by Chad Oliver
Royce was engulfed in an anger and a terror beyond anything he had ever known. He could face danger to himself with understanding if not with enthusiasm; he was a man, and he had years of experience behind him. But to seize a child, a little girl five years old, to carry her off into something she could not possibly comprehend …
It was his failure, of course. Barby could not defend herself. And he had been sleeping.
Even through his sick fury, the questions insinuated themselves. Questions and answers …
Why had they taken Barby? Obviously, because she was a child. They had learned something from Bob Russell, learned perhaps that they could not yet cope effectively with an adult. They had not been completely successful with the baboons. They might take Barby away with them, experiment with her, come back when they knew more …
Why hadn’t they waited for darkness, after going to the trouble of knocking out the generator? Well, they were not fools, whatever else they were. They had seen him come back. They knew he would have to sleep, knew he could be ready for a night attack. They were at least as intelligent as he was. They had simply revised their plans.
And now …
His hatred drowned out everything else. He could see them out there in the bush, moving, watching …
He ran through the slow-drying mud beneath a deep-blue sky fragmented with drifting clouds still swollen with rain. He pulled up at the baboon cages, his heart hammering. He threw the heavy rifle to his shoulder, peered through the telescopic sight. He picked one of them up almost at once. His belly tightened as the cross-hairs centered on the olive-gray coat, the naked snout, the gleaming canines.
His finger curled on the trigger.
He did not fire.
Royce lowered the .375, his hands shaking. He swallowed hard to keep from vomiting.
Think, you fool. You’ve made enough mistakes. If you shoot every animal out there, what then? Will that get Barby back?
He looked more closely at those dark forms at the edge of the bush. What were they doing there? Why hadn’t they gone with the others? Surely, they knew they were vulnerable if they did not run. What if they couldn’t run? What if they were too sick, too weak to escape?
He had to get through to that ship, wherever it was. He had to get Barbara out of there. He couldn’t storm it with a popgun and bows and arrows.
Whatever else he did, he had to get his girl out.
Royce spun around, shouting to Mutisya and Elijah. He sprinted to the lab storeroom, scooped up two bottles of sernyl. He filled the three pole-syringes he had. He hollered to Wathome to throw some maize and pineapple into the Land Rover and fill it with petrol.
With the rifle in one hand and the syringe in the other, he led the men on a dead run toward the creatures in the bush. He took no safety precautions. It was speed that counted now, nothing else.
The baboon-things saw him coming. There were four of them, all males. They coughed and snorted in fear. They tried to retreat into the tangle of the bush, but they could not run. They staggered and fell, saliva dripping from their snouts. Their eyes were cloudy and dull. The stink of sickness hovered over them like a preview of death.
The animals turned at bay. There was an alien intelligence in their primate skulls, but illness reduces all creatures to the same level. They functioned as sick and desperate beasts, nothing more.
They bared their fangs and waited.
Royce did not hesitate. He faked at the nearest one, drawing a weak lunge and a snapping of jaws. He leaped behind the animal and jabbed with his syringe. He hit him hard and rammed the plunger home.
The animal screamed, biting the air.
Royce backed away and refilled his syringe. Mutisya, despite his bad leg, already had another baboon cornered. Elijah, with the third syringe, was taking his own sweet time, protecting himself.
Royce stuck his second baboon, snatched the pole from Elijah, and went after the last animal. The baboon ignored his fake and attacked with a snarl of hate. Royce kicked him in the face with his boot, feeling a crunch of bone. He jabbed him in the belly with his needle, slammed the plunger with the heel of his hand, and leaped back.
He stood there, his chest heaving, sweat staining his shirt. The sernyl did its job. The baboons wobbled about on rubber legs, collapsed, twitched, and were still.
Royce eyed the thin bodies with a raging mixture of emotions: fear, anger, wonder, loathing, pity …
“Watch them,” he said to Mutisya.
His thoughts on his child somewhere out there in the waiting bush, he ran back to get the Land Rover.
12
The warm afternoon sun stroked the rain-soaked land with golden fingers. The air was still and heavy. It was hot enough for wisps of smoky vapor to rise from the sodden acacias. The washed gray bulges of the baobabs stood impassively in the sunlight, indifferent to either rain or sun. Insects buzzed in the flattened grass and squadrons of birds feasted until they could hardly fly.
The back road to Mitaboni, thick with choking dust the last time Royce had driven it when he had checked his traps an eternity ago, was a trail of mud. There were no wheel tracks ahead of the Land Rover; no vehicle had come this way since the rains had started. The two rails that paralleled the road on the left had a thin patina of rust on them; no train had gotten through for a long, long time.
The slowing of the rains and the heat of the sun had helped to drain the road. It was not impossible now, at least on this side of the Tsavo. It was merely improbable.
The battered Land Rover was heavily loaded this time, which was both an advantage and a disadvantage. It did not skid and fishtail as it had done when Royce had driven it alone, but it dug into the soft spots more deeply and persistently. Royce had four men with him. Elijah and Wathome rode up front in the cab. He had taken Elijah so that he would not lose face with his men and Wathome because he was steady and reliable. Nzioki and Kisaluwa rode in the back with the unconscious baboons. They were both big strong men not unduly cursed with imagination. Whenever the Land Rover got stuck they vaulted over the side and pushed.
Royce had left Mutisya with Kathy and Susan. There was nothing else he could do, and in any case Mutisya was the best man for the job. He could not carry a load through the bush on his bad leg, but he could fight if he had to. Royce trusted him more than other man he knew in Kenya, white or black.
Royce tried not to think about Barbara. Whenever her image slipped into his mind his vision blurred and his thoughts went wild. He knew that he had to think clearly now, had to keep his emotions out of it. If he surrendered to hate, whatever small chance the child had was gone.
He fought the wheel, nursed the whining engine, picked his course his skill and care. He did not try to bull his way through the slop on the road. He stayed out of the ruts, took advantage of every patch of grass, every stretch of firm earth …
He forced himself to think about them.
He knew about where they were. The location of the eerie glow that he had seen was burned into his brain. It was this side of the roaring Tsavo River, thank God, off there to the right in the bush. He had gotten to within a mile of the source of that glow that long-ago night. He could have found it whenever he wished, even in the torrent of the rains. It would have been foolish before, perhaps suicidal. His chances were not good now. He knew that, but he had no other choice.
Would they know that he was not coming as an attacker bent on revenge? Would they even wait to see what his intentions were? If he ever got back to Kathy at all, would he still be Royce Crawford … or something else?
Well, he could always shoot himself if it came to that. And he could take a few of them with him, too …
Don’t think that way. Choke it off.
What about them, those beings waiting for him in the warm mists of a world not their own? Could they understand him any better than he understood them? Could he see himself through their eyes? He had to try. If he miscalculated their response to his actions …
It came
to him that he had never really seen them. A vapor trail in the sky, alien eyes staring from the skull of a baboon, a man who had once been Bob Russell, strange tracks in the African earth—these were their only visible signs. He could not imagine what they might look like. He supposed that it did not matter. They might be ugly or beautiful. They might produce no reaction at all. He might not even recognize them as living beings. It made no difference. It was what they did that counted. Octopus or dragon or blob of jelly—it was all the same.
He could not know what purpose had brought them to this world. He thought he knew why they had chosen this particular place; he could not believe that it had been an accident. This remote spot in the African bush must have seemed ideal from their point of view. They could operate with a minimum of interference and a maximum of safety. There were isolated human beings to observe, and there were simpler primates to experiment with—baboons that were enough like men so that men themselves used them for medical research. That was strategy, of course. It told him nothing about the nature of the game that was being played.
Royce knew one thing, at least. This was a dangerous world to them. They were running terrible risks. They were taking casualties. Whatever project they were engaged in, this was no picnic. They were vulnerable outside their ship. They were in a strange and hostile land. They must feel that they were surrounded by monsters, aliens bent on destroying them. They had killed, it was true, but perhaps they had only done so in what they regarded as self defense.
Suppose one day man landed on some distant planet. Why would he have come, what impulse would have driven him across the darkness and the light-years? Could he explain, and would he even try? If he set out to explore that fearful world, if he trapped some specimens, what would he do if he were attacked by monstrous beings he could not understand? Would he stay his hand, leave them in peace?
Royce knew with a hard cold certainty that the killing had to stop. No matter who had made the first false move, the chain of fear and destruction had to be broken. A man does not worry about a world or two worlds when the life of his child is at stake. It was Barby he was fighting for. But if she were to have any chance at all, there had to be a new kind of contact between him and them.
Somehow, he had to show them that man could be a better ally than an enemy. He had to prove that he was more than a mindless savage. He had to demonstrate that a man could be a friend worth having. If they could not risk compassion, then he must take that first tough step.
If his gesture did not move them—if they were so different from man that they could not be moved—then he had lost. But he could not get his child back by firing at a spaceship with rifle bullets. He could not induce an act of mercy by more killing.
Royce ground his teeth together. The muscles of his arms stood out like taut ropes as he gripped the wheel. He did not know whether he was man enough for the job ahead. There was another side of him, a side that shrieked for vengeance, that wanted to surrender to hate, that wanted to cut loose and take the easy way …
“Damn them,” he whispered. “Damn them for coming here, damn them all.”
He pushed the Land Rover as far as he could along the muddy trail, kept it going until the thunder of the flooded Tsavo was loud above the whine of the engine, and then jerked the wheel to the right. The vehicle jolted into the bush with a series of shuddering shocks. Royce engaged all four wheels but used his mud gear to maintain speed. He could not bull his way through thick brush and fallen trees, but it was surprising how much open country there was in uncleared land. There were lanes of wet brown grass and barren fields without a tree in them. The ground was more uneven than the road, but thick mud was less of a problem. He picked his course with care and he made good progress. He had trailed many an animal this way, and except for the jolts it was not particularly difficult.
Royce pushed the Land Rover on for nearly twenty minutes until the acacias and vines and thorny scrub brush thickened around him. Shadows darkened the land and the air grew still. A wall of damp vegetation confronted him, and he knew that he would have to make a long and time-consuming circle to get around it.
He stopped the Land Rover. There was a heavy silence in the air, broken only by the distant liquid roar of the Tsavo. Mosquitoes and flies swarmed through the open windows of the cab.
Royce leaped out, slapping at the bugs.
Now the fun starts, he thought.
It was a strange, slow procession that picked its hesitant way through the darkening wilderness. The men walked in single file, their footsteps cushioned by the soggy ground. Royce went first, a limp baboon slung over his left shoulder and a rifle in his right hand. Elijah followed him, staggering under the weight of a folded tarp and a canvas bag filled maize and pineapples. Royce wanted Elijah right behind him; he knew that Elijah had little stomach for this safari, and he needed to make certain that Elijah kept moving in the right direction. Nzioki and Kisaluwa came next, each carrying a baboon with something less than complete enthusiasm. Wathome brought up the rear with the last baboon and a sharp ax. Royce had confidence in Wathome, at least where cooking was not involved.
It was not, Royce thought, the most powerful possible assemblage to represent mankind in an encounter with an alien power. Perhaps, though, its very impotence constituted its best chance for success.
He forced his way forward, relying on his memory to take him in the right direction. There were no landmarks. He could feel the baboon stirring slightly on his shoulder. The dead weight dragged him down; it was like carrying a sixty-pound sack of lead. Insects bit his hands and face and he could do nothing to deter them. The clouds in the lowering sky grew thicker and blacker. If the rains came again …
He sensed what he could not see. He was getting closer to them. They were ahead of him. They must be very close now. He did not doubt that they were watching him somehow, waiting for him, sizing him up …
A brown flash bolted out of a clump of dead grass right in front of him. There was a snort of expelled air, a muted drumming of hooves pushing against the wet earth. Royce recognized the animal as a small bushbuck the instant he saw him, but his heart hammered so hard in his chest that he almost had to stop to catch his breath. He was keyed up so high that the slightest touch would have made him jump.
“Don’t let it get dark yet,” he whispered. “Don’t let it rain.” It might have been a prayer, though its target was uncertain. God, Mulungu, Allah, one of the local deities …
He fought his way on. Thorns ripped at his legs. The pounding sound of the flooded river came clearly through the screening trees but Royce thought he heard a new sound now. A higher sound, steady but taut, a vibrant hum of tingling power. It was like the hot buzz of electricity in a high-tension line back home on a still day …
He picked his way around a grotesquely swollen baobab tree, pushed through a curtain of clinging brush.
There it was, as he had always known it would be.
He stopped and stared.
It rested in the middle of a small clearing: white as new-fallen snow, smooth and featureless, terribly matter-of-fact and terribly wrong there in the confines of the African bush.
There was a cold white light coming from it, an aura that ignored the earthly shadows. The hum seemed louder and Royce almost thought he could see the thing move silently. It was on.
It was perfectly round, a great white globe. It looked like it could roll. It seemed to be resting on the ground but it made no impression at all, as though it were weightless. The blank smooth surface of the sphere looked more like plastic than metal. No, not plastic. Like a gigantic glowing white marble …
It was hard to grasp the size of the thing. The mind tried to find a slot to put it in, tried to check it against something known, and the mind failed. It was big, yes, but that was a pitiful word, an inadequate word. Mountains are big, oceans are big, men are big. It was not as big as the great rockets that men launched from this world—but it was far larger than the capsules that perched o
n top of those rockets. The thing was perhaps eighty feet across, perhaps more. The size of a house with rooms higher than any house, a vast shining bubble that moved through the dark seas between worlds and stars …
Royce thought: Barby is in that thing. She has to be in there. She’s in there with them, whatever they are.
The men crowded in behind him, staring with more curiosity and fear than astonishment. They had seen so many astounding things in their lifetimes, things that had suddenly appeared in their world from outside—trains and planes and trucks that growled along the dusty roads. They were willing to accept anything now. They did not even ask questions, fearing to be thought ignorant. They simply waited for instructions.
Royce knew that he was close to death. He was certain that the beings in that ship could wipe him out as easily as he could step on a spider.
Act, he told himself. They are waiting to see what we are going to do. Show them.
He lowered the twitching baboon to the ground, gently. He took the ax from Wathome and told the men to remain as still as possible. He searched around in the brush, not venturing any closer to the sphere. He found some wood and hacked out six crude but sturdy poles. He fashioned a rough point on one end of each pole and chopped a notch in the other end. The sound of the ax blade biting into the damp wood worried him, but he knew that his fear was irrational. They would know that the men had arrived. It would serve no purpose to aim at concealment.
He gathered up the poles and returned to the waiting Africans. “Okay,” he said. “Leave the baboons. Bring the tarp. Wathome, stay with the baboons. Holler if they come to enough to move away. Quickly, now.”
He moved out into the clearing. He forced himself to walk toward the glowing white sphere. He went to within thirty yards of it. He could feel the thing as it towered over him. The humming tension that surrounded it was a palpable force that made his skin crawl.