Classic Fiction

by Hal Clement

  It was fairly bright even in the depths of the woods, since the trees did not spread out at the top nearly as much as is common on Earth, but it was strange enough. Drifting along almost in the shadow of the weird plants, many of the crew felt a resurgence of their old terror of having solid objects overhead; and there was a general feeling of relief when the captain silently gestured the helmsman to steer away from the bank once more.

  If anyone lived there they were welcome to it. Dondragmer expressed this opinion aloud, and was answered by a general mutter of approval. Unfortunately, his words were either not heard or not understood by listeners on the bank. Perhaps they were not actually afraid that the Bree’s crew meant to take their forest away from them, but they decided to take no chances; and once more the visitors from high-weight suffered an experience with projectile weapons.

  The armory this time consisted entirely of spears. Six of them flew silently from the top of the bank and stuck quivering in the Bree’s deck; two more glanced from the protective shells of sailors and clattered about on the rafts before coming to rest. The sailors who had been hit leaped convulsively from pure reflex, and both landed yards away in the river. They swam back and clambered aboard without assistance, for all eyes were directed toward the source of the mysterious attack. Without orders the helmsman angled more sharply toward the center of the river.

  “I wonder who sent those—and if they used a machine like the Flyer’s. There wasn’t the same noise.” Barlennan spoke half aloud, not caring whether he were answered. Terblannen wrenched one of the spears out of the deck and examined its hardwood point; then experimentally, he threw it back at the receding shore. Since throwing was a completely new art to him, except for experiments such as he had made in getting objects to the top of the tank in the stone-rollers’ city, he threw it as a child throws a stick, and it went spinning end over end back to the woods. Barlennan’s question was partly answered; short as his crewman’s arms were, the weapon reached the bank easily.

  The invisible attackers at least didn’t need anything like Lackland’s gun, if they were anything like ordinary people physically. They might, of course, be giants such as they had met already; Barlennan suddenly realized that he had no idea of the physical strength of those beings, since none of his crew had become involved hand-to-hand with them in that fight. There seemed no way to tell what the present attackers were, and the captain had no intention of finding out by direct examination.

  The Bree kept on downstream, while an account of the affair went winging up to Lackland on distant Toorey. It was a comfort, felt even by the sailors who could not understand his language, to be able to talk to this mysterious and powerful being even though he was no longer with them. His answer in the present case was a little mysterious, even to Barlennan.

  “For a planet that should be dead and in cold storage, Mesklin can certainly keep a person hopping.” Nothing more came of the incident.

  For fully a hundred miles the forest continued while the river widened gradually. The Bree kept out in midstream for a time after her single encounter with the forest dwellers, but even that, did not keep her completely out of trouble. Only a few days after the arrival of the spears, a small clearing was sighted on the left bank. His view point only a few inches off the surface prevented Barlennan from seeing as well as he would have liked, but there were certainly objects in that clearing worthy of examination.

  After some hesitation he ordered the ship a little closer to that bank. The objects looked a little like trees, but were shorter and thicker. Had he been a little higher he would have seen small openings in them just above ground level which might have been informative; Lackland, watching through one of the vision sets, compared the things at once to pictures he had seen of the huts of African natives, but he said nothing yet.

  Actually he was more interested in a number of other items lying partly in and partly out of the river in front of what he already assumed to be a village. They might have been logs or crocodiles, for they were not too clearly visible at this distance, but he rather suspected they were canoes. It would be interesting to see how Barlennan reacted to a boat so radically different from his own.

  It was quite a while, however, before anyone on the Bree realized that the “logs” were canoes or the other mysterious objects dwellings. For a time, in fact, Lackland feared that they would drift on downstream without ever finding out; their recent experience had made Barlennan very cautious indeed. However, there were others besides Lackland who did not want the ship to drift by without stopping, and as she approached the point on her course opposite the village a red-and-black flood of bodies poured over the bank and proved that the Earthman’s conjecture had been correct. The loglike objects were pushed into the stream, each carrying fully a dozen creatures who apparently belonged to the identical species as the Bree’s crew. They were certainly alike in shape, size, and coloring; and as they approached the ship they uttered ear-splitting hoots precisely like those Lackland had heard on occasion from his small friends.

  The canoes were apparently dug-outs, hollowed out sufficiently so that only the head end of each crew member could be seen; from their distribution, Lackland suspected that they lay herringbone fashion inside, with the paddles operated by the foremost sets of pincer-equipped arms. Actually they sculled rather than paddled; the blades were not lifted from the water at any time, and there seemed to be little back-and-forth movement.

  None of Barlennan’s crew analyzed these points; what interested them was the fact that the canoes were approaching far more rapidly than the Bree had ever moved except in a full gale. If their paddlers should prove hostile, as recent incidents made probable, there was nothing that could be done to avoid a fight; there was practically no wind, and what there was blew straight toward the left bank from which the canoes had come.

  The crew unobtrusively took up their stations on the outer rafts, weapons beside them. The leeward flamethrowers were manned, though Barlennan doubted that they would be useful under these conditions. Krendoranic, the munitions officer, was working furiously at one of his storage bins, but no one knew what he was up to; there was no standard procedure for his department in such a situation. Actually, the entire defense routine of the ship was being upset by the lack of wind, something that almost never occurred on the open sea.

  Any chance there might have been to make effective use of the flame dust vanished as the fleet of canoes opened out to surround the Bree. Two or three yards from her on all sides they glided to a stop, and for a minute or two there was silence. To Lackland’s intense annoyance, the sun set at this point and he was no longer able to see what went on. The next eight minutes he had to spend trying to attach meaning to the weird sounds that came over the set, which was not a very profitable effort since none of them formed words in any language he knew. There was nothing that denoted any violent activity; apparently the two crews were simply speaking to each other in experimental fashion.

  He judged, however, that they could find no common language, since there appeared to be nothing like a sustained conversation.

  With sunrise, however, he discovered that the night had not been wholly uneventful. By rights, the Bree should have drifted some distance downstream during the darkness; actually, she was still opposite the village. Furthermore she was no longer far out in the river, but only a few yards from the bank.

  Lackland was about to ask Barlennan what he meant by taking such a risk, and also how he had managed to maneuver the Bree, when it became evident that the captain was just as surprised as he at this turn of events. His voice could be heard issuing a steady stream of comment, orders, and, Lackland suspected, invective in his own language, rising steadily in pitch until he finally seemed to lose his voice entirely. The Earthman could have learned much from that fact if he had been able to interpret it correctly.

  Instead, he failed even to notice it particularly. Wearing a slightly annoyed expression, he turned to one of the men sitting beside him—th
e receiving screens for Barlennan’s vision sets had been set up in a small auditorium in the station on Toorey, and expedition members who had nothing else to do could usually be found there—with the remark:

  “Barl has let himself get into trouble already. I know he’s a smart fellow, but with over thirty thousand miles to go I don’t like to see him getting held up in the first hundred.”

  “Aren’t you going to help him? There are a couple of billion dollars, not to mention a lot of reputations, riding with him.”

  “What can I do? All I could give would be advice, and he can size up the situation better than I can. He can see it better, and is dealing with his own sort of people.”

  “From what I can see, they’re about as much his sort as the South Sea Islanders were Captain Cook’s. I grant they appear to be the same species, but if they’re, say, cannibals, your friend may really be in hot water.”

  “I still couldn’t help him, could I? How do you talk a cannibal out of a square meal when you don’t know his language and aren’t even facing him in person? What attention would he pay to a little square box that talked to him in a strange language?”

  The other raised his eyebrows a trifle. “While I’m not mind reader enough to predict that one in detail, I would suggest that in such a case he might just possibly be scared enough to do almost anything. As an ethnologist I can assure you that there are primitive races on a lot of planets, including our own Earth, who would bow down, hold square dances, and even make sacrifices to a box that talked to them.”

  Lackland digested that remark in silence for a few moments, nodded thoughtfully, and turned back to the screens.

  A number of sailors had seized spare masts and were trying to pole back toward the center of the river, but were having no success. Dondragmer, after a brief investigation around the outer rafts, reported that they were in a cage formed of piles driven into the river bed; only the upstream side was open. It might or might not be coincidence that the cage was just large enough to accommodate the Bree—no one had noticed sounds during the night that might have betokened its construction.

  As this report was made, the canoes drifted away from the three closed sides of the cage and congregated on the fourth; and the sailors, who had heard the mate’s report and prepared to pole in the upstream direction, looked to Barlennan for instructions. After a moment’s thought, he motioned the crew to the far end of the ship and crawled alone to the end facing the assembled canoes. He had long since figured out how his ship had been moved; with the coming of darkness some of the paddlers must have gone quietly overboard, swum beneath the Bree, and pushed her where they wanted. There was nothing too surprising in that; he himself could exist for some time beneath the surface of river or ocean, which normally carried a good deal of dissolved hydrogen. What bothered him was just why these people wanted the ship.

  As he passed one of the provision lockers he pulled back its cover and extracted a piece of meat. This he carried to the edge of the ship and held out toward the crowd of now silent captors. Presently some unintelligible gabbling sounded among them; then this ceased, as one of the canoes eased slowly forward and a native in the bow reared up and forward toward the offering. Barlennan let him take it. It was tested, and commented upon; then the chief, if that was his position, tore off a generous fragment, passed “the rest back to his companions, and thoughtfully consumed what he had kept.

  Barlennan was encouraged; the fact that he hadn’t kept it all suggested that these people had some degree of social development. Obtaining another piece, the captain held it out as before; but this time, when the other reached for it, it was withheld. Barlennan put it firmly behind him, crawled to the nearest of the piles that were imprisoning his ship, indicated it, gestured to the Bree, and pointed out into the river. He was sure his meaning was plain, as undoubtedly it was; certainly the human watchers far above understood him, though no word of their language had been used. The chief, however, made no move. Barlennan repealed the gestures, and finished by holding out the meat once more.

  Any social consciousness the chief possessed must have been strictly in connection with his own society; for as the captain held out the meat a second time a spear licked out like the tongue of a chameleon, impaled the food, jerked it out of Barlennan’s grasp, and was withdrawn before any one of the startled sailors could move. An instant later the chief gave a single barking order; and as he did so half the crew of each of the canoes behind him leaped forward.

  The sailors were completely unused to aerial assault, and bad also relaxed a trifle when their captain began his negotiation; in consequence, there was nothing resembling a fight. The Bree was captured in something less than five seconds, with two husky natives equipped with knives stationed, quite evidently ready for action, beside each member of the crew.

  A committee headed by the chief began at once to investigate the food lockers, and their satisfaction was evident even through the language barrier. Barlennan watched with dismay as the meat was dragged out on deck in obvious preparation for transferal to a canoe, and for the first time it occurred to him that there was a possible source of advice which he had not yet used.

  “Charles!” he called, speaking English for the first time since the incident had begun. “Have you been watching?”

  Lackland, with mixed anxiety and amusement answered at once. “Yes, Barl; I know what’s been going on.”

  He watched the Bree’s captors for reaction as he spoke, and had no reason to feel disappointed. The chief, who had been facing away from the point where the radios were lashed in the center of the ship, switched ends like a startled rattlesnake and then began looking around for the source of the voice with an unbelievably-human air of bewilderment. One of his men who had been facing the radios indicated to him the one whose speaker Lackland had used, but after poking around the impenetrable box with knife and lance the chief obviously rejected this suggestion. This was the moment the Earthman chose for speaking again.

  “Do you think there’s any chance of getting them scared of the radios, Barl?”

  The chief’s head was about two inches from the speaker this time, and Lackland had made no effort to reduce the volume. Consequently there was no question where the sound had come from; and the chief began backing away from the noisy box. He was evidently trying to go slowly enough to satisfy his self-respect and fast enough to suit his other emotions, and once again Lackland had trouble in not laughing aloud.

  Before Barlennan had a chance to reply Dondragmer, who Lackland was beginning to think must be some kind of mind reader, moved over to the pile of meat, selected a choice piece, and laid it in front of the radio set with every indication of humility. He had taken a chance on having a pair of knives meet in his body, and knew it; but his guards were too absorbed by the new situation to take offense at his motion. Lackland, understanding how the mate had interpreted his own lead, followed on; he reduced the volume in the hope that his next utterance would seem less like anger to the canoeists, and heartily approved the mate’s action.

  “Good work, Don. Every time one of you does something like that I’ll try to show approval; and I’ll bark like nobody’s business at anything I don’t want our new acquaintances to be doing. You know the appropriate actions better than I, so just do everything in your power to make ’em think these radio boxes are high-powered beings who’ll deliver lightning if properly annoyed.”

  “I understand; we can hold our end,” replied the mate. “I gathered that was what you had in mind.”

  The chief, gathering his courage once more, suddenly lunged at the nearest radio with his spear. Lackland remained silent, feeling that the natural result on the wooden point would be impressive enough; the sailors entered with a will into the game outlined by the Flyer. With what Lackland supposed were the equivalent of gasps of pious horror, they turned away from the scene and covered their eyes with their pincers.

  After a moment, seeing that nothing further was happening, Barlennan off
ered another piece of meat, at the same time gesturing in a way meant to convey the impression that he was begging for the life of the ignorant stranger. The river people were quite evidently impressed, and the chief drew back a little, gathered his committee, and began to discuss the whole situation with them.

  One of the guards reached slyly for a piece of the food that had been offered to the radio, and the sailor beside him went to the length of holding him back, giving every indication he could of horror. The similarity in natural gesture between all of these people, that had helped so much in trading with the giants, was in full play here as well; and the people of the river were becoming convinced more thoroughly every moment that the radio boxes were objects with which it would be wise to remain on friendly terms.

  Finally one of the chief’s counselors, in what was evidently an experiment, picked up a piece of meat and gave it to the nearest radio. Lackland was about to express gentle thanks when Dondragmer’s voice came, “Refuse it!” Not knowing why but willing to trust the mate’s judgment, Lackland turned up the volume and emitted a lionlike roar. The donor leaped back in genuine and unmistakable terror; then, at a sharp order from the chief, he crawled forward, retrieved the offending bit of food, selected another from the pile on the deck, and presented that.

  “All right.” It was the mate’s voice again, and the Earthman lowered the volume of the speaker.

  “What was wrong the other time?” he asked quietly.

  “I wouldn’t have given that piece to a ternee belonging to my worst enemy,” replied Dondragmer. “I don’t know what attributes a being like you would be expected to have, but in my experience the higher-up an individual is placed the choosier he gets.”

  “I keep finding resemblances between your people and mine in the darnedest situations,” Lackland remarked. “I hope this business is suspended for the night; I can’t see what’s going on in the dark. If anything happens that I should react to, be sure to tell me.”