by Jerry
He was in a large, barren chamber. The walls and floor and ceiling were all a muted brown. There was nothing in the room. There was no sound except for a gentle hissing from the air vents. The room was a little cold.
A sealed airlock portal was set flush into the wall that was closest to the edge of the dome. It was not large—just big enough to admit two men at once—but it was the same general type as the huge main lock that Lee had seen many times.
There was a panel just to the left of the lock. When Lee stepped in front of it, a red warning light appeared. Words flashed on the panel: DANGER, THIS IS AN EMERGENCY EXIT. DO NOT OPEN WITHOUT AUTHORIZATION.
The directions were engraved on the panel.
The instructions were not complicated.
Lee took a deep breath and activated the lock.
John Melner sat with his head in his hands. He was desperately afraid. He could not lie to himself. The ultimate responsibility was his.
“Lee never had a chance,” he said. His voice was tired and barely audible. “The message was too calculated. He was an iron filing drawn to a magnet, a starving man moving toward food. We made the decision for him.”
Dana Bigelow paced as always, his face a frozen mask. “We have switched roles, John. It is futile to blame yourself for what had to be done. The thing may work, you know. I have every confidence in Lee. His prognosis is strong.”
“Yes, but we manipulated him.”
“We had to. The Colony is staring down a dead-end tunnel. We are stagnant, static, afraid to act. We know what the problem is and what caused it. We were abandoned here; God knows why. We were dumped and left. We found ourselves on an alien world and none of the fancy plans were ever implemented. We knew how to survive: stay put, don’t make waves, don’t take chances. We had it drilled into us. It was all we knew. We were too infernally wise and experienced to break out of the shell. We needed something we did not have. We needed a man of action . . .”
“We needed a hero,” John Melner said quietly. “A quaint, old-fashioned primordial hero. A bringer of fire, a slayer of dragons, an opener of the way. A man who ignored the odds, took the long chance, welcomed a challenge. A dreamer, a doer, a man of impulse. In short, a young man whose mind was not too cluttered up with the knowledge of what he couldn’t or shouldn’t do. We had the young man. We worked on him a little, but basically he was what he was. We provided the opportunity. It is the situation that creates the hero—or breaks him. We set it up. We baited the trap.”
“There was no alternative. Most of us exist in a kind of paralysis of routine. We worship order because it has kept us alive. The rest of us—Edson Hewitt and his cape-flapping friends—have retreated into sheer ceremonialism and mystical flapdoodle. Harmless, maybe, but it won’t get us anywhere. We had to try. If we didn’t, we wouldn’t last more than a generation or two. We’ll iust curl up in a ball and whimper ourselves to death.”
“But he’s my son, Dana. Logic won’t help me now—and it won’t help him. The world out there is tougher than Lee can possibly know. And those—savages—are dangerous. There were—troubles—when we first came here. You remember young Tom Bailey. He was going to make friends with them. They tore him apart and ate him.”
“That was a long time ago, John.”
“Yes, a long time ago . . .”
They could remember, both of them. Fifty years, half a century, a lifetime. They had come from a crowded earth, more than eleven light-years to the fifth planet of the Procyon system. There had been great plans then, plans to start a new life, plans to work with the inhabitants of Procyon V, plans for visits back to earth.
Plans . . .
For seven years the ships had come on schedule, driving through the gray reaches of space prime. The Colony had been successful. For a while, it was a good place to be: alive, creative, sure.
And then the ships had stopped.
There was no warning; there could be no warning. The ships from earth simply did not come.
Messages, yes. But they were old transmissions, long outdated. It took better than ten years for radio waves to span the gulf between earth and Procyon V. It took more than twenty years to send a message and receive a reply.
There was no clue to what had happened in any of the messages. There had been no word at all for the last thirty-five years. That meant, of course, that the transmissions from earth had ceased even before the last ships had come . . .
The colonists were cut off, isolated, forgotten. It was a shock beyond belief, and it hurt. The scars went deep.
It was anybody’s guess what had happened. A political revolution, possibly, a revolt against the exploration of space. A religious upheaval and a creed that space travel was evil. A plague, a war, a lapse into barbarism.
It made no difference.
They were alone, more alone than men had ever been. For all they knew, they were the human race. There might be survivors in other colonies on other worlds. There might be people left on earth.
And there might not.
They had to preserve what was left. They had to be careful. They could not afford the luxury of experiments.
They survived. They imitated life. That was all.
They knew a fear that was beyond calculation.
And now, finally, they were stirring. They had found the strength to break the pattern, to make a gesture, to try, to seek . . .
“He’s out there now,” Dana Bigelow said. “If only we could help him—”
Old John Melner shook his head. “We’ve done what we can do. You know the analysis. He has to be alone. He has to be romantically—idealistically—motivated. He has to believe that it is in his hands. The decisions must be his to make. We can’t help. We can only get in his way.”
“What can we do?”
John Melner managed a bitter old man’s smile. “We can wait,” he said.
Lee Melner stepped Outside.
Something hit him, spun him around. He fell to his hands and knees, gasping.
Wind. He knew what it was; he had studied about it. He was not prepared for the reality. He had known only still air.
This was different. Raw, wild, strong! It smacked him like a thousand fists. It howled at his clothes. It ripped at his flesh.
Lee’s mind reeled; he was assaulted by sensations. He could not sort them out. Smells of green and growing things, smells of wetness, smells of immense quantities of free and moving air. Light: intense flaming white light that seared his eyes. Colors: vivid greens and blacks and browns and blues. Sounds: the wind that moaned, the trees that creaked, the grasses that cracked and slithered . . .
He struggled to his feet, rocking, bracing himself.
He narrowed his eyes to slits, trying to absorb what he saw.
Behind him, the vast arch of the dome. He could not see it all, of course. It looked peculiar to him, somehow reversed. It gleamed in the light. He could not see through it; it was a gigantic bubble of reflective glare.
Ahead of him was a band of sterile ground, gray and grimy, that circled the bottom of the dome wall. It was narrow, less than seventy yards in most places, but it seemed formidable to Lee. There were few open spaces in the world he knew.
Beyond that was a tremendous green plain, alive in the rivers of wind, huge beyond comprehension. Bare and jagged mountains of dark, shining rock, far away, so distant that he had no concepts to judge them by.
And a sky, the first sky he had ever seen, a sky without a roof, a sky that went on forever, a sky that dwarfed him, a sky that held a swollen white sun that burned—
Lee drank it in. He was beyond fear, beyond excitement. He was alive, out of the tomb! He could do anything, go anywhere.
He yelled a wild animal yell.
The wind ripped it from his mouth, hurled it away.
He ran, stumbling and falling, across the sterile band. The gritty gray stuff stuck to his shoes, worked into his feet. It smeared itself on his jacket, his knees, his hands.
He reached
the green grasses and collapsed. He rolled in the damp, tough stems, feeling the moist soil beneath him. He sniffed the juices of life. The wind moaned at him, but he was under it now and it was lessening. He laughed like a madman, laughed with a strange glee that was sweeter than anything he had ever known.
He surged to his feet, challenging the wind. He moved through the grasses at a pace somewhere between a fast walk and a trot. He felt strong, confident, and eager. He had no fixed destination; he simply moved away from the Colony. He could not get lost. The dome was so big that it hardly diminished in size no matter how far he went. Within a day’s range it would still be visible.
He paused. The first note of caution intruded on his mood. He did not want the night to catch him Outside. He had never experienced that kind of darkness, in the open, with an invisible world pressing in on him . . .
Still, there was plenty of time.
He moved on. The sun burned his face and hands, but it was not yet painful. The wind was cool and the grasses danced, and the thick, stunted trees whispered a song to him . . .
Abruptly, he came to a small clearing. There was a tiny spring of crystal-clear water that bubbled up from a rock formation. There was a path that led away from the spring, and tracks in the soft soil, many tracks.
And there was someone—or something—in the clearing.
Lee stopped short. He dropped to his belly and held his breath. Somehow, he had not expected this. He knew about the savages that lived Outside, of course. He had planned to contact them, one day when he knew more. But not now, not so soon, not the very first time . . .
Why not? Why not today?
He lay very still and studied the figure in the clearing.
It was a female, he decided, and very old. She was sprawled on her side, her eyes closed. Her breathing was so shallow that she almost seemed dead. Her arms were thin and very long. Her knees were flexed under a stained yellow tunic of animal skin. There was hair on her wrinkled face.
She was not human. She was neither good to look at nor ugly. She was just there, a half-alien thing in the dirt.
Half alien, yes. And half something else. An old woman, alone, more dead than alive.
Sick?
Lee stood up. There was nothing to fear here. He came from a world where illness was something rare, and curable when it happened. He was not afraid of it. The old woman certainly could not harm him. They were alone in the clearing.
He took a cloth and moistened it in the spring. The water was cold. He knelt beside the woman and gently bathed her wrinkled face. He made soothing noises.
She smelled. There was an old deep scar on her forehead.
She opened her eyes. They were astonishingly clear and a bright, hard green.
She hissed, horribly. She raked at him with her claws.
Lee moved back, not too fast. He saw a cluster of purple berries on a nearby bush. He had no idea whether or not they were edible, but that was unimportant. He needed to make a gesture that she would understand.
He picked a handful of the fat berries. He bit into one, tasting it. It was sweet and juicy. He placed the berries near the woman’s head and stepped back again.
He waited, not rushing her. The wind had died and the clean air was almost still. He could see thin eddies of blue smoke curling up in the distance. The trampled path led in that direction.
The old woman shook her hairy head and groaned. She reached out and grabbed the berries. She crammed them into her mouth, all of them. She chewed with stained and worn-down teeth. She swallowed.
She tried to get up and failed. She looked at Lee with those strange metallic green eyes. She seemed puzzled and confused now. Her eyes came in and out of focus.
She tried again to rise. She could not make it. She fell back on her side.
She said something harsh and guttural. It might have been a curse or a prayer or nothing at all.
She stopped speaking. She lay perfectly still, barely breathing.
Lee made his decision. He did not know what the old woman was doing here. He was not a fool, and he had studied something about primitive peoples; the Colony school was a good one and Lee—although he was unaware of it—had received special attention. The old woman might be sick; she could have been separated from the others to protect the village. She was very old; she could have been abandoned or crawled out herself to die. She might have come to the spring and simply been unable to return. She might be lost, although that was unlikely.
There was no way to tell. What was certain was that he had already made contact. That had not been his plan, but plans were made to be changed.
Lee picked up the woman and cradled her in his arms. She stiffened but had no strength to fight. There was not much meat on her bones. She smelled of sweat and soil and age.
Carrying the woman in his arms, Lee started down the path toward the tendrils of blue smoke.
A cluster of pithouses covered with roofs of branches and plastered mud. Hives, like miniature domes. Blending into the landscape: natural, weathered, timeless. Smells of burning wood and fire-dripping meat.
A great white sun, blazing at the zenith.
Sounds: cries, screams, whistles.
People: squat hairy men with hugely muscled arms dangling below their knees, half-naked women, brighteyed children peering from doorways.
Weapons: long spears with stone points, clubs, flaked-stone knives with leather handles.
Lee put the old woman down and stepped slowly back. He made no sudden moves. He kept his hands in plain sight.
He was defenseless, of course. He had no knowledge of killing.
He waited, looking into hard unreadable alien eyes.
The thought came to him that he was very close to death. He felt it, deep down, but his mind rejected it. He stood quietly, resisting the impulse to run.
The old woman groaned and stretched out a bony hand toward her people.
A man grunted something, put down his spear, and walked to her. He stared straight at Lee but did not speak. He picked the woman up—casually, as though she were a stick of firewood—and carried her back. He put her down by the hide-covered hole that served as a doorway to one of the smoking pithouses. Hands reached out and pulled her inside.
Lee waited. He could do nothing else.
Time passed, slowly. The great white sun moved in the sky.
After an age, a man moved. He was old but not feeble. He stepped into a pithouse, a knife in his gnarled hand. He emerged in a moment with a charred dripping hunk of meat impaled on the knife.
The man walked up to Lee and stopped. Lee could smell the grease in his hair. The man extended the knife.
Carefully, Lee put out his hand. He grasped the chunk of meat. It was hot and slippery. He pulled it from the flaked-stone blade of the knife.
He bit into it. The meat was tough, and the flavor was strong. He chewed it as best he could and managed something resembling a smile.
The old man smiled back. He sheathed his knife. He reached out and touched Lee, gently.
The other men put down their spears and clubs. The women began to chatter. Children emerged from doorways.
The vast river of wind stirred, gathering its power. Long black shadows crept across the land. The heat of the sun was fading.
Lee did not care. He grinned broadly now.
Something, perhaps, was over.
Something else was ready to begin.
Many times, Lee Melner went through the hidden exit and rejoined the Outside People.
He studied them, hunted with them, ate with them, laughed with them. He came to know them, little by little.
They were both less and more than he had imagined. Less, because they were not romantic creatures of an idyllic world of dreams. They were tough, brutal, and hard.
The old woman he had saved had indeed crawled away to die; she had too many years and had become a burden. She went out again and this time she did not return.
There was death, too, among the very
young. Infants rarely survived very long. Death came to them in many guises: sudden, sure, unsentimentalized. Lee had never seen young people die before.
But the people were more than that . . .
It was curious. In the midst of death—and uncertainty and sickness and desperate hardship—there was life. There was promise. There was a quickening of the blood, laughter that eased pain, new dreams, new beginnings.
And there was the sun and the great wind and the enormous sky and the stars and the rain . . .
The contrast with the Colony was stark and clear. Inside the dome, there was order, security, peace—and decay. Under the dome, there was no real tomorrow. There was only a slow ending.
Lee learned who had sent him from the Colony and why. He knew that he had a decision to make. The decision was not easier with his father involved.
It was not easy, period.
He could not just run away. He was the alien on this world, even though he had been born here. He was drastically different from the Outside People. And he was a man, with a man’s sexuality. He needed a woman of his own kind. He needed Ellen.
He could not bring the Outside People into the Colony. They could never adapt to it, and it would be wrong to try. There was no point at all in inflicting a dead end on them.
He could not bring the Colony to the Outside People. It was utterly impossible. The citizens of the Colony lived on a pyramid of technology; they could not move. And they were set in their ways, frozen, more fearful than any savage child huddled in the darkness and the howling wind . . .
Lee knew something of history; he had been carefully taught. He knew the dangers of contacts between an advanced civilization and bands of primitive hunters. It was rough on the hunters, always. Rough, and usually fatal.
On earth, the hunters had been obliterated. Technological civilization had triumphed.
And now, perhaps, there was no life on earth.
It was not an easy decision that Lee Melner had to make.
But he made it.
John Melner looked at his son. “Well,” he said, his voice carefully neutral. “You have something to tell me.”
Lee searched for the words that would not come. Old John seemed so frail, his lined face sunken beneath his fine white hair, his thin hands trembling slightly even when supported by the top of the table . . .