Vietnam and Other Alien Worlds

by Joe Haldeman

  He was half dead from exposure and hunger. We fed him tiny bits of shellfish in water, and after a day of intermittent sleeping and raving, he came around enough to talk.

  He’d seen two Plathys in the process of eating Herb. They ran after him, but he plunged blindly into brambles (his arms and lower legs were covered with festering scratches), and they evidently didn’t follow him very far. He’d found the river and run out to sea in a blind panic. Got to the first water island and lay there for days. He couldn’t remember whether he’d eaten.

  Then he heard Plathys, or thought he did, and took off north as fast as he could manage. He didn’t remember getting here. Gab found him unconscious at the water’s edge.

  So now the plan is to wait here two or three more days, until Derek feels strong enough for the next push.

  Hardest part still ahead. Even if we don’t run into Plathys. What if the boats are gone?

  Gabriel

  We didn’t see any further sign of the Plathys. After four days Derek was ready to go. For a full day we drank all the water we could hold, and then at sundown set out.

  There was only one place so deep we had to swim. I tried to carry Maria’s water basket, sidestroking, but it didn’t work. So the last 20 or 25 kilometers we were racing against the dwindling supply of water in the two bladders.

  At first light there was still no sight of land, and we had to proceed by dead reckoning. (The Plathys evidently don’t have this problem; they’re somehow sensitive to the planet’s magnetic field, like some Selvan migrating birds.) We saved a few spoonfuls of water to drink when we finally sighted land.

  We went along in silence for an hour or so, and then Derek had a brainstorm. We were scanning the horizon from only a meter or so above sea level; if someone stood on my shoulders, he could see twice as far. Derek was the tallest. I ducked under and hoisted him up. He could stay balanced only for a second, but it did work; he saw a green smudge off to the left. We adjusted our course and slogged on with new energy. When all of us could see the smudge, we celebrated with a last sip of water.

  Of course the stream that would be our guide uphill was nowhere to be seen. We stumbled ashore and did manage to lick enough moisture from foliage to partly allay our terrible thirst, though the bitter flavor soured my stomach.

  We marked the spot with a large X in the sand and split into pairs, Brenda and I going one direction and Maria and Derek going the other, each with a water bladder to fill when one pair found the river. We agreed to turn back after no more than ten thousand steps. If neither pair found the river within 10 kilometers of our starting place, we’d just work our way uphill toward the crater lake. It would be slower going than following the stream’s course, but we could probably manage it, licking leaves and splitting some kinds of stalks for water. And we’d be less likely to run into an ambush, if there were hunters waiting ahead. I wasn’t looking forward to it, though. Coming down had been enough trouble.

  We were lucky. In a sense. Brenda and I stumbled on the stream less than two kilometers from where we started. We drank deeply and jogged back to catch up with Maria and Derek.

  We made an overnight camp some distance from the stream and foraged for food. There were no fish in the shallows, and none of the sulfurous oysters. There were small crabs, but they were hard to catch and had only a pinch of meat. We wound up digging tubers, which were not very palatable raw but would sustain us until we got to the lake, where fish were plentiful.

  It might have been a little safer to travel by night, but we remembered how the brambles had flayed us before, and decided to take the chance. It was a mistake.

  As we had hoped, progress was a lot faster and easier going up than it had been coming down. Less slipping. It was obvious that Plathys had preceded us, though, from footprints and freshly broken vegetation, so we climbed as quietly as possible.

  Not quietly enough, perhaps, or maybe our luck just ran out. Damn it, we lost Derek. He had to be the one in front.

  Maria

  We couldn’t see the sun because of the forest canopy, but it was obvious from the reddening of the light that we would soon have to decide whether to make camp or push on through the darkness. Gab and I were discussing this, whispering, when the Plathy attacked.

  Derek was in front. The spear hit him in the center of the chest and passed almost completely through his body. I think it killed him instantly. The Plathy, a lone young female, came charging down the stream bed toward us, roaring. She tripped and fell almost at our feet. Probably stunned. Gab and I killed her with spear and axe. After she was dead, Gab hacked off her head and threw it into the bush.

  We waited for the rest of them, but she evidently had been alone. Gab had a hard time controlling his grief.

  When it got dark we pushed on. The stream was slightly phosphorescent, but we relied mainly on feeling our way. A kind of fungus on the forest floor always grew in pairs, and glowed dull red, like pairs of sullen eyes watching us.

  We made more noise than we had during the daytime, but there was probably little risk. Plathys sleep like dead things, and in this kind of terrain they don’t post guard at night, since none of the predators here is big enough to bother them. Big enough to give us trouble, though. Three times we moved to the middle of the stream, when we thought we heard something stalking us.

  The slope began to level off before it got light, and by dawn we were moving through the marshy grassland that bordered the crater lake.

  We had unbelievable luck with the lake fish. Hundreds of large females lay almost immobile in the shallows. They were full of delicious roe. We gorged ourselves and then cut strips of flesh to dry in the sun. Not as effective as smoking, but we couldn’t risk a fire.

  We decided it would be safest to sleep separately, in case someone had picked up our trail. Like Gab, I found a tree to drape myself in. Brenda just found a patch of sunlight, arranged her furs on the wet ground, and collapsed. I thought I was too jangled to sleep, after Derek, but in fact I barely had time to find a reasonably secure set of branches before my body turned itself off.

  Our survival reflexes have improved. A few hours later—it was not quite noon—I woke up suddenly in response to a slight vibration. One of the cat creatures was creeping toward me along another branch.

  I didn’t want to throw the spear, of course. So I took the offensive, crawling closer to the beast. He snarled and backed up warily. When I was a couple of spear lengths from him I started poking toward his face. Eventually I forced him onto too small a limb, and he crashed to the ground. He lay there a moment, then heaved himself up, growled at the world, and limped away. I went back to my branch and slept a few more hours unmolested.

  Gab woke me up with the bad news that Brenda was gone. There was no sign of violence at the spot where she’d settled down, though, and we eventually found her hiding in a tree as we had. She’d heard a noise.

  We gathered up our dried fish—that it hadn’t been disturbed was encouraging—and killed a few fresh ones to carry along for dinner. Then we moved with some haste down along the river we had followed up so long ago. If all goes well we will be able to duplicate in reverse the earlier sequence: rest tonight on this side of the banyan forest, then push through to the large clearing; spend the night there, and at first light press on to the sea.

  Gabriel

  The sea. I was never so glad to see water.

  The first boat we found was beyond use, burned in two, but the water jugs nearby were unharmed, curiously enough. It’s possible some immature Plathys had come upon it and not recognized that it was a boat, just a hollow log that had burned partway through. So they may have innocently used it for fuel.

  The other boat, farther away from the river, was untouched. If anything, it might be in better shape now than when we left it, since it has been propped up on two logs, hollow side down. It was dryer and harder, and apparently had no insect damage.

  Unfortunately, it was too heavy for three people to lift; it had been som
ething of a struggle for all twelve of us. We went back upstream a couple of kilometers to where Maria remembered having seen a stand of saplings. Stripped of branches, they looked like they would make good rollers. We each took an armload. It was dark by the time we got back to the boat.

  It might have been prudent to try to launch it in the darkness, and paddle out to comparative safety. But there hadn’t been any sign of Plathys on this side of the island, and we were exhausted. I stood first watch, and had to trudge around in circles to stay awake. A couple of times I heard something out in the grass, but it never came close. Maria and Brenda heard it on their shifts, but it left before dawn.

  At first light we started rolling the boat. A good three hours of hard labor, since when the saplings got into sand they forgot how to be wheels. We dragged it the last hundred meters, one bonecracking centimeter after another. Once it was floating free, we anchored it and sat in the shallow water for a long time, poleaxed by fatigue. It was amazing how much warmer the water was here, just a hundred or so kilometers north of the Plathy island: volcanic activity, coupled with distance from the continental shelf drop-off.

  We dragged ourselves back to the place we’d slept and found that all our food was gone. Animals; the weapons were still there. Rather than start off with no reserve food, we spent the rest of the morning hunting. A dozen large snakes and seven small animals like zamri, but with six legs. We risked a fire to smoke them, which perhaps was not wise. One person guarded the fire while the other two loaded all the jars and then arranged a makeshift vessel in the stern, pegging the largest fur out in a cup shape.

  Finally we loaded all the food and weapons aboard and swung up over the side (the outriggers kept us from losing too much water from the stern). We paddled almost hysterically for an hour or so, and then, with the island just a whisper of dark on the horizon, anchored to sleep until the guide stars came out.

  Brenda

  It was smart of Maria to pick a beefy young athlete as one of her graduate assistants. I don’t think that she and I would have stood a chance alone, pushing this heavy old log 250 kilometers. We’re all pretty tough and stringy after months of playing caveman, but the forced march has drained us. Last night I paddled more and more feebly until, just before dawn, I simply passed out. It’s a good thing Gab was in the rear position. He heard me slump over and grabbed the paddle as it floated by. When the sun got too high to continue, he massaged the knots out of my arms and shoulders, and when I fell asleep again he was doing the same for Maria.

  Perhaps we should have delayed our launch long enough to weave a sunshield. It isn’t all that hot but it must have some dehydrating effect. And it would be easier to sleep. But Martin was the only one who could weave very well, and he—

  Oh my God. My God, we left him for dead and I haven’t even thought about him since, since we met up at the river mouth. Now we’ve left him behind with no boat. He could have been just a day or an hour behind us, and if he was we’ve murdered him.

  Maria

  Brenda suddenly burst into tears and started going on about Martin. I gave him up before we left the Plathy island. His route was a mirror image of mine and he was a much faster runner. They must have caught him.

  I pointed out to Brenda that if Martin did make it to the coast of the crater lake island, he could probably survive indefinitely with his primitive skills, since it would be fairly easy for one man alone to stay away from the Plathys who occasionally passed through there. Surely he would be intelligent enough to stamp out a regular marking in the sand, easily visible from the satellite. Then the next expedition could rescue him. That fantasy calmed her down a bit. Now she’s sleeping.

  I’m starting to think we might make it. We have water enough for twenty days and food for half that time, even if we don’t catch any fish. Admittedly it’s harder to keep a straight course when the guiding stars are behind you, but it shouldn’t take us twice as long as the trip south, especially if there are no clouds.

  Once we get to the mainland and retrieve the modern weapons, the trek back to the base will be simple. And the year waiting inside the dome will be sybaritic luxury. Real food. Chairs. No bugs. Books. Wonder if I can still read?

  Gabriel

  Seven days of uneventful routine. On the eighth day I woke up in the afternoon and took a spear up to the bow to stare at the water. I stood up to piss overboard, which sometimes attracts fish, and saw a Plathy swimming straight toward us.

  He stopped and treaded water about eight meters away, staring at me and the spear. I called out to him but he didn’t answer. Just stared for several minutes in what seemed to be a calculating way. Then he turned his back and swam on, powerful strokes that gave him more speed than we could ever muster.

  Could he tip us over? Probably not, with nothing to stand on. Once in the water, though, we’d be no match for one of them. My brain started to run away with fear, after a week of the luxury and novelty of not being afraid. He could approach underwater and pull us overboard one by one. He could grab an outrigger while we were sleeping and rock us out. He could for God’s sake bite a hole in the boat!

  When the women woke up I told them, and we made the obvious decision to maintain a rotating watch. I wondered privately how much good it would do. I suspected that a Plathy could hold his breath for a long time; if he approached underwater we might not be able to see him until he was right by the boat. Or one might overtake us in darkness. I didn’t give voice to any of these specific fears. Neither of them lacks imagination, and they didn’t need my scenarios to add to their own private apprehensions.

  How much farther? I suspect we’ll be making better time from now on.

  Maria

  I began to have a recurrent dream that we’d somehow got turned around, and were paddling furiously back to the waiting Plathys. This daymare even began invading my waking hours, especially toward dawn, when I was in that vulnerable, suggestible mental state that extreme fatigue and undirected anxiety can bring on.

  So when in the first light I saw land, the emotion I felt was speechless apprehension. We’d been paddling eleven days. We must have gotten turned around; we couldn’t have covered the distance in that time. I stared at it for half a minute before Brenda mumbled something about it being too early to take a break.

  Then Gab also saw the faint green line on the horizon, and we chattered on about it for a while, drifting. As it got lighter we could see the purple cones of distant volcanoes, which put my subconscious to rest.

  The volcanoes simplified navigation, since I could remember what their relative positions had been on the way out. It looked as if we were going to land 10 or 15 kilometers west of the mouth of the river that led to the base. The question was whether to alter our course off to the right, so as to land closer to the river, or go straight in and walk along the beach. We were safer on the water but terminally tired of paddling, so we opted for the short approach.

  It was little more than an hour before the canoe landed with a solid crunch. We jumped out and immediately fell down. No land legs. I could stand up, but the ground seemed to teeter. For some reason it was a lot worse than it had been on the outward trip. There had been a little more wave action this time, which could account for that. It might also account for the good time we made: some sort of seasonal current.

  Using the spears as canes, we practiced walking for a while. When we could stagger pretty well unsupported, we gathered our stuff and started down the beach as quickly as possible. It would be a good idea to find the weapons and dig them up before dark.

  Eventually we were making pretty good progress (though when we stopped the ground would still rock back and forth). The musty jungle actually smelled good, reassuring. We ate the last of the smoked snake while hungrily discussing the culinary miracles waiting for us at the base. There was enough food there to last twelve people for more than a year, a precaution against disaster.

  We reached the mouth of the river before midday. But when we paced off from
the rock to where the weapons were supposed to be buried, we got a nasty surprise: someone had already dug them up. Humus had filled the hole, but there was a definite depression there, and the ground was soft.

  Dejected and frightened, we paced on to the next site, and it had also been dug up—but we found three of the exhumed fuel cells lying in the brush. The Plathys wouldn’t know how to install them, of course. Even if, as now seemed likely, they had been watching us when we first buried them, they wouldn’t have been able to find the hidden studs that had to be pushed simultaneously to open the camouflaged weapons. Even if they somehow got one open, they wouldn’t know how to screw in the fuel cell and unsafe it.

  We went back to the first site on the off-chance that they might have discarded the weapons, too, since ours weren’t superior, in conventional capabilities, to what they would normally carry. That turned out to be a smart move: we found a club and a spear snarled in the undergrowth, still in good working order. (They’d been crafted of Bruuchian ironwood, and so were impervious to moisture and mold.)

  We armed the two and confirmed that they worked. There were probably others hidden more deeply in the brush, but we were too tired to continue the search. We’d been pushing for most of a day, burning adrenaline. The two weapons would be enough to protect us while we slept.

  Gabriel

  Brenda woke me up delightfully. I was having an interesting dream, and then it wasn’t a dream.

  I had the last guard shift before dawn. Scouting the perimeter of our site for firewood, I almost stumbled over a slow lizard, about a meter long, and fat. Skinned and cleaned him and had him roasting on a spit by the time the women woke up.

  After breakfast, we spent a good two hours searching the area around the weapons pit, spiraling out systematically, but didn’t find anything further. Well, it was good luck we even had the two weapons. We were considerably better with spear, knife, and club than we had been when we landed, but probably not good enough for an extended trek through the mainland. Packs of hungry carnivores, even if no Plathys waited in ambush.