A drum throbbed hypnotically through the evening hush, and they could see the orange warmth of the fires in the village. A chant sobbed out on the moonlight—plaintive and sad and far away. The forest held its breath, absorbing the sounds of life.
Martin Ashley was lonely. He had always been a lonely man. He questioned instead of accepted, and that is a road that all men walk alone. Perhaps all men are lonely, and Ashley hid it as well as any. But Ashley was acutely aware of his loneliness, and now that Carol was gone, and with her the Juarez that had been his only home—
He shook himself. Getting morbid, he thought. Mustn’t do.
But he was looking in at life, warm life in a village one hundred light-years from Earth. And he was isolated, cut off from it. He didn’t belong. Perhaps he could never belong.
He knew, and he was not ashamed, that he would have given his soul to be in that village now, in with the drums and the songs and the firelight.
Not as a student. Just as Martin Ashley.
“They’re a funny bunch,” Ernie Gallen said. “Beating on those drums just like it was really something. Boy, we really picked us a dilly for home sweet home.”
Bob Chavez was feeling romantic.
“It’s pretty, really,” he said. “Kind of simple and unspoiled. But what’s in it for us? We’ve got to show these people we mean something, got to show them a few things, carve out a place for ourselves. We’re being too careful. After all—”
Yes, thought Martin Ashley. After all, after all.
It was then that he found it.
He picked it up off the ground.
He looked at it. A white tube, four inches long. Machine-made. While he held it between his thumb and forefinger it glowed redly at its tip. A tiny wisp of smoke curled upward into the night.
“A cigarette,” he said slowly. “And better than any on Earth.”
The others stared at him.
“Looks like we’re not the only visitors this planet has had lately,” he said. “Unless—”
“Unless what?” asked Ernie Gallen.
“Unless what?”
Martin Ashley stood in the moonlight under the trees. “I don’t know,” he said. “I just don’t know.”
He listened to the lonely chant carried on the night wind and watched the orange fires glowing from far away.
Martin Ashley felt a dawning fear—and a rising excitement.
IV
It was raining—a slow, steady rain that pattered through the trees, dripping from limb to limb, and gurgled down in a miniature river from the gabled roof of the log house.
Martin Ashley stood in the doorway, looking out. The rain was a humming sheet of silver and gray, covering the world but not hiding it. The tall, straight trees accepted the rain patiently, without much interest. The trees were very much like Earthly pines, with dripping needles and cones. They even smelled like pines, with that wet heavy fragrance that could weave synthetic memories for those unfortunates who had none of their own. Glistening village pathways wandered off among the houses, and laughing children played in the mud. The washed air was so clean it invigorated the lungs like a tonic.
Perhaps this, too, is worth something.
Martin Ashley liked the rain.
They had been with the Nern for ten weeks. Bob Chavez sat on a wooden stool in the middle of the room, quiet and depressed. Ernie Gallen, short and stocky and with his blondish hair in his eyes, paced the floor nervously. They were beginning to feel it now, Ashley knew. The isolation, the Earth forever denied them. It wasn’t an unreal picnic any longer. They felt cut off from everything that had ever mattered to them. From copters in the sun, silken women, dark hushed bars with music in the air—
The rain came down—soft, familiar rain. It was the same rain. Ashley had heard it so often—how many times? He had sworn at it while he fished, damned it at Yankee Stadium, listened to its lullaby on the tent canvas before he slept. Yes, the rain was the same.
“Look,” said Ernie finally, stopping his pacing. “We’re all in this thing together, right?”
“Sure, Ernie,” Marlin Ashley said, knowing what was coming.
“Then what say we can all the cryptic references to unsolved primitive mysteries, Martin. We don’t have to take orders from you, you know. We’ve sat on our tails for nearly three months, and still no dope from you on how to proceed. Call me crude, Martin—I want a woman and a decent house and a chance to make something out of this flea-bitten place.”
There was tension in the cabin, then; the ugliness of personalities that couldn’t harmonize.
“I don’t recall giving any orders, Ernie,” Ashley said. “Just advice. Whether you care to take it or not is strictly up to you.”
“Ernie’s right though, Mart,” Bob Chavez spoke up. His voice was tired. “If we’re going to play this game, we’ve got to know the rules.”
Martin Ashley shrugged. Rules? There were no rules out here. Space was long and space was deep. Here were only brains and feelings and wind in the night. “No secrets,” he said. “I just don’t have much to tell.”
“Tell it anyway,” Ernie suggested.
Ashley took his time cleaning his pipe with a pocket knife. He loaded it with his own private blend of bourbon-soaked tobacco, which no self-respecting smoker would touch with insulated tongs, and lit it with that most efficient pipe-lighter of all, a big wooden stick match. He chose his words carefully, knowing that he wouldn’t be believed.
“In a nutshell,” he said slowly, “I think the Nern are very much more advanced than we are. I think that if we step out of line we’re going to get our fingers burned.”
Harder now, the rain beat down outside, and heavy thunder rolled in from the distant hills.
The others stared at him.
Ernie Gallen jerked his thumb at the huts in the rain. “Them? More advanced than we are? Without even the wheel? You’re nuts, Martin, just plain nuts.”
“Thank you,” Marlin Ashley said.
Ernie hesitated. “I’m sorry,” he offered finally. “Didn’t mean it that way. We’re all in this together.”
“Sure,” Ashley said.
“There is the cigarette,” Bob Chavez said wearily. His face was pale. “I don’t understand that, not at all.”
Martin Ashley waved his hand. “Forget the cigarette for now. I’ve thought that one over. There isn’t any technology to speak of on this planet, unless it’s hidden in a cave or something, and that’s plain garbage. That cigarette came from someplace else, which raises an interesting problem or three. But let it go for now. I wasn’t referring to the cigarette.”
“What then?” demanded Ernie irritably. “How could you possibly—?”
Martin Ashley sucked on his pipe. Where are the words? There are no words. It is like the small boy who asks, “Daddy, tell me about the stars and things. And hurry—I’ve got to go play.”
“I can’t explain it all to you,” he said, “any more than you can make me an expert radio technician in ten minutes. But I’ll try. I warn you that a lot of this is going to sound considerably more subjective than it actually is, but you’ll just have to listen and decide for yourselves.”
“Just don’t throw it too far over our heads,” Ernie said with only a trace of sarcasm. “We’ll try to catch it.”
“Look at it this way,” Ashley began. “It’s easy to count and identify the various items in a culture—a totem pole here, a spear there, a feather cape somewhere else. It isn’t even hard to pick out elements of social organization—here a clan, there the couvade, back yonder a parallel cousin taboo. Unfortunately, however, all that isn’t too important. It doesn’t tell you much that you need to know if you’re going to understand a culture. What counts is how these things are put together. Cultures are not just collections of random ideas and spear points, you see. They are dynamic, integrated systems—blueprints for living.”
“You mean like patterns?”
Martin Ashley had been expecting that one
. “Think of it that way if it helps,” he said. He blew a fat, wobbling smoke ring out into the rain. “The point is this: all the ingredients are here, and they all seem simple, if a trifle idealized. But how do they hang together? What is the organizing principle? How does the thing work?”
“You tell me,” encouraged Ernie.
“I don’t know, and I’ll be the first to say so. I can’t get to first base with these people. But I’ll tell you this—this isn’t any primitive culture, and the Nern are not a primitive people. It all looks primitive, but it isn’t. Remember our friend Einstein in his shorts, getting sunburned on the beach. Maybe you’ve heard of convergent evolution—two lines of development that follow entirely different paths but come out looking alike on the surface? Well, pal, this is it, and we are right in the big fat middle of it.”
Ashley could sense the skepticism in the room.
“Hold on a minute,” he said. “I’m not through yet. I want to give you two facts to roll around inside your skulls.” He smiled pleasantly. “First, consider the contact situation. We came zooming down out of the blue in a spaceship, went right over their village, and parked out there in the grass field. A few hours later, and out come three Nern to say hello. They aren’t afraid of us, and what’s more they obviously aren’t even very interested in us. As for the ship, they hardly give it a glance. Old stuff, do you see? Standard operating procedure. Another day, another spaceship. But at the same time their village and their culture shows absolutely no traces of anything taken over from a ‘higher’ culture—no steel knives, no rifles, no plows, no fancy pants, no junk jewelry, no nothing. That’s something to chew on a while, gentlemen. Nothing spectacular, nothing that hits you in the eye, no signpost with a big MYSTERY HERE! painted on it in letters ten feet high—but how do you explain it?”
Nobody explained it.
“O.K. Second, there’s the little matter of the Nern language. For purposes of communication, they taught me—and I tried to teach you—a simplified jargon, on about the this is a book—the book is brown level. All very well—the complexity of a language tells you very little about the complexity of a culture. But the kicker is that the jargon isn’t their language! They actually have an extremely intriguing linguistic set-up that I’m just now beginning to get the drift of. Basically, they’ve got about ten different verb classes—and the type of verb you use indicates your authority for making the statement you make. That is, it tells whether your information comes from first-hand knowledge, or from a reliable authority, or from hearsay, or what-have-you. Neat, eh? This sort of thing has popped up before, of course—there was an American Indian language called Wintu that was set up along much the same lines. But the important thing is that they edited their language when they taught it to me—they revised it down to my level to make it easy for me. That just plain doesn’t happen. Explanation, please?”
He puffed smoke in a blue cloud at the ceiling.
Bob Chavez was silent and shifted uncertainly on his wooden stool. His eyes had a tired, distant look about them. The eyes bothered Ashley, vaguely. Where had he seen eyes like that before?
Ernie said, “So what? So they’re unusual. So they elude your keen scientific mind. They’re still savages, Martin, and all your books won’t change that. As for the cigarette, I say cross that bridge when we come to it—if we come to it.”
Ashley smiled. “O.K., Ernie. Just close your eyes and maybe it will all go away. You asked for my opinion and you got it. I may be wrong—I’ve been wrong before. You go play Og, Son of Fire.” He pointed, out into the wet village streets. “Go on out and tell them all about the wheel.”
Silence then, for a long time.
“Let’s don’t argue anymore,” Bob Chavez said suddenly, in a voice that was fuzzy with weariness. “I … I don’t feel so good.”
Martin Ashley put down his pipe in alarm and stepped over to the kid. He looked at him, remembering now. He felt the kid’s forehead. It was icy cold. Even as his hand rested there, the heat flowed back again and the chill became a fever.
“Get to bed, Bob,” he said slowly.
Martin Ashley and Ernie Gallen stared wordlessly at each other in the gray light. There was no need to speak, and nothing to say. They both remembered the Juarez.
Outside, the rain came hammering down in dull gray sheets.
Six hours later and it was night. The driving rain had once more become a drizzle.
Bob Chavez, obviously, was dying. He was unconscious now, and did not stir on his bed. His face was alternately too pale and flushed red with blood.
The disease had struck again. They had found the planet safe as far as they could tell, and that probably meant that they had carried the disease with them from the Juarez. It had waited, dormant, biding its time.
And now—
And now it had come back, in a little cabin on a new world. Bob was very sick, which was bad enough, but that wasn’t all. Martin Ashley and Ernie Gallen had exchanged no words, but they both knew. Each man could already feel the symptoms in himself. Gallen had had the disease once, and Ashley had watched fifty-one people die of it.
He remembered: Fifty-one down and three to go.
“It’s faster this time,” Ernie said, breaking the long silence. “A lot faster.” He sat down on his bed and wiped the sweat from his forehead with a handkerchief.
The rain pattered gently on the roof, eternal and unconcerned.
Martin Ashley licked lips that were suddenly dry and parched. He felt his blood pounding through his veins, heavy and sluggish and sick. He listened to Bob Chavez, breathing in short, harsh gasps in the darkness. So quickly, then, did death come in and win all arguments—
The night was slow and very long.
An hour passed. Without a word, Martin Ashley went over and picked up Bob Chavez in his arms.
“What are you doing?”
“Going for a walk.”
“In the rain?”
“I’m taking the kid to see a doctor.” His brain was spinning now, and it was hard to hold on to it.
Ernie Gallen surged weakly to his feet. “You crazy fool—to that witch doctor?”
“He got his M.D. at Johns Hopkins,” Ashley said, feeling giddy.
“You’re crazy! I won’t let you do it.”
“He can only die, Ernie.”
“I won’t let you!”
Martin Ashley smiled slowly. His mind, suddenly, was crystal clear. Calmly, he put the kid back on the bed. “Ernie,” he said, “if we don’t get out of this, I want you to remember one thing: you give me a pain.”
He moved in fast, on dancing feet. He swung just once, his fist coming up in a long arc almost from the floor. It had every ounce of Ashley’s strength behind it, and it landed with a crunch on the point of Gallen’s jaw.
Ashley didn’t even look at him. He picked Bob Chavez up again and staggered out into the drizzle and the darkness. The kid was terrifically heavy, like a lead sack in his arms. His feet slipped and sloshed in the mud and his hair plastered itself down over his eyes.
The fever was getting him now. He was burning up. Insanely, he wondered why the drops of rain on his forehead didn’t boil away into steam. He couldn’t think clearly and his feet got all tangled up when he tried to walk.
He fell twice, and the mud felt cool.
Where was the Juarez now, he wondered, out there beyond the rain? He thought he could hear it: THIS IS THE JUAREZ, SURVEY SHIP FROM EARTH, SEPTEMBER TWENTY, TWO THOUSAND AND SIXTY-SEVEN. UNKNOWN DISEASE HAS KILLED FIFTY-ONE, OF FIFTY-FOUR. THREE REMAINING MEN HAVE TAKEN SHUTTLE TO FOURTH PLANET, SYSTEM OF CARINAE. CONDITIONS THERE UNKNOWN—”
He began to laugh. He heard himself, and stopped.
He saw the dark structure before him and fell through the door of Rondol’s cabin. He twisted as he fell, breaking the kid’s fall with his body.
“Sick,” he said from a thick, oily blackness. “Sick. Needs a doctor—”
From somewhere, from nowhere, strong hands to
uched his shoulder and he knew nothing more. There was only the rain, the warm and soothing rain, forever.
V
Martin Ashley woke up.
The sky was over his head and it was a brilliant, astonishing blue. He lay very still, not trying to move, just looking at it, drinking it in. The air around him was warm and clean and filled with the sharp sweetness of pine.
He was well. He knew that instantly; no trace of disease was left in his body. Very vaguely, he seemed to remember long chants and singing and herbs in his mouth. But all of that was long ago, and now there was only the blue sky, and the lazy delight in just being alive.
He glanced to one side, and there was Bob Chavez. Like himself, he was lying on a bed of leaves, covered with a light blanket. His face was clear, his eyes unclouded, and he was smiling weakly.
“Tell ’em about the wheel,” Bob Chavez whispered.
Ashley smiled back at him. He tried to think, but the effort didn’t seem worth the trouble. He relaxed and let the soft air wash over him as he drowsed.
“Feeling better?” asked a voice out of a great distance.
He opened his eyes again. It was evening. Rondol was crouching by his side. The shaman had lost much of his earlier brashness, and now seemed almost gentle.
“Much better,” he said sleepily. “Thank you, Rondol.”
Rondol frowned. “The other one,” he said, “the one who was always so certain about things—”
“Ernie?”
“Yes. He would not let me help him. I went to him as soon as I found the nature of your trouble. We started to sing him well, to call on the good forces to assist him, but he cursed us and demanded that we leave.” Rondol shrugged. “We left. He is dead. We have disposed of the body.”
Dead. Fifty-four had boarded the Juarez, and now two were left.
Martin Ashley was still foggy with sleep. Undoubtedly, he thought, he had been drugged. Rondol’s voice drifted down to him from a great and misty height.
“Soon now you will leave us, Martin. We have studied you enough; we would not endanger your lives further and have you think badly of us.”
Seven Come Infinity Page 27