He was not really interested, but he had a wild hope that anything he said or did, however trivial, might put off the final and fatal moment when they would return to his apartment. He was pointing at a large and evidently intoxicated wogglebug hanging onto a lamppost to keep from falling on his needle-shaped nose. He might have been a nineteenth- or twentieth-century drunk, complete to top hat, cloak, and lamppost. Now and then, the creature groaned as if he were deeply disturbed.
‘Perhaps we’d better stop to see if he’s hurt,’ said Hal.
He had to say something, anything to delay Pornsen. Before his captor could protest, he went up to the wog. He put his hand on the free arm—the other was wrapped around the post—and spoke in Siddo.
‘Can we help you?’
The big wog looked as if he, too, had been in a brawl. His cloak, besides being ripped down the back, was spotted with dried green blood. He kept his face away from Hal, so that the Earthman had a hard time understanding his muttering.
Pornsen jerked at his arm. ‘Come on, Yarrow. He’ll get by all right. What’s one sick bug more or less?’
‘Shib,’ agreed Hal tonelessly. He let his hand drop and started to walk on. Pornsen, behind, took one step and then bumped into Hal as Hal stopped.
‘What are you stopping for, Yarrow?’ The gapt’s voice was suddenly apprehensive.
And then the voice was screaming in agony.
Hal whirled—to see in grim actuality what had flashed across his mind and caused him to stop in his tracks. When he had put his hand on the wog’s arm, he had felt, not warm skin, but hard and cool chitin. For a few seconds, the meaning of that had not cleared the brain’s switchboard. Then it had come through, and he had remembered the talk he and Fobo had had on the way to the tavern, and why Fobo wore a sword. Too late, he had wheeled to warn Pornsen.
Now the gapt was holding both hands to his eyes and shrieking. The big thing that had been leaning against the lamppost was advancing toward Hal. Its body seemed to grow huger with every step. A sac across its chest swelled until it looked like a palpitating gray balloon and a wheezing sound accompanied its deflation. The hideous insectal face, with two vestigial arms waving on each side of its mouth and the funnel-shaped proboscis below the mouth, was pointed at him. It was that proboscis which Hal had mistakenly thought was a wog’s nose. In reality, the thing must have breathed through tracheae and two slits below the enormous eyes. Normally, its breath must saw loudly through the slits, but it must have suppressed the sound in order not to warn its victims.
Hal yelled with fright. At the same time he grabbed his cloak and threw it up before his face. His mask might have saved him, but he did not care to take the chance.
Something burned the back of his hand. He yelped with pain but leaped forward. Before the thing could breathe in air to bloat the sac again and expel the acid through the funnel, Hal rammed his head against its paunch.
The thing said, ‘Oof!’ and fell backward where it lay on its back and thrashed its legs and arms like a giant poisonous bug—which it was. Then, as it recovered from the shock and rolled over and tried to get back on its feet, Hal kicked hard. His leather toe drove with a crunching sound through the thin chitin.
The toe withdrew; blood, dark in the lamplight, oozed out; Hal kicked again in the open place. The thing screamed and tried to crawl away on all fours. The Terran leaped upon it with both feet and drove it sprawling to the cement. He pressed his heel against its thin neck and shoved with all the strength of his leg. The neck cracked, and the thing lay still. Its lower jaw dropped open and exposed two rows of tiny needle teeth. The mouth’s rudimentary arms wigwagged feebly for a while and then drooped.
Hal’s chest heaved in agony. He couldn’t get enough air. His guts quivered and threatened to force their way through his throat. Then they did, and Hal bent over, retching.
All at once, he was sober. By that time Pornsen had quit screaming. He was lying huddled on his side in the gutter. Hal turned him over and shuddered at what he saw. The eyes were partly burned out, and the lips were gray, with large blisters. The tongue, sticking from the mouth, was swollen and lumpy. Evidently, Pornsen had swallowed some of the venom.
Hal straightened up and walked away. A wog patrol would find the gapt’s body and turn it over to the Earth-men. Let the hierarchy figure out what had happened. Pornsen was dead, and now that he was, Yarrow admitted to himself what he had never allowed himself to admit before this time. He had hated Pornsen. And he was glad that he was dead. If Pornsen had suffered horribly, so what? His pains were brief, but the pain and grief he had caused Hal had lasted for almost thirty years.
A sound behind him made him whirl around.
‘Fobo?’
There was a moan, followed by pain-garbled words.
‘Pornsen? You can’t be … you’re … dead.’
But Pornsen was alive. He was standing up, swaying.
He held his hands out before him to feel his way and took a few weak, exploratory steps.
For a moment, Hal was so panicked he thought of running away. But he forced himself to remain rooted and to think rationally.
If the wogs did find Pornsen, they’d turn him over to the doctors of the Gabriel And the doctors would give Pornsen new eyes from the meat bank and would inject regeneratives into him. In two weeks, Pornsen’s tongue would grow out again. And he’d talk. Forerunner, how he’d talk!
Two weeks? Now! There was nothing to prevent Pornsen from writing.
Pornsen groaned with physical pain; Hal, with mental.
There was only one thing to do.
He went up to Pornsen and seized his hand. The gapt flinched and said something unintelligible.
‘It’s Hal,’ said Yarrow.
Pornsen reached out his free hand and pulled a notebook and pen from his pocket. Hal released the other hand. Pornsen wrote on the paper and then handed the notebook to Hal.
The moonlight was bright enough to read by. The handwriting was a scrawl, but, even blind, Pornsen could write legibly.
Take me to the Gabriel, son. I swear by the Forerunner I won’t say a word about the liquor to anybody. I’ll be eternally grateful. But don’t leave me here in my pain at the mercy of monsters. I love you.
Hal patted Pornsen on the shoulder and said, ‘Take my hand. I’ll lead you.’
At the same time, he heard a noise from down the street. A group of noisy wogs was heading his way.
He pulled Pornsen into the nearby park, guiding the stumbling man around the trees and bushes. After they’d walked a hundred yards, they came to an especially thick grouping of trees. Hal halted. Unfamiliar sounds were coming from the center of the grove—clicking and wheezing sounds.
He peered around a tree and saw the origin of the noise. The bright moonlight fell on the corpse of a wog, or, rather, on what was left of it. The upper part was stripped of flesh. Around it and on it were many silvery-white insects. These resembled ants but were at least a foot high. The clicking came from their mandibles working on the corpse. The wheezing came from the air sacs on their heads breathing in and out.
Hal had thought he was hidden, but they must have detected him. Suddenly, they had disappeared into the shadows of the trees on the side of the grove opposite him.
He hesitated, then decided that they were scavengers and would give a healthy person no trouble. Probably, the wog was a drunk who had passed out and been killed by the ants.
He led Pornsen to the corpse and examined it because this was his first chance to inspect the bone structure of the indigenes. The spinal column of the wog was located in the anterior of the torso. It rose from unhumanly shaped hips in a curve that was the mirror image of the curve of a man’s spine. However, two sacs of the intestinal tract lay on each side of the spine; forward of the hips. They made a stomach with a hollow in its center. The stomach of a live wog concealed the depression, for the skin stretched tightly over it.
Such an internal construction was to be expected in a being
that had developed from the ancestors similar to those of the insects. Hundreds of millions of years ago, the ancestors of the wogs had been unspecialized, worm-like prearthropods. But evolution had intended to make a sentient being from the worm. And, realizing the limitations of true arthropods, evolution had split the wogs’ Nth-great-grandfather from the phylum of Arthropoda. When the Crustacea, arachnida, and insecta had formed exoskeletons and many legs, Grandfather Wog the Nth had not gone along with them. He had refused to harden his delicate cuticle skin into chitin. Instead, he had erected a skeleton inside the flesh. But his central nervous system was still ventral, and the feat of shifting spinal nerves and spine from front to back was beyond him. So, he had formed the spine where it had to be. And the rest of his skeleton had to go along. The inner parts of a wog were unmistakably different from a mammal’s. But if the form was different, the function was similar.
Hal would have liked to investigate further, but he had work to do.
Work which he hated.
Pornsen wrote something in the notebook and handed it to Hal.
Son, I am in terrible pain. Please don’t hesitate about taking me to the ship. I will not betray you. Have I ever broken a promise to you? I love you.
Hal thought, The only promise you ever made to me was to whip me.
He looked at the shadows between the trees. The pale bodies of the ants were like a forest of mushrooms. Waiting until he left.
Pornsen mumbled something and sat down on the grass. His head drooped.
‘Why do I have to do this?’ murmured Hal.
He thought, I don’t have to. Jeannette and I could throw ourselves on the mercy of the wogs. Fobo would be the one to go to. The wogs could hide us. But would they do it? If I could be sure, But I can’t. They might surrender us to the Uzzites.
‘No use putting it off,’ he murmured.
He groaned, and he said, ‘Why must I do this? Why couldn’t he have died back there?’
He drew a long knife from a sheath in his boot.
At that moment, Pornsen raised his head and looked upward with scarred eyes. His hand groped for Hal. A ghastly caricature of a smile formed on his burned lips.
Hal raised his knife until its point was about six inches from Pornsen’s throat.
‘Jeannette, I am doing this for you!’ Hal said loudly.
But the knifepoint did not move, and, after a few seconds, it dropped.
‘I can’t do it,’ Hal said. ‘Can’t.’
Yet, he must do something, something which would either keep Pornsen from informing on him or would remove him and Jeannette from the scene of danger.
Moreover, he had to see that Pornsen was given medical care. The suffering of the man was making him sick, making him writhe with empathy. If he could have killed Pornsen, he would have put an end to that suffering. But he could not do it.
Pornsen, mumbling with burned lips, took a few steps forward, his hands held out at chest level and rotating as he felt for Hal. Hal stepped to one side. He was thinking furiously. There was only one course of action. That was to get Jeannette and make a run for it. His first thought to get a wog to take Pornsen to the ship was discarded. Pornsen would have to be in agony for a while. Hal needed every second of time he could get, and to try to ease the gapt’s pain quickly would be treachery to Jeannette—not to mention himself.
Pornsen had been walking slowly forward, exploring the air with his hands, shuffling his feet across the grass so he wouldn’t stumble over an obstacle. Presently, his foot came into contact with the bones of the native. He halted, and he stopped to feel. When he closed his hands around the ribs and pelvis, he froze. For several seconds, he kept his stance, then he began feeling the length of the skeleton. His fingers touched the skull, moved around it, tested the fragments of flesh clinging to it.
Abruptly, seemingly terrified, perhaps realizing that whatever had stripped the wog of flesh might be close and that he was helpless, he straightened up and ran headlong. A choking scream came from him as he sped across the glade. The high-pitched ululation ended abruptly. He had rammed into a tree trunk and fallen on his back.
Before he could rise, he was overwhelmed by a wheezing and clicking horde of mushroom-white bodies.
Hal did not think of the fact that he was not behaving rationally. Instead, giving a cry, he ran toward the ants. Halfway across the glade, Hal saw them disappear into the shadows, but not so far that he could not discern their massed whiteness.
Reaching Pornsen, Hal sank down to one knee and examined him.
In those few moments, the man’s clothing had been torn to shreds and his flesh bitten in many places.
His eyes stared straight upward; his jugular vein had been severed.
Hal, moaning, rose and walked swiftly from the grove. Behind him was a rustling and wheezing as the ants surged forward from the protection of the trees. Hal did not look back.
And, when he stepped under the light of the street-lamp, the pressure inside him found vent. Tears ran down his cheeks. His shoulders shook with sobs. He staggered like a drunk. His intestines felt as if they were being pulled apart.
He did not know if it was grief or if it was hate at last finding expression because the cause of his hate could no longer retaliate against him. Perhaps, it was both grief and hate. Whatever it was, it was working out of his body like a poison; his body was expelling it. At the same time, it was boiling him alive.
Yet, it was coming out. Though he felt he was dying, by the time he had walked to his home, he was rid of the poison. Fatigue leadened his arms and legs, and he could scarcely find the energy to walk up the flight of steps to the front door of the building.
At the same time, his heart felt light. It was strong, pumping unimpeded as if a hand around it had released its clutch.
13
A tall ghost in a light blue shroud was waiting for the Terran in the false dawn. It was Fobo, the empathist, standing in the hexagonal-shaped arch that led into his building. He threw back the hood and exposed a face that was scratched on one cheek and blackened around the right eye.
He chuckled and said, ‘Some son-of-a-bug pulled my mask off and plowed me good. But it was fun. It helps if you blow off steam now and then. How did you come out? I was afraid you might have been picked up by the police. Normally, that wouldn’t worry me, but I know your colleagues at the ship would frown upon such activities.’
Hal smiled wanly.
‘Frown misses it by a mile.’
He wondered how Fobo knew what the hierarch’s reactions would be. How much did these wogs know about the Terrestrials? Were they onto the Haijac game and waiting to pounce? If so, with what? Their technology, as far as could be determined, was far behind Earth’s. True, they seemed to know more of psychic functions than the Terrans did, but that was understandable. The Sturch had long ago decreed that the proper psychology had been perfected and that further research was unnecessary. The result had been a standstill in the psychical sciences.
He shrugged mentally. He was too tired to think of such things. All he wanted was to go to bed.
‘I’ll tell you later what happened.’
Fobo replied, ‘I can guess. Your hand. You’d better let me fix that burn. Nightlifer venom is nasty.’
Like a little child, Hal followed him to the wog’s apartment and let him put a cooling salve on it.
‘Shib as shib,’ Fobo said. ‘Go to bed. Tomorrow you can tell me all about it.’
Hal thanked him and walked down to his floor. His hand fumbled with the key. Finally, after using Sigmen’s name in vain, he inserted the key. When he had shut and locked the door, he called Jeannette. She must have been hiding in the closet-within-a-closet in the bedroom, for he heard two doors bang. In a moment she was running to him. She threw her arms around him.
‘Oh, maw num, maw num! What has happened? I was so worried. I thought I would scream when the night went by, and you didn’t return.’
Though he was sorry he had caused her pain
, he could not help a prickling of pleasure because she cared enough about him to worry. Mary, perhaps, might have been sympathetic, but she would have felt duty-bound to repress it and to lecture him on his unreal thinking and the resulting injury to himself.
‘There was a brawl.’
He had decided not to say anything about the gapt or the nightlifer. Later, when the strain had passed, he’d talk.
She untied his cloak and hood and took off his mask. She hung them up in the front room closet, and he sank into a chair and closed his eyes.
A moment later, they were opened by the sound of liquid pouring into a glass. She was standing in front of him and filling a large glass from the quart. The odor of beetlejuice began to turn his stomach, and the picture of a beautiful girl about to drink the nauseating stuff spun it all the way around.
She looked at him. The delicate brackets of her brows rose.
‘Kyetilr?’
‘Nothing’s the matter!’ he groaned. ‘I’m all right.’
She put down the glass, picked up his hand, and led him into the bedroom. There she gently sat him down, pressed on his shoulders until he lay down, and then took off his shoes. He didn’t resist. After she unbuttoned his shirt, she stroked his hair.
‘You’re sure you’re all right?’
‘Shib. I could lick the world with one hand tied behind my back.’
‘Good.’
The bed creaked as she got up and walked out of the room. He began to drift into sleep, but her return awakened him. Again, he opened his eyes. She was standing with a glass in her hand.
She said, ‘Would you like a sip now, Hal?’
‘Great Sigmen, don’t you understand?’ Fury roused him and he sat up.
‘Why do you think I got sick? I can’t stand the stuff! I can’t stand to see you drink it. It makes me sick. You make me sick. What’s the matter with you? Are you stupid?’
Jeannette’s eyes widened. Blood drained from her face and left the pigment of her lips a crimson moon in a white lake. Her hand shook so that the liquor spilled.
The Lovers * Dark Is the Sun * Riders of the Purple Wage Page 12