s an arachnid.”

“With
wings
?”

Teague lifted the slender, scorpion-like pincers of the creature and let them fall. “Flat chitinous wings are no more remarkable a leg adaptation than those things. Anyway, in spite of the ingenuity of his engineering, internally he’s pretty primitive. All of which lets us hypothesize that we’ll find fairly close analogs of what we’re used to on Earth.”

“Teague,” Tod interrupted, his voice lowered, his eyes narrowed to contain the worry that threatened to spill over, “Teague, what’s happened?”

“The temperature and humidity here seem to be exactly the same as that outside,” Teague went on, in precisely the same tone as before. “This would indicate either a warm planet, or a warm season on a temperate planet. In either case it is obvious that—”

“But,
Teague—
”

“—that a good deal of theorizing is possible with very little evidence, and we need not occupy ourselves with anything else but that evidence.”

“Oh,” said Tod. He backed off a step. “Oh,” he said again, “sorry, Teague.” He joined the others at the food dispensers, feeling like a cuffed puppy.
But he’s right,
he thought.
As Alma said … of the many things which might have happened, only one actually has. Let’s wait then, and worry about that one thing when we can name it.

There was a pressure on his arm. He looked up from his thoughts and into April’s searching eyes. He knew that she had heard, and he was unreasonably angry at her. “Damn it, he’s so cold-blooded,” he blurted defensively, but in a whisper.

April said, “He has to stay with things he can understand, every minute.” She glanced swiftly at the closed Coffin. “Wouldn’t you?”

There was a sharp pain and a bitterness in Tod’s throat as he thought about it. He dropped his eyes and mumbled, “No, I wouldn’t. I don’t think I could.” There was a difference in his eyes as he glanced back at Teague.
But it’s so easy, after all, for strong people to be strong,
he thought.

“Teague, what’ll we wear?” Carl called.

“Skinflex.”

“Oh, no!” cried Moira. “It’s so clingy and hot!”

Carl laughed at her. He swept up the lizard’s head and opened its jaws. “Smile at the lady. She wouldn’t put any tough old skinflex in the way of your pretty teeth!”

“Put it down,” said Teague sharply, though there was a flicker of amusement in his eyes. “It’s still loaded with God-knows-what alkaloid. Moira, he’s right. Skinflex just doesn’t puncture.”

Moira looked respectfully at the yellow fangs and went obediently to storage, where she pulled out the suits.

“We’ll keep close together, back to back,” said Teague as they helped each other into the suits. “All the weapons are … were … in the forward storage compartment, so we’ll improvise. Tod, you and the girls each take a globe of anesthene. It’s the fastest anesthetic we have and it ought to take care of anything that breathes oxygen. I’ll take scalpels. Carl—”

“The hammer,” Carl grinned. His voice was fairly thrumming with excitement.

“We won’t attempt to fasten the door from outside. I don’t mean to go father than ten meters out, this first time. Just—you, Carl—lift off the bar as we go out, get the door shut as quickly as possible, and prop it there. Whatever happens, do not attack anything out there unless you are attacked first, or unless I say so.”

Hollow-eyed, steady, Teague moved to the door with the others close around him. Carl shifted the hammer to his left hand, lifted the bar and stood back a little, holding it like a javelin. Teague, holding a glittering lancet lightly in each hand, pushed the door open with his foot. They boiled through, stepped aside for Carl as he butted the rod deep into the soil and against the closed door. “All set.”

They moved as a unit for perhaps three meters, and stopped.

It was daytime now, but such a day as none of them had dreamed of. The light was green, very nearly a lime-green, and the shadows were purple. The sky was more lavender than blue. The air was warm and wet.

They stood at the top of a low hill. Before them a tangle of jungle tumbled up at them. So vital, so completely alive, it seemed to move by its own power of growth. Stirring, murmuring, it was too big, too much, too wide and deep and intertwined to assimilate at a glance; the thought,
this is a jungle,
was a pitiable understatement.

To the left, savannah-like grassland rolled gently down to the choked margins of a river—calmfaced, muddy, and secretive. It too seemed astir with inner growings. To the right, more jungle. Behind them, the bland and comforting wall of their compartment.

Above—

It may have been April who saw it first; in any case, Tod always associated the vision with April’s scream.

They moved as she screamed, five humans jerked back then like five dolls on a single string, pressed together and to the compartment wall by an overwhelming claustrophobia. They were ants under a descending heel, flies on an anvil … together their backs struck the wall, and they cowered there, looking up.

And it was not descending. It was only—big. It was just that it was there, over them.

April said, later, that it was like a cloud. Carl would argue that it was cylindrical, with flared ends and a narrow waist. Teague never attempted to describe it, because he disliked inaccuracies, and Moira was too awed to try. To Tod, the object had no shape. It was a luminous opacity between him and the sky, solid, massive as mountains. There was only one thing they agreed on, and that was that it was a ship.

And out of the ship came the golden ones.

They appeared under the ship as speckles of light, and grew in size as they descended, so that the five humans must withstand a second shock: they had known the ship was huge, but had not known until now how very high above them it hung.

Down they came, dozens, hundreds. They filled the sky over the jungle and around the five, moving to make a spherical quadrant from the horizontal to the zenith, a full hundred and eighty degrees from side to side—a radiant floating shell with its concave surface toward, around, above them. They blocked out the sky and the jungle-tops, cut off most of the strange green light, replacing it with their own—for each glowed coolly.

Each individual was distinct and separate. Later, they would argue about the form and shape of the vessel, but the exact shape of these golden things was never even mentioned. Nor did they ever agree on a name for them. To Carl they were an army, to April, angels. Moira called them (secretly) “the seraphim,” and to Tod they were masters. Teague never named them.

For measureless time they hung there, with the humans gaping up at them. There was no flutter of wings, no hum of machinery to indicate how they stayed aloft, and if each individual had a device to keep him afloat, it was of a kind the humans could not recognize. They were beautiful, awesome, uncountable.

And nobody was afraid.

Tod looked from side to side, from top to bottom of this incredible formation, and became aware that it did not touch the ground. Its lower edge was exactly horizontal, at his eye level. Since the hill fell away on all sides, he could see under this lower edge, here the jungle, there down across the savannah to the river. In a new amazement he saw eyes, and protruding heads.

In the tall grass at the jungle margin was a scurry and cease, scurry and cease, as newtlike animals scrambled not quite into the open and froze, watching. Up in the lower branches of the fleshy, hook-leaved trees, the heavy scaly heads of leaf-eaters showed, and here and there was the armed head of a lizard with catlike tearing tusks.

Leather-winged fliers flapped clumsily to rest in the branches, hung for a moment for all the world like broken umbrellas, then achieved balance and folded their pinions. Something slid through the air, almost caught a branch, missed it and tumbled end-over-end to the ground, resolving itself into a broad-headed scaly thing with wide membranes between fore and hind legs. And Tod saw his acquaintance of the night before, with its serrated tail and needle fangs.

And though there must have been eater and eaten here, hunter and hunted, they all watched silently, turned like living compass-needles to the airborne mystery surrounding the humans. They crowded together like a nightmare parody of the Lion and the Lamb, making a constellation, a galaxy of bright and wondering eyes; their distance from each other being, in its way, cosmic.

Tod turned his face into the strange light, and saw one of the golden beings separate from the mass and drift down and forward and stop. Had this living shell been a segment of curving mirror, this one creature would have been at its focal point. For a moment there was complete stillness, a silent waiting. Then the creature made a deep …
gesture.
Behind it, all the others did the same.

If ten thousand people stand ten thousand meters away, and if, all at once, they kneel, it is hardly possible to see just what it is they have done; yet the aspect of their mass undergoes a definite change. So it was with the radiant shell—it changed, all of it, without moving. There was no mistaking the nature of the change, though its meaning was beyond knowing. It was an obeisance. It was an expression of profound respect, first to the humans themselves, next, and hugely, to something the humans represented. It was unquestionably an act of worship.

And what,
thought Tod,
could we symbolize to these shining ones?
He was a scarab beetle or an Egyptian cat, a Hindu cow or a Teuton tree, told suddenly that it was sacred.

All the while there flooded down the thing which Carl had tried so ineptly to express:
“We’re sorry. But it will be all right. You will be glad. You can be glad now.”

At last there was a change in the mighty formation. The center rose and the wings came in, the left one rising and curling to tighten the curve, the right one bending inward without rising. In a moment the formation was a column, a hollow cylinder. It began to rotate slowly, divided into a series of close-set horizontal rings. Alternate rings slowed and stopped and began a counter-rotation, and with a sudden shift, became two interlocked spirals. Still the over-all formation was a hollow cylinder, but now it was composed of an upward and a downward helix.

The individuals spun and swirled down and down, up and up, and kept this motion within the cylinder, and the cylinder quite discrete, as it began to rise. Up and up it lifted, brilliantly, silently, the living original of that which they had found by Alma’s body … up and up, filling the eye and the mind with its complex and controlled ascent, its perfect continuity; for here was a thing with no beginning and no end, all flux and balance where each rising was matched by a fall and each turn by its counterpart.

High, and higher, and at last it was a glowing spot against the hovering shadow of the ship, which swallowed it up. The ship left then, not moving, but fading away like the streamers of an aurora, but faster. In three heartbeats it was there, perhaps it was there, it was gone.

Tod closed his eyes, seeing that dynamic double helix. The tip of his mind was upon it; he trembled on the edge of revelation. He
knew
what that form symbolized. He knew it contained the simple answer to his life and their lives, to this planet and its life and the lives which were brought to it. If a cross is more than an instrument of torture, more than the memento of an event; if the
crux ansata,
the Yin-and-Yang, David’s star and all such crystallizations were but symbols of great systems of philosophy, then this dynamic intertwined spiral, this free-flowing, rigidly choreographed symbol was … was—

Something grunted, something screamed, and the wondrous answer turned and rose spiraling away from him to be gone in three heartbeats. Yet in that moment he knew it was there for him when he had the time, the phasing, the bringing-together of whatever elements were needed. He could not use it yet but he had it. He had it.

Another scream, an immense thrashing all about. The spell was broken and the armistice over. There were chargings and fleeings, cries of death-agony and roaring challenges in and over the jungle, through the grasses to the suddenly boiling river. Life goes on, and death with it, but there must be more death than life when too much life is thrown together.

It may be that their five human lives were saved, in that turbulent reawakening, only by their alienness, for the life around them was cheek-and-jowl with its familiar enemy, its familiar quarry, its familiar food, and there need be no experimenting with the five soft containers of new rich juices standing awestruck with their backs to their intrusive shelter.

Then slowly they met one another’s eyes. They cared enough for each other so that there was a gladness of sharing. They cared enough for themselves so that there was also a sheepishness, a troubled self-analysis:
What did I do while I was out of my mind?