by Jerry
“Unearthly.”
“You said it.”
“Come on,” said Anderson. “No place like earth.”
He walked on, then stopped.
“Someone in our tent.”
“Bingley, talking to someone,” said Gale.
They moved closer.
There was a light inside the tent. Bingley was heard to say, “Ah, go on, sing a little song for your uncle Gus.”
They looked inside, and stood astonished. Sitting on a chair was a small Lemnosian, who seemed to be male, and about eight earth years old. He wore shorts and a shirt of rough brown material. One leg was bound up with a new bandage, and there was a patch of plaster on his head. He was eating a biscuit with a certain amount of nervous enjoyment. Bingley, holding a recorder microphone close to the child, looked up and grinned.
“One of their young ’uns, sir. I went into the wood—”
“Forbidden,” said Anderson, “but go on.”
“I found this kid lying with a bump on his head and a cut leg. Looked as though he might have been snaring, or something, and slipped.”
The child was looking scared now.
“I picked him up and brought him in. He was proper amused when I did a bit of my act. I thought—”
“Did you think?” snapped Anderson. “The Charter—” Before anyone could guess his intention, the youngster shot between Anderson’s legs and out of the tent. Bingley whooped and went after him, and Anderson and Gale found themselves outside after Bingley before they knew what they were about. The wood loomed darkly.
“Bingley, come back!”
“I’ll have him, sir, leave him to me!” He was a blur of dark against almost equal darkness. The broad-leafed trees above them hid the rising of the first of the Lemnos moons.
Bingley was gone. They slackened pace as the crackling of small twigs and branches ahead grew fainter.
“Discipline!” snapped Anderson, breathing hard. “It’ll be a court martial for that fool. I liked him up to now.”
“Listen.”
The wood was quiet and velvet dark. Through the trees and nearly a hundred yards away, the lit shapes of the camp showed dimly. As Anderson looked, something stepped in front of him.
“That you, Bill?”
“I’m here,” said Gale behind him.
“Then what—”
Suddenly the wood became sinuously alive. Hands grasped them, pinioned their arms, while sticky, sweet smelling pads clapped over nose and mouth brought dark nothing swiftly to their minds.
Still with his eyes shut, Anderson tried to stretch his limbs and felt thongs biting into wrists and ankles. His head ached abominably. There was a sweet smell about his mouth and nose. He cursed aloud, then opened his eyes. He was in a cave the walls of which were square hewn, and decorated with drawings and brightly coloured woven mats. The illumination came from deep troughs that ran along the bottom of the wall. There was furniture, and a bed of sorts in one corner. The cave entrance, as far as he could make out, was closed by a wellfitting door. A groan from nearby told him that Gale was awake.
“Ugh. How do you feel?”
“Lousy,” said Anderson. “What happened?”
“The injuns got us. Discipline: remember?”
“Maybe they’re collecting specimens too. Could have taken a dislike to us over that boy, though how they’d know . . . How long have we been here? Can’t see my watch.”
Gale rolled over into a kneeling position. “Just let me get out of this lot, and I’ll be as hot on discipline as a long service Master at Arms.” He shifted round. “See my watch?”
“Four and a half hours to midnight. Then we’ve only been here about half an hour.” Anderson listened. “What’s that hammering?”
“Maybe they’re getting the stewpot ready.”
“That’s not funny.”
The sound of a latch and the clump of wood on wood turned their attention to the door. Through it came a tall figure which resolved itself into a male Lemnosian, clad in rough woven clothes and moccasins. As he stood and looked impassively down at the prisoners, he was joined by three others. All carried short curved swords. They talked together in a rattling tongue, and then the first one pointed to the door. The prisoners were freed about the feet, and, stumbling with numbness, were propelled outside.
They found themselves looking down from a walkway cut in the rockface: there were many other cave mouths. The other face, across a kind of village street, was similarly pitted. At intervals the street was illuminated by the glowing troughs. Distantly, they could see a vague wooden erection, from which came the hammering.
“It looks like a scaffold,” said Gale.
They descended to street level, and their captors halted them again. A fresh burst of noise was coming from farther up the street, where lights bobbed and people sang in fluting voices. The four Lemnosians exchanged remarks with one another, and pointed. It was a procession consisting mostly of children, headed by a boy with a bandage on his knee and a plaster on his head: he led by the hand the nervously grinning crewman Bingley. Adults ran down the walks from the caves, and soon the procession had stopped and was surrounded by assorted Lemnosians, who listened and hooted, apparently with amusement. Bingley was hidden from view for the moment.
Anderson jeered, “Local boy saves alien and makes good: make um all earth men good fella.”
“If it’s really as corny and simple as that,” said Gale, “what the hell are they laughing at?”
With their captors they went into the crowd: Bingley stood grinning as his young friend told the crowd his story, and the onlookers guffawed. Then the little man saw his two bosses, and greeted them with unabashed cheer.
“I caught the kid eventually, and he made out that he wanted me to come here. Thought we might get a line on the inhabitants you know. I told you I was entertaining—”
“Here,” said Anderson, “just what is this kid doing?”
In the weird light, surrounded by bobbing faces, the boy was going through juggling motions, pointing at Bingley, laughing and gesticulating.
“He’s telling them about me cheering him up: look at his actions. Here kid, hey!”
And on an alien planet with an alien audience, Bingley produced three rubber balls and a penknife and started to juggle. The crowd roared.
“Listen though,” said Gale, “those aren’t cheers. They sound more like jeers to me.”
“You wouldn’t expect them to sound exactly like Earthmen,” Anderson reminded him.
Bingley had added a pen and a pencil to the articles: to the other two it seemed quite good, but the Lemnosians found it funny.
“I don’t get it,” muttered Gale.
The answer came a moment later. They boy Bingley had rescued, who had disappeared for a minute, now returned with some children of his own age. The carried balls, club-shaped bits of wood and other less easily recognisable things. They stood solemnly in the centre of the crowd, and then, at a signal, they began to juggle. First slowly, with four articles apiece, then faster, with five, six, seven, eight and even nine each, until the human eye could not follow the whirling objects. The Earthmen gaped as the virtuoso kids turned somersaults, leaped in and took each others pieces, all at the most furious pace. Other kids came from the crowd and took their turn, while the elders clapped and shouted and found time to point derisive fingers at Gale and Anderson. Bingley was near them.
“It’s beyond me gents: how on Earth—”
“Eureka!” yelled Anderson. “I see it. You have found a point of contact with these people. We think that this is very skilful, but to them it’s just a child’s game, and you’re just a clumsy mutt!”
Bingley scratched his head as Gale added eagerly, “They were afraid of us before, but now they’ve found that there’s something they can do better than we can, and they feel superior about it. Hear ’em laugh? Fear and laughter can’t go together: carry on Bingley!”
Bingley carried on and the Lemnosians lau
ghed till they cried. When Gale and Anderson suddenly found themselves free, they dived for stones, clawed pencils and knives from their pockets, and set out to make themselves as bigger juggling fools as possible. It was a good beginning.
HUNTING MACHINE
Carol Emshwiller
A vignette of tomorrow, and its brave, brave sportsmen!
IT SENSED Ruthie McAlister’s rapid heartbeat, just as it sensed any other animal’s. The palms of her hands were damp, and it felt that, too—it also felt the breathing, in and out. And it heard her nervous giggle.
She was watching her husband, Joe, as he leaned over the control unit of the thing that sensed heartbeats—the gray-green thing they called the hound, or Rover, or sometimes the bitch. “Hey,” she said. “I guess it’s okay, huh?”
Joe turned a screw with his thumbnail and pulled out the wire attached to it. “Gimme a bobby pin.”
Ruthie reached to the back of her head. “I mean it’s not dangerous, is it?”
“Naw.”
“I don’t just mean about it.” She nodded at the gray-green thing. “I mean, I know you’re good at fixing things like this, like the time you got beer for nothing out of the beer vendor and, golly, I guess we haven’t paid for a TV show for years. I mean, I know you can fix things right, only won’t they know when we bring it back to be checked out?”
“Look, these wardens are country boys, and besides, I can put this thing back so nobody knows.”
The gray-green thing squatted on its six legs where Joe could lean over it; it sensed that Ruthie’s heartbeat had slowed almost to normal, and it heard her sigh.
“I guess you’re pretty good at this, huh, Joe?” She wiped her damp hands on her green tunic. “That’s the weight dial, isn’t it?” she asked, watching him turn the top one.
He nodded. “Fifteen hundred pounds,” he said slowly. “Oo, was he really and truly that big?”
“Bigger.” And now the thing felt Joe’s heart and breathing surge.
They had been landed day before yesterday, with their geodesic tent, pneumatic form beds, automatic camping stove and pocket air tables, pocket TV set, four disposable hunting costumes apiece (one for each day), and two folding guns with power settings.
In addition, there was the bug-scat, go-snake, sun-stop and the gray-green hunter, sealed by the warden and set for three birds, two deer and one black bear. They had only the bear to go; now, Joe McAlister had unsealed the controls, released the governor and changed the setting to brown bear, 1,500 pounds. “I don’t care,” he said, “I want that bear.”
“Do you think he’ll still be there tomorrow?”
Joe patted one of the long jointed legs of the thing. “If he’s not, ol’ bitch here will find him for us.”
NEXT DAY was clear and cool, and Joe breathed big, expanding breaths and patted his beginning paunch. “Yes, sir,” he said, “this is the day for something big—something really big, that’ll put up a real fight.”
He watched the red of the sunrise fade out of the sky while Ruthie turned on the stove and then got out her makeup kit. She put sun-stop on her face, then powdered it with a tan powder. She blackened her eyelids and purpled her lips; after that, she opened the stove and took out two disposable plates with eggs and bacon.
They sat in the automatic blowup chairs, at the automatic blowup table. Joe said that there was nothing like north air to give you an appetite, and Ruthie said she bet they were sweltering back in the city. Then she giggled.
Joe leaned back in his chair and sipped his coffee. “Shooting deer is just like shooting a cow,” he said. “No fight to ’em at all. Even when ol’ hound here goads ’em, they just want to run off. But this bear’s going to be different. Of course bears are shy too, but ol’ hound knows what to do about that.”
“They say it’s getting to be so there aren’t many of the big kind left.”
“Yes, but one more won’t hurt. Think of a skin and head that size in our living room. I guess anybody that came there would sure sit up and take notice.”
“It won’t match the curtains,” his wife said.
“I think what I’ll do is pack the skin up tight and leave it somewhere up here, till the warden checks us through. Then, maybe a couple of days later, I’ll come back and get it.”
“Good idea.” Ruthie had finished her coffee and was perfuming herself with bug-scat.
“WELL I GUESS, we’d better get started.” They hung their folded-up guns on their belts. They put their dehydrated, selfheating lunch in their pockets. They slung on their cold-unit canteens. They each took a packet containing chair, table and sunshade; then Joe fastened on the little mike that controlled the hunter. It fit on his shoulder where he could turn his head to the side and talk into it.
“All right, houn’ dog,” he said, shoulder hunched and head tilted, “get a move on, boy. Back to that spot where we saw him yesterday. You can pick up the scent from there.”
The hunting machine ran on ahead of them. It went faster than anything it might have to hunt. Two miles, three miles—Joe and Ruthie were left behind. They followed the beam it sent back to them, walking and talking and helping each other over the rough spots.
About eleven o’clock, Joe stopped, took off his red hunting hat and mopped his balding forehead with the new bandanna he’d bought at Hunter’s Outfitters in New York. It was then he got the signal. Sighted, sighted, sighted
Joe leaned over his mike. “Stick on him boy. How far are you? Well, try to move him down this way if you can.” He turned to his wife. “Let’s see, about three miles . . . we’ll take a half-hour out for lunch. Maybe we’ll get there a couple of hours from now. How’s it going, kid?”
“Swell,” Ruthie said.
THE BIG bear sat on the rocks by the stream. His front paws were wet almost to the elbows. There were three tom fish heads lying beside him. He ate only the best parts because he was a good fisher; and he looked, now, into the clean cold water for another dark blueback that would pause on its way upstream.
It wasn’t a smell that made him turn. He had a keen nose, but the hunting machine was made to have no smell. It was the gray dead lichen’s crackle that made him look up. He stood still, looking in the direction of the sound and squinting his small eyes, but it wasn’t until it moved that he saw it.
Three-quarters of a ton, he was; but like a bird or a rabbit or a snake, the bear avoided things that were large and strange. He turned back the way he always took, the path to his rubbing tree and to his home. He moved quietly and rapidly, but the thing followed.
He doubled back to the stream again, then, and waded down it on the opposite side from the thing—but still it followed, needing no scent. Once the hunting machine sighted, it never lost its prey.
Heart beat normal, respiration normal, it sensed. Size almost 1,600 pounds.
The bear got out on the bank and turned back, calling out in low growls. He stood up on his hind legs and stretched his full height. Almost two men tall, he stood and gave warning.
The hunting machine waited twenty yards away. The bear looked at it a full minute; then he fell back on all fours and turned south again. He was shy and he wanted no trouble.
Joe and Ruthie kept on walking north at their leisurely pace until just noon. Then they stopped for lunch by the side of the same stream the bear had waded, only lower down. And they used its cold water on their dehydrated meal—beef and onions, mashed potatoes, a lettuce salad that unfolded in the water like Japanese paper flowers. There were coffee tablets that contained a heating unit too and fizzled in the water like firecracker fuses until the water was hot, creamy coffee.
The bear didn’t stop to eat. Noon meant nothing to him. Now he moved with more purpose, looking back and squinting his small eyes.
The hunter felt the heart beat faster, the breathing heavy, pace increasing. Direction generally south.
Joe and Ruthie followed the signal until it suddenly changed.
It came faster; that meant they wer
e near.
They stopped and unfolded their guns. “Let’s have a cup of coffee first,” Ruthie said.
“Okay, Hon.” Joe released the chairs which blew themselves up to size. “Good to take a break so we can really enjoy the fight.”
Ruthie handed Joe a fizzing cup of coffee. “Don’t forget you want ol’ Rover to goad some.”
“Uh-huh. Bear’s not much better than a deer without it. Good you reminded me.” He turned and spoke softly into the little mike.
The hunting machine shortened the distance slowly. Fifteen feet, ten, five. The bear heard and turned. Again he rose up, almost two men tall, and roared his warning sound to tell the thing to keep back.
JOE AND Ruthie shivered and didn’t look at each other. They heard it less with their ears and more with their spines—with an instinct they had forgotten.
Joe shook his shoulder to shake away the feeling of the sound. “I guess the ol’ bitch is at him.”
“Good dog,” Ruthie said. “Get ’im, boy.”
The hunter’s arm tips drew blood, but only in the safe spots—shoulder scratches at the heavy lump behind his head, thigh punctures. It never touched the veins, or arteries.
THE BEAR swung at the thing with his great paw. His claws screeched down the body section but didn’t so much as make a mark on the metal. The blow sent the thing thirty feet away, but it came back every time. The muscles, claws and teeth were nothing to it. It was made to withstand easily more than what one bear could do, and it knew with its built-in knowledge how to make a bear blind-angry.
Saliva came to the bear’s mouth and flew out over his chin as he moved his heavy head sideways and back. It splashed, gummy on his cheeks, and made dark, damp streaks across his chest. Only his rage was real to him now, and he screamed a deep rasp of frustration again and again.
Two hundred yards away, Joe said, “Some roar!”
“Uh-huh. If noise means anything, it sounds like he’s about ready for a real fight.”
They both got up and folded up the chairs and cups. They sighted along their gun barrels to see that they were straight.