‘He’ll be informative,’ Barney said, skirting a thicket of rhododendron. ‘He’ll save us a load of field work. In nineteen years – if he’s anything like the man he’s cracked up to be – he should have accumulated a mass of material of inestimable value to us, and to Dansson.’
When a PES team landed on an unexplored planet like Kakakakaxo, they categorised possible dangers and determined the nature of the opposition the superior species would offer colonists. The superior species might be mammal, reptile, insect, vegetable, mineral, or virus. Frequently it proved so difficult that it had to be exterminated – and exterminated so that the ecological balance of the planet was disturbed as little as possible. Disaster happened.
Their journey ended unexpectedly. They were only a mile from their ship when the jungle gave way to a cliff, which formed the base of a steep mountain. Rounding a high spur of rock, they saw a sort of settlement ahead. Barney braked and cut out the power, and the three of them sat for a minute in silence, taking in the scene.
Rapid movement under the trees followed their arrival.
‘Here comes the welcoming committee,’ Craig said. ‘We’d better climb down and look agreeable, as far as that is possible. Heaven knows what they are going to make of your beard, Barney.’
They were surrounded as soon as they jumped to the ground. The pygmies moved quickly; though they appeared from all quarters, it took them only a few seconds.
They were ugly creatures. They moved like lizards, and their skin was like lizard skin, green and mottled, except where it broke into coarse scales down their backs. None of them stood more than four feet high. They were four-legged and two-armed. Their heads, perched above their bodies on no visible neck, were like cayman heads fitted with long, cruel jaws and serrated teeth. These heads now swivelled from side to side, silently observing the visitors.
Once they had surrounded the ecologists, the pygmies made no further move. The initiative had passed from them. In their baggy throats, heavy pulses beat.
Craig pointed at a pygmy in front of him and said, ‘Greetings! Where is Daddy Dangerfield? We intend you no harm. We merely wish to see Dangerfield. Please take us to him.’
He repeated his words in Galingua.
The pygmies stirred, opening their jaws and croaking. An excited clack-clack-clacking broke out on all sides. An overpowering odour of fish rose from the creatures. None of them volunteered anything that might be construed as a reply.
Their stocky bodies might have been ludicrous, but their two pairs of sturdy legs and their armoured jaws certainly gave no cause for laughter.
‘These are only animals!’ Tim exclaimed. ‘They possess none of the personal pride you’d expect in a primitive savage. They wear no clothes. Why, they aren’t even armed!’
‘Don’t say that until you’ve had a good look at their claws and teeth,’ Barney said.
‘Move forward slowly with me,’ Craig said to his comrades. ‘Dangerfield must be about somewhere, heaven help him.’
Thigh-deep in clacking cayman-heads, the PES men advanced towards the settlement. This manoeuvre was resented by the pygmies, whose noise redoubled, though they backed away without offering opposition.
Bounded on one side by the cliff face, the village stood under trees. In the branches of the trees, a colony of gay-coloured birds had plaited a continuous roof out of lianas, climbers, leaves and twigs. Under this cover, the pygmies had their rude huts, which were no more than squares of woven reed, propped at an angle by sticks to allow an entrance.
Tied outside these dwellings were furry animals, walking in the small circles allowed by their leashes, and calling to each other. Their mewing cries, the staccato calls of the birds, the croaking of the cayman-heads, made a babel of sound. And over everything drifted the stench of decaying fish.
‘Plenty of local colour,’ Barney remarked. ‘These tethered animals are an odd touch, aren’t they?’
In contrast to this squalid scene was the cliff face, which had been carved with stylised representations of foliage mingled with intricate geometrical forms. The decoration rose to a height of some forty feet and was inventive and well-proportioned. Later, the ecologists were to find this work crude in detail, but from a distance its superiority to the village was marked. As they came nearer, they saw that the decorated area was the façade of a building hewn in the sheer rock, complete with doors and windows, from which pygmies watched their progress with unblinking curiosity.
‘I begin to be impressed,’ Tim observed, eyeing the patterns in the rock. ‘If these little horrors can create something as elaborate as that, there is hope for them yet.’
‘Dangerfield!’ Craig called, when another attempt to communicate with the pygmies failed.
Barney pointed to the far side of the clearing. Leaning against the dun-coloured rock of the cliff was a sizeable hut, built of the same flimsy material as the pygmy dwellings, but constructed with more care and of less crude design.
While the ecologists were looking at it, an emaciated figure appeared in the doorway. It was human. It made its way towards them, aiding itself with a stout stick.
‘That’s Dangerfield!’ Barney exclaimed. ‘It must be Dangerfield. As far as we know, there’s no other human being on this whole planet.’
A warming stream of excitement ran through Tim. Daddy Dangerfield was a legend among the youth of Starswarm. Crash-landing on Kakakakaxo, nineteen years before, he had been the first man to visit this uninviting little world.
Although only eighty-six light years from Droxy, one of the great interstellar centres of commerce and pleasure, Kakakakaxo was off the trade lanes. So Dangerfield had lived alone with the pygmies for ten standard years before someone had arrived with an offer of rescue.
By then it was too late: the poison of loneliness had become its own antidote. Dangerfield refused to leave. He claimed that the pygmies had need of him. So he remained where he was, King of the Crocodile People, Daddy to the Little Folk – as the Droxy tabloids phrased it, with their affection for capital letters and absurd titles.
As Dangerfield approached the team, the pygmies fell back before him. It was hard to recognise, in the bent figure peering anxiously at them, the young, bronzed giant by which Dangerfield was represented in the comic strips. The thin, sardonic face with its powerful hook nose had become a caricature of itself. This was Dangerfield, but appearances suggested that the legend would outlive the man.
‘You’re from Droxy?’ he asked, speaking in Galingua. ‘You’ve come to make another film about me? I’m pleased to see you here. Welcome to the untamed planet of Kakakakaxo.’
Craig Hodges put out his hand. ‘We’re from Droxy,’ he said. ‘But we are no unit come to make a film; our mission is more practical than that.’
‘You ought to shoot one – you’d make your fortune. What are you doing here, then?’
As Craig introduced himself and his team, Dangerfield’s manner became notably less cordial. He muttered angrily to himself about invaders of his privacy.
‘Come to our overlander and have a drink with us,’ Barney said. ‘You must be glad to have someone to talk to.’
‘This is my place,’ the old man cried, waving his stick over the tawdry clearing. ‘I don’t know what you people are doing here. I’m the man who beat Kakakakaxo. If you had pushed your way in here twenty years ago as you did just now, the pygmies would have torn you to bits – right to little bits. I tamed ’em! No living man has ever done what I’ve done. They’ve made films about my life on Droxy – that’s how important I am. I’m known throughout Diamond Sector. Didn’t you know that?’
His sunken eye rested on Tim Anderson. ‘Didn’t you know that, young man?’
‘I was brought up on those films, sir. They were made by the old Melmoth Studios.’
‘Yes, yes, that was the name. You don’t belong to them? Why don’t they come back here any more, eh, why don’t they?’
Tim wanted to tell this gaunt relic that Dangerfie
ld, the Far-flung Father, had been one of his boyhood heroes, a giant through whom he had first felt the ineluctable lure of space travel; he wanted to tell him that it hurt to have the legend defaced. Here was the giant himself – bragging of his part, and bragging, moreover, in a supplicatory whine.
They came up to the overlander. Dangerfield stared at the neat shield on the side, under which the words Planetary Ecological Survey were inscribed. After a moment, he turned on Craig.
‘Who are you people? What do you want here? I’ve got troubles enough.’
‘We’re a fact-finding team, Mr Dangerfield,’ Craig said. ‘Our business is to gather data on this planet. Next to nothing is known about ecological conditions here; the planet has never been properly surveyed. We are naturally keen to secure your help; you should be a treasury of information – ’
‘I can’t answer any questions! I never answer questions. You’ll have to find out anything you want to know for yourselves. I’m a sick man – I’m in pain. I need a doctor, drugs … Are you a doctor?’
‘I can administer an analgesic,’ Craig said. ‘And if you will let me examine you, I will try to find out what you are suffering from.’
Dangerfield waved a hand angrily in the air.
‘I don’t need telling what’s wrong with me,’ he snapped. ‘I know every disease that’s going on this cursed planet. I’ve got fiffins, that’s my trouble, and all I’m asking you for is something to relieve the pain. If you haven’t come to be helpful, you’d best get out altogether!’
‘Just what is or are fiffins?’ Barney asked.
‘They’re not infectious, if that’s what’s worrying you. If you have come only to ask questions, clear out. The pygmies will look after me, just as I’ve always looked after them.’
As he turned to go, Dangerfield staggered and would have fallen, had not Tim caught his arm. The old fellow shook off the support and hurried back across the clearing in a shuffle that sent the captive animals squeaking to the far end of their tethers.
Catching him up, Tim laid a hand on his arm.
‘Please be reasonable,’ he said pleadingly. ‘You look as if you need medical treatment, which we can give you.’
‘I never had help, and I don’t need it now. And what’s more, I’ve made it a rule never to be reasonable.’
Full of conflicting emotion, Tim turned back. He caught sight of Craig’s impassive face.
‘We should help him,’ he said.
‘He doesn’t want help from you or anyone,’ Craig replied, not moving. ‘He is his own self, with his own ways.’
‘He may be dying,’ Tim said. ‘You’ve no right to be so damned indifferent.’ He looked defiantly at Craig, who returned his gaze, then walked rapidly away. Dangerfield, on the other side of the clearing, glanced back once and then disappeared into his hut. Barney made to follow Tim, but Craig stopped him.
‘Leave him,’ he said quietly. ‘Let him have his temper out.’
Barney looked straight at his friend. ‘Don’t force the boy,’ he said, ‘He hasn’t got your outlook on life.’
‘We all have to learn, and it isn’t easy to learn fast,’ Craig observed. Then, changing his tone, he said, ‘Dangerfield seems unbalanced, which means he may soon swing the other way and offer us help: that we should wait for; I’d be interested to get a straight record of his nineteen years here. It would make a useful psychological document, if nothing else.’
‘He’s a stubborn old guy, to my way of thinking,’ Barney said, shaking his head.
‘Which is the sign of a weak man. That’s why Tim was unwise to coax him; it would merely make him more stubborn. He will come to us when he feels like it. Meanwhile, let’s make the usual ground sample survey and establish the intelligence status of these cayman-heads.’
Now that it was quieter, they could hear a river flowing nearby. The pygmies had dispersed; some lay motionless in their crude shelters, only their snouts showing, the blue light lying like a mist along their scales.
‘I’d hazard they have evolved as far as they’re ever going to get,’ Barney remarked, picking from his beard an insect which had tumbled out of the thatched trees above. ‘They have restricted cranial development, no opposed thumb, and no form of clothing – which means the lack of any sexual inhibition, such as one would expect to find in this Y-type culture. I should rate them as Y gamma statis, Craig.’
Craig nodded, smiling, as if with a secret pleasure.
‘Which implies you feel as I do about the cliff temple,’ he said, indicating the wealth of carving visible through the trees.
‘You mean – the pygmies couldn’t have built it?’ Barney said. Craig agreed.
‘These cayman-heads are far below the cultural level implicit in the architecture. They are its caretakers not its creators. This means, of course, that there is – or was – another species, a superior species, on Kakakakaxo, which may prove more elusive than the pygmies.’
Craig was stolid; he spoke unemphatically. But Barney, who knew something of what went on inside that head, knew that Craig’s habit of throwing away an important point revealed that he was chewing something over.
Understanding enough not to probe on the subject, Barney filed it away and switched to another topic.
‘I’m just going to look at these furry pets the cayman-heads keep tied up outside their shelters,’ he said; ‘they’re intriguing little creatures.’
‘Go carefully,’ Craig cautioned. ‘Those pets may not be pets at all; the pygmies don’t look like a race of animal lovers.’
‘Well, if they aren’t pets, they certainly aren’t livestock. Judging by the smell, the cayman-heads eat nothing but fish.’
Outside most of the shelters, two different animals were tethered. One was a grey, furry creature with a pushed-in face like a Pekingese dog, standing almost as high as the pygmies. The other was a little creature with brown fur and a gay yellow crest; half the size of the ‘peke’, it resembled a miniature bear. Both pekes and bears had little black monkey-like paws, which, as the ecologists approached, were now raised as if in supplication.
‘They’re a deal more cuddlesome than their owners,’ Craig said. Stooping, he extended a hand to one of the little bears. It leaped forward and clutched it, chattering.
‘Do you suppose the two species, the pekes and the bears, fight together?’ Barney asked. ‘You notice they are kept tied just far enough apart so that they can’t touch each other. We may have found the local variation on cockfighting.’
‘These beasts are about as dangerous as bunny rabbits! Even their incisors are blunt. They have no natural weapons at all.’
‘Talking of teeth, they exist on the same diet as their masters – though whether from choice or necessity we’ll have to discover.’
Barney pointed to decaying piles of fish bones, fish heads, and scales on which the little animals were sitting disconsolately. Iridescent beetles scuttled among the debris.
‘I’m going to take one of these pekes back to the overlander and examine it,’ he announced.
He could see a cayman snout sticking out of its shelter not three yards away; keeping it under observation, he bent over one of the pekes and tried to loosen the tightly drawn throng that kept it captive.
The cayman-head’s speed was astonishing. One second, it was scarcely visible in its shelter; the next, it confronted Barney with its claws resting over his hand, its ferocious teeth bared. Small though the reptile was, it could have undoubtedly snapped his neck through.
‘Don’t fire, or you’ll have the lot on us!’ Craig cried, for Barney’s free hand dropped immediately for his blaster.
They were surrounded by pygmies, all scuttling up and clacking. The reptiles made their typical noises, waggling their tongues without moving their jaws. Though they crowded in, they made no attempt to attack Craig and Barney. One of them thrust himself forward and commenced to harangue them, waving his small upper arms.
‘Some traces of a primitive speech patt
ern,’ Craig observed coolly. ‘Let’s barter for your pet, Barney, while we have their attention.’
Dipping into one of the pouches of his duty equipment, he produced a necklace in whose marble-sized stones spirals of colour danced, delicate internal springs ensuring that their hues changed continually as long as their wearer moved. It was the sort of trinket to be picked up for a few minicredits on almost any planet in Starswarm. Craig held it out to the pygmy who had delivered the speech.
The pygmy leader scrutinised it briefly, then resumed his harangue. The necklace meant nothing to him. With signs, Craig indicated that he would exchange it for one of the little bears. The leader showed no interest. Pocketing the necklace, Craig produced a mirror.
Mirrors unfailingly excite the interest of primitive tribes – yet the pygmies remained unmoved. Many of them began to disappear now the crisis was over, speeding off with their nervous, lizard movements. Putting the mirror away, Craig brought out a whistle.
It was like a silver fish with an open mouth. The pygmy leader snatched it from Craig’s hand, leaving the red track of its claws across his open palm. It popped the whistle into its mouth.
‘Here, that’s not edible!’ Craig said, instinctively stepping forward with his hand out. Perhaps the pygmy misinterpreted Craig’s gesture and acted defensively. Snapping its jaws, it lunged at Craig’s leg. As the ecologist fell, a blue shaft flashed from Barney’s blaster. The noise of the thermonuclear blast rattled around the clearing, and the pygmy toppled and dropped dead, its hide smoking.
Into the ensuing silence broke the clatter of a thousand weaver birds, winging from their homes and circling high above the treetops. Barney bent down, seized Craig around the shoulders, and raised him with one arm, keeping the blaster levelled in his free hand. Over Craig’s thigh, soaking through his torn trousers, grew a ragged patch of blood.
‘Thanks, Barney,’ he said. ‘Trade seems to be bad today. Let’s get back to the overlander.’
The pygmies made no attempt to attack. It was impossible to determine whether they were frightened by the show of force or had decided that the brief quarrel was no affair of theirs. At last they bent over their dead comrade, seized him by his hind feet, and dragged him off briskly in the direction of the river.
The Complete Short Stories- The 1950s - Volume One Page 75