Vietnam and Other Alien Worlds (10 page)

Outdoors, they indulge in complicated games and athletic exhibitions. The larders are full, the time of birthing and nursing is well over, and the family exudes happiness, well into the thaw. We experienced this euphoria ourselves. I can't blame Garcia's people for their enthusiastic report.

We still don't know what happened. Or why it happened. Perhaps if these data survive, the next researchers…

Trouble.

Gabriel

I was having a strange dream of food—real food, cooked—when suddenly there was Maria, tugging on my arm, keeping me away from the table. She was whispering “Gab, wake up!” and so I did, cold and aching and hungry.

“What's—” She put her hand on my mouth, lightly.

“There's one outside. Mylab, I think.” He had just turned three this winter, and been given his name. We crept together back to the mouth of the cave and both jumped when my ankle gave a loud pop.

It was Mylab, all right; the fur around one earhole was almost white against the blond. I was glad it wasn't an adult. He was only about a head taller than me. Stronger, though, and well fed.

We watched from the cave's darkness as he investigated the latrine rock, sniffing and licking, circling.

“Maybe he's a scout for a hunting party,” I whispered. “Hunting us.”

“Too young, I think.” She passed me a stone axe. “Hope we don't have to kill him.”

“Should we wake the others?”

“Not yet. Make us easier to scent.” As if on cue, the Plathy walked directly away from the rock and stood, hands on hips, sniffing the air. His head wagged back and forth slowly, as if he were triangulating. He shuffled in a half-circle and stood looking in our direction.

“Stay still.”

“He can't see us in the shadow.”

“Maybe not.” Their eyesight was more acute than ours, but they didn't have good night vision.

Behind us, someone woke up and sneezed. Mylab gave a little start and then began loping toward the cave.

“Damn it,” Maria whispered. She stood up and huddled into the side of the cave entrance. “You get over there.” I stationed myself opposite her, somewhat better hidden because of a projecting lip of rock.

Mylab slowed down a few meters from the cave entrance and walked warily forward, sniffing and blinking. Maria crouched, gripping her spear with both hands, for thrusting.

It was over in a couple of seconds, but my memory of it goes in slow motion: he saw Maria, or sensed her, and lumbered straight for her, claws out, growling. She thrust twice into his chest while I stepped forward and delivered a two-handed blow to the top of his head.

That axe would have cracked a human head from crown to jaw. Instead, it glanced off his thick skull and hit his shoulder, then spun out of my grip.

Shaking his head, he stepped around and swung a long arm at me. I was just out of range, staggering back; one claw opened up my cheek and the tip of my nose. Blood was spouting from two wounds in his chest. He stepped forward to finish me off and Maria plunged the spear into the back of his neck. The flint blade burst out under his chin in a spray of blood.

He stood staggering between us for a moment, trying to reach the spear shaft behind him. Two stones flew up from the rear of the cave; one missed, but the other hit his cheek with a loud crack. He turned and stumbled away down the slope, the spear bouncing grotesquely behind him.

The other four joined us at the cave entrance. Brenda, our doctor, looked at my wound and regretted her lack of equipment. So did I.

“Have to go after him,” Derek said. “Kill him.”

Maria shook her head. “He's still dangerous. Wait a few minutes; then we can follow the blood trail.”

“He's dead,” Brenda said. “His body just doesn't know it yet.”

“Maybe so,” Maria said, her shoulders slumping sadly. “Anyhow, we can't stay here. Hate to move during daylight, but we don't have any choice.”

“We're not the only ones who can follow a blood trail,” Herb said. He had a talent for stating the obvious.

We gathered up our few weapons, the water bladders, and the food sack, to which we had just added five small batlike creatures, mostly fur and bone. None of us looked forward to being hungry enough to eat them.

The trail was easy to follow, several bright red spatters per meter. He had gone about three hundred meters before collapsing.

We found him lying behind a rock in a widening pool of blood, the spear sticking straight up. When I pulled it out he made a terrible gurgling sound. Brenda made sure he was dead.

Maria looked very upset, biting her lip, I think to keep tears away. She is a strange woman. Hard and soft. She treats the Plathys by the book but obviously has a sentimental streak toward them. I sort of like them too, but don't think I'd want to take one home with me.

Brenda's upset too, retching now. My fault; I should have offered to do the knife. But she didn't ask.

I'd better take point position. Stop recording now. Concentrate on not getting surprised.

Maria

Back to the beginning. Quite hot when we were set down on the tropical mainland. It was the middle of the night and we worked quickly, with no lights (what I'd give for night glasses now), to set up our domed base.

In a way it's a misnomer to call it a “base,” since we left it the next night, not to return for three and a half years. We thought. It was really just a staging area and a place where we would wait for pickup after our mission was ended. We really didn't foresee having to run back to it to hide from the Plathys.

It was halfheartedly camouflaged, looking like a dome of rock in the middle of a jungle terrain that featured no other domes of rock. To our knowledge at the time, no Plathy ever ventured that far north, so even that gesture toward noninterference was a matter of form rather than of actual caution. Now we know that some Plathys do go that far, on their rite-of-passage wanderings. So it's a good thing we didn't simply set up a force field.

I think the closest terrestrial match to the biome there would be the jungles of the Amazon basin. Plus volcanoes, for a little extra heat and interest. Sort of a steam bath with a whiff of sulfur dioxide added to the rich smell of decaying vegetable matter. In the clearings, riots of extravagant flowers, most of which gave off the aroma of rotting meat.

For the first leg of our journey, we had modern energy weapons hidden inside conventional-looking spears and axes. It would have been more sporting to face the Mesozoic fauna with primitive weapons, but of course we had no interest in that sort of adventure. We often did run into creatures resembling the Deinonychus (Lower Cretaceous period)—about the size of a human but fast, and all claws and teeth. They travel in packs, evidently preying on the large placid herbivores. We never saw fewer than six in a group, and once were cornered by a pack of twenty. We had to kill all of them, our beams silently slashing them into steaming chunks of meat. None paid any attention to what was happening to his comrades but just kept advancing, bent low to the ground, claws out, teeth bared, roaring. Their meat tasted like chicken, but very tough.

It took us nine days to reach the coast, following a river. (Did I mention that days here are twenty-eight hours long? Our circadian rhythms had been adjusted accordingly, but there are other physiological factors. Mostly having to do with fatigue.) We found a conspicuous rock formation and buried our modern weapons a hundred meters to the north of it. Then we buried their power sources another hundred paces north. We kept one crazer for group defense, to be discarded before we reached the first island, but otherwise all we had was flint and stone and bicuspids with amazing memories.

We had built several boats with these tools during our training on Selva, but of course it was rather different here. The long day, and no comfortable cot to retire to at night. No tent to keep out the flying insects, no clean soft clothes in the morning, no this, no that. Terrible heat and a pervasive moldy smell that kept us all sniffling in spite of the antiallergenic drugs that our modified endocrine systems fed us. We did manage to get a fire going, which gave us security and roast fish and greatly simplified the boatbuilding. We felled two large trees and used fire to hollow them out, making outrigger canoes similar to the ones the Maori used to populate the sparse South Pacific. We weren't able to raise sails, though, since the Plathys don't have that technology. They wouldn't have helped much, anyway; summer was usually dead calm. We didn't look forward to rowing 250 kilometers in the subtropical heat. But we would do it systematically.

Herb was good at pottery, so I exempted him from boatbuilding in exchange for the fascinating job of crafting and firing dozens of water jugs. That was going to be our main survival problem, since it was not likely to rain during the couple of weeks we'd be at sea. Food was no problem; we could spear fish and probably birds (though eating a raw bird was not an experiment even I could look forward to) and also had a supply of smoked dinosaur.

I designed the boats so that either one would be big enough to carry all twelve of us, in case of trouble. As a further safeguard, we took a shakedown cruise, a night and a day of paddling and staying anchored near shore. We took our last fresh-water bath, topped off the jugs, loaded our gear, and cast off at sundown.

The idea had been to row all night, with ten minutes' rest each hour, and keep going for a couple of hours after sunup, for as long as we could reliably gauge our direction from the angle of the sun. Then anchor (the sea was nowhere more than ten or twelve meters deep) and hide from the sun all day under woven shades, fishing and sleeping and engaging in elevated discourse. Start paddling again when the sun was low enough to tell us where north was. It did go that way for several days, until the weather changed.

It was just a thin haze, but it was enough to stop us dead. We had no navigational instruments, relying on the dim triangle of stars that marked the south celestial pole. No stars, no progress.

This was when I found out that I had chosen my party well. When the sky cleared two nights later, there was no talk of turning back, though everyone was capable of counting the water jugs and doing long division. A few more days becalmed and we would be in real danger of dying from dehydration, unable to make landfall in either direction.

I figured we had been making about 25 kilometers per night. We rowed harder and cut the break time down to five minutes, and kept rowing an extra hour or so after dawn, taking a chance on dead reckoning.

Daytime became a period of grim silence. People who were not sleeping spent the time fishing the way I had taught them, Eskimo style (though those folks did it through a hole in the ice): arm cocked, spear raised, staring at one point slightly under the surface; when a fish approaches a handspan above that point, let fly the spear. No Eskimo ever applied greater concentration to the task; none of them was ever fishing for water as well as food. Over the course of days we learned which kinds of fish had flesh that could be sucked for moisture, and which had to be avoided for the salty blood that suffused their tissues.

We rationed water fairly severely, doling it out in measures that would allow us to lose one night out of three to haze. As it turned out, that never happened again, and when we sighted land, finally, there was water enough for another four days of short rations. We stifled the impulse to drink it all in celebration; we still had to find a stream.

I'd memorized maps and satellite photos, but terrain looks much different seen horizontally. It took several hours of hugging the shore before I could figure out where we were; fortunately, the landmark was a broad shallow river.

Before we threw away the crazer and its power source, we used it to light a torch. When the Plathys traveled, they carried hot coals from the previous night's fire, insulated in ash inside a basket of tough fiber. We would do the same, rather than spend an hour each day resolutely sawing two pieces of dry wood together. We beached the canoes and hauled them a couple of hundred meters inland, to a stand of bushes where they could be reasonably well camouflaged. Perhaps not much chance they would still be there after a full year, but it was better than simply abandoning them.

We walked inland far enough for there to be no trace of salt in the muddy river water, and cavorted in it like schoolchildren. Then Brenda and I built a fire while the others stalked out in search of food.

Game was fairly plentiful near the river, but we were not yet skilled hunters. There was no way to move quietly through the grass, which was shoulder-high and stiff. So the hunters who had the best luck were the ones who tiptoed up the bank of the stream. They came back with five good-sized snakes, which we skinned and cleaned and roasted on sticks. After two weeks of raw fish, the sizzling fatty meat was delicious, though for most of us it went through the gut like a dropped rock.

We made pallets of soft grass, and most of us slept well, though I didn't. Combination of worry and indigestion. I was awake enough to notice that various couples took advantage of the relative privacy of the riverbank, which made me feel vaguely jealous and deprived. I toyed with the idea of asking somebody, but instead waited for somebody to ask me, and wound up listening to contented snores half the night.

A personal note, to be edited out if this tooth survives for publication. Gabriel. All of us women had been studying his naked body for the past two weeks, quite remarkable in proportion and endowment, and I suppose the younger women had been even more imaginative than me in theorizing about it. So I was a little dismayed when he went off to the riverbank with a male, his Selvan crony Marcus. I didn't know at the time that their generation on Selva is very casual about such things, and at any rate I should have been anthropologist enough to be objective about it. But I have my own cultural biases, too, and (perhaps more to the point) so do the Terran males in the party. As a scientist, I can appreciate the fact that homosexuality is common and natural and only attitudes about it change. That attitude is not currently very enlightened on Earth; I resolved to warn them the next day to be discreet. (Neither of them is exclusively homosexual, as it turned out; they both left their pallets with women later in the night, Gabriel at least twice.)