When Barney got Craig onto his bunk, he stripped his trousers off, cleansed the wound, and dressed it with a restorative culture. Although Craig had lost blood, no damage was done; his leg would be entirely healed by morning.
‘You got off lightly,’ Barney said, straightening up. ‘That baby could have chewed your knees off if he had been trying.’
‘One thing about the incident particularly interested me,’ Craig said. ‘The cayman-heads wanted the whistle because they mistook it for food; fish, as we gather from the stink outside, is a main item in their diet. The mirror and necklace meant nothing to them; I have never met a backward tribe so lacking in simple, elementary vanity. Does it connect with the absence of sexual inhibitions you mentioned?’
‘What have they to be vain about?’ Barney asked, stripping off and heading for the shower. ‘After five minutes out there, I feel as if the stench of fish has been painted on me with a brush.’
It was not long before they realised Tim Anderson was nowhere in the overlander.
‘Go and see if you can find him, Barney,’ Craig said. ‘He isn’t safe wandering about on his own. He’ll have to learn to enjoy freedom of thought without freedom of action.’
The afternoon was stretching its blue shadows across the ground. In the quiet, you could almost hear the planet turn on its cold, hard axis.
Barney set out towards the distant murmur of water, thinking that a river would hold as much attraction for Tim as for himself. He turned down a narrow track among the trees, then stopped, unsure which way to go. He called Tim’s name.
An answer came almost at once, unexpectedly. Tim emerged from the bushes ahead and waved to Barney.
‘You had me worried,’ Barney confessed, catching up with him. ‘It’s wiser not to stroll off without telling us.’
‘I’m quite capable of looking after myself, you know,’ Tim said. ‘There’s a river just beyond these bushes, wide and deep and fast-flowing. I suppose these cayman-heads are cold-blooded?’
‘They are,’ Barney confirmed. ‘I should know. I had one of them holding hands with me a while back.’
‘There’s a bunch of them in the water now, and it’s ice cold. It must flow straight down off the glaciers. The pygmies are superb swimmers, very fast, very sure; I watched them diving and coming up with fish the size of big salmon in their jaws.’
Barney told him about the incident with the fish-whistle.
‘I’m sorry about Craig’s leg,’ Tim said, ‘but while we’re on the subject, perhaps you can tell me why he’s on my back, why he jumped down my throat when I went after Dangerfield.’
‘He isn’t on your back, and he didn’t jump down your throat. At present he’s worried because he smells a mystery, but is undecided where to turn a key to it. He probably regards Dangerfield as that key; certainly he respects the knowledge the man must have, yet I think that inwardly he would prefer to tackle the whole problem alone, leaving Dangerfield out of it altogether.’
‘Why should Craig feel like that? PES HQ instructed us to contact Dangerfield.’
‘True. And HQ being a tidy few light-years away is often out of touch with realities. But Craig probably thinks that old Dangerfield might be – well, misleading, ill-informed … Craig’s a man who likes to work things out for himself.’
They turned and began to make their way back to the settlement, walking slowly, enjoying the mild air uncontaminated by fish.
‘Surely that wasn’t why Craig was so ragged about helping Daddy Dangerfield?’ Tim asked.
‘No, that was something else,’ Barney said. ‘PES teams are the precursors of change, remember. Before we arrive, the planets are in their natural state – unspoiled or undeveloped, whichever way you care to phrase it. After we leave, they are going to be taken over and altered, on our recommendation. However cheery you feel about man’s position in the galaxy, somehow you can’t help regretting that this mutilation is necessary.’
‘It’s not our business to care,’ Tim said impatiently.
‘But Craig cares, Tim. The more planets we survey, the more he feels that some mysterious – divine – balance is being overthrown. You can’t avoid the idea that you are confronting an individual entity – and your sworn duty is to destroy it, and the enigma behind it, and turn out yet another assembly-line world for assembly-line man.
‘That’s how Craig feels about planets and people. For him, a man’s character is sacrosanct; anything that has accumulated has his respect. It may be simpler to work with people who are mere ciphers, but an individual is of greater ultimate value.’
‘That’s what he meant when he said Dangerfield was still his own self?’
‘Sound sceptical if you like. It’ll hit you one day. Imagine this place in fifty years, if we give it a clean bill of health. Do you think this river will run as it does now? It may be dammed to provide hydroelectric power, it may be widened and made navigable, it may be even a sewer. These birds overhead’ll be extinct, or force-bred in cages, or roosting on factory roofs. Everything’ll be changed – and we take much of the credit and blame for it.’
‘I won’t miss the stink of fish,’ Tim said.
‘Even a stink of fish has – ’ Barney began, and broke off. The silence was torn right down the middle by screams. The two ecologists ran down the trail, bursting full tilt into the clearing.
A peke creature was being killed. A rabble of pygmies milled everywhere, converging on a large decayed tree stump, upon which two of their kind stood with the screaming peke held between them.
To its cries were added those of all the others tethered nearby. The cries stopped abruptly as cruel talons ripped its stomach open. Its entrails were then scooped, steaming, into a crudely shaped clay bowl, after which the ravaged body was tossed to the crowd. The pygmies scrambled for it.
Before the hubbub had died down, another captive was handed up to the two executioners, kicking and crying as it went. The crowd paused to watch the fun. This time, the victim was one of the bearlike animals. Its body was gouged open, its insides turned into a second bowl. It, too, was tossed to the cayman-head throng.
‘Good old Mother Nature!’ Barney said angrily. ‘How many more of the little creatures do they intend to slaughter?’
But the killing was over. The two executioner pygmies, bearing the bowls of entrails in their paws, climbed from the tree stump and made their way through the crowd. The vessels were carried towards the rear of the village.
‘It looks like some sort of religious ceremony,’ Craig said. Barney and Tim turned to find him standing behind them. The screaming had drawn him from his bed, and he had limped over to them unobserved. ‘Or parody of same.’
‘How’s the leg?’ Tim asked him.
‘It’ll be better by morning, Tim.’
‘The creature that bit you – the one Barney killed – was thrown into the river,’ Tim said. ‘I was there watching when the others turned up and slung him in.’
‘They’re taking those bowls of guts into Dangerfield’s hut,’ Barney said, pointing across the clearing. The two cayman-headed bearers disappeared through the hut doorway; a minute later they emerged empty-handed and mingled with the throng.
‘I wonder what he wants guts for,’ Tim said. ‘Don’t say he eats them!’
‘That’s smoke!’ Craig exclaimed. ‘His hut’s caught fire! Tim, quick, fetch a foam extinguisher from the overlander. Run!’
Smoke, followed by licking flame, showed through Dangerfield’s window. It died, then sprang up again. Craig and Barney ran forward as Tim dashed for the overlander. The pygmies, some of whom were still quarrelling over the pelts of the dead peke and bear, took no notice of them or the fire.
The interior of the hut was full of smoke. Flame crawled among the dry rushes on the floor. An oil lamp had been upset; it lay on its side among the flames. Only a few feet beyond it, Dangerfield sprawled on his bed, eyes closed.
Craig pulled a rug from the other side of the room, flung it onto the
fire, and stamped on it. When Tim arrived with the extinguisher, it was hardly needed, but they doused the smouldering ashes with chemicals to make doubly sure.
‘There might be an opportunity to talk to the old boy when he pulls out of his faint,’ Craig said. ‘Leave me here, will you, and I’ll see what I can do.’
As Tim and Barney left, Craig noticed the two bowls of entrails standing on a side table. They were still gently steaming.
On the bed, Dangerfield stirred. His eyelids flickered, and one frail hand went up to his throat.
‘No mercy from me,’ he muttered, ‘you’ll get no mercy from me, you scum.’
He lay looking up at the ecologist. Shadows crept like faded inkstains over his face.
‘I must have passed out,’ he said tonelessly. ‘Felt so weak.’
‘You knocked over your oil lamp as you collapsed,’ Craig said. ‘I was just in time to save a bad blaze.’
The old man made no comment, unless the closing of his eyes was to be interpreted as an indifference to death.
‘Every afternoon they bring me the bowls of entrails,’ he muttered. ‘It’s a … rite. They’re touchy about it. I wouldn’t like to disappoint them. But this afternoon it was such an effort to stand. You people coming here exhausted me. If you aren’t making a film, you’d better get – ’
Craig fetched him a mug of water. He drank without raising his head, allowing half the liquid to trickle across his withered cheeks. Craig produced a hypodermic from his emergency pack and filled it from a plastic vial.
‘You’re in pain,’ he said. ‘This will stop the pain but leave your head clear. Let’s have a look at your arm, can I?’
Dangerfield’s eyes rested on the syringe as if fascinated. He began to shake slowly, until the rickety bed creaked.
‘I don’t need your help, mister,’ he said, his face crinkling.
‘We need yours,’ replied Craig indifferently, swabbing the thin, palsied arm. He nodded his head towards the bowls of entrails. ‘What are these unappetising offerings? Some sort of religious tribute?’
Unexpectedly, the old man began to laugh, his eyes filling with tears.
‘Perhaps it’s to placate me,’ he said. ‘Every day for years, for longer than I can remember, they’ve been bringing me these guts. The pygmies must think I swallow them, and I don’t like to disillusion them, in case – well, in case I lost my power over them.’
He hid his gaunt, beaky face in his hands; the paper-thin skin on his forehead was suddenly showered with sweat. Craig steadied his arm, injected the needle deftly, and massaged the stringy flesh.
Standing away from the bed, he said deliberately, ‘It’s strange that you stay here on Kakakakaxo when you fear these pygmies so much.’
Dangerfield looked sharply up, a scarecrow of a man with a shock of hair and sucked-in mouth. Staring at Craig, his eyes became very clear. He made no attempt to evade Craig’s statement.
‘Everyone who goes into space has a good reason driving him,’ he said. ‘You don’t only need escape velocity, you need a private dream – or a private nightmare.’ As always he spoke in Galingua, using it stiffly and unemphatically. ‘Me, I could never deal with people; you never know where you stand with them. I’d rather face death with the pygmies than life with humanity. There’s a confession for you, Hughes, coming from Far-flung Father Dangerfield. Maybe all heroes are just escapists, if you could see into them.’
‘Hodges. You have it wrong. Though it may be that all escapists pose as heroes,’ Craig said, but the old man continued to mutter to himself.
‘… so I stay on here, God of the Guts,’ he said. ‘That’s what I am, God of the Guts.’ His laugh wrecked itself on a shoal of wheezes.
He hunched himself up in the foetal position, breathing heavily. In a moment he was asleep. Craig sat still, integrating all he had learned or guessed about Dangerfield. At last he slipped the PES harness from his shoulders; unzipping a pouch, he extracted two specimen jars. He poured the bloody contents of the clay bowls into separate jars. Then he set down the bowls, covered the jars, and returned them to his pack.
‘And now, I think, a little helminthology,’ Craig said aloud.
As he returned through the village, he noticed that several pygmies lay, glaring unwinkingly at each other over the lacerated remains of the recent sacrifice. Circling them, he entered the overlander. It was unexpectedly good to breathe air free from the taint of fish and corruption.
‘Dangerfield’s sleeping now,’ he announced to Barney and Tim. ‘I’ll go back in a couple of hours to treat his “fiffin” and get him in a talkative frame of mind. Let’s eat.’
‘How about exploring the temple in the cliff, Craig?’ Tim asked.
‘We’ll let it go till the morning. We don’t want to upset the locals more than necessary – they might take offence at our barging in there. By morning I’m hoping Dangerfield will have given us more to go on.’
Over the meal, Barney told Craig of two weaver birds that he had snared while Craig was with Dangerfield.
‘The younger one had an unusually large number of lice on it,’ he said. ‘Not strange when you realise it’s a bird living in a colony, and a youngster at that, not yet expert at preening. It goes to show that the usual complex ecological echelons are in full swing on Kakakakaxo.’
With their meal, they drank some of Barney’s excellent Aldebaran wine – only the wine of heavy-gravity planets will travel happily through space. As they lingered over coffee, Tim volunteered to go over and sit with Dangerfield.
‘Excellent idea,’ Craig agreed. ‘I’ll be over to relieve you. And be careful – night’s coming down fast.’
Collecting his kit and a flashlight, Tim went out. Barney returned to his birds. Craig shut himself up in the tiny lab with his jars of entrails.
Cassivelaunus was sinking below the western horizon. Beneath the sheltering trees, darkness was already dominant; a fish scale gleamed here and there like a knife. In the treetops, where the weavers were settling to roost, an entanglement of light and shade moved. Kept apart by their tethers, peke and bear lay staring at each other in disconsolate pairs, indifferent to day and night. Hardly a cayman-head moved; joylessly they sprawled beneath their crude shelters, not sleeping, not watching.
Five of them lay in the open. These were the ones Craig had noticed earlier. They waited with their heads raised. In the gloom, only their yellow-white throats, where a pulse beat like a slow drum, were clearly distinguishable. As he made his way across the clearing, Tim saw that they were waiting around the bodies of the two creatures that had been sacrificed. They crouched tensely about the masses of battered fur, glaring at one another.
In Dangerfield’s hut Tim found the oil lamp and a jar of fish oil with which to refill it. He trimmed the wick and lit it. Though it gave off a reek of fish, he preferred it to the glare of his solar flashlight.
Dangerfield slept peacefully. Tim covered the old man with a blanket. In the chill air moving through the hut, Tim thought he caught a breath of the glaciers only a few hundred miles away, north or south.
Over him moved a feeling of wonder. He felt nothing of Craig’s dislike of altering the nature of a planet, and was suddenly impatient for the morning, when they would integrate and interpret the riddles they glimpsed around them.
A succession of leathery blows sounded outside. The three cayman-heads that crouched over one of the pelts were fighting. Though they were small, they battled like giants. Their main weapons were their long jaws, thrusting, slashing, biting. When their jaws became wedged together in temporary deadlock, they used their claws as well. Each one fought against the other two.
After some minutes of this murderous activity, the three fell apart. Collapsing with their jaws along the ground, they eyed each other once more over the remains of the bear.
Later, the two pygmies crouching over the dead peke rose and did battle, their ferocious duel ending again with a sudden reversion into immobility. The deep, sullen ev
ening light made the battles more terrible. However much the five pygmies suffered from wounds they received, they gave no sign of pain.
‘They are fighting over the gutted bodies of their slaves. It’s a point of honour with them,’ Tim thought.
He turned from the window. Dangerfield had roused, awakened by the thumping outside. He spoke tiredly, without opening his eyes.
‘What are they fighting for?’ Tim asked, lowering his voice.
‘Every sunset they fight in the same way.’
‘What does it all mean?’ Tim asked, but Dangerfield had drifted back into sleep.
After an hour, the old man became restless, throwing off his blanket and tearing open his shirt. Tossing on the bed, he clawed repeatedly at his chest, coughing and groaning.
Bending over him, Tim noticed a patch of discoloured skin under one of the sick man’s ribs. A red spot grew rapidly, lapping at the surrounding grey flesh. He made to touch it and then thought better of it.
Dangerfield groaned. Tim caught his wrist, steadying him against a crisis he did not understand. The patch on the chest formed a dark centre like a storm cloud. It oozed, then erupted thick blood, which trailed around the cage of the ribs to soak into the blanket below. In the middle of the bloody crater, something moved.
A flat armoured head appeared. A brown insect – it resembled a caterpillar larva – heaved itself into sight, to lie exhausted on the discoloured flesh. Overcoming his disgust, Tim pulled a specimen jar from his pack and imprisoned the larva in it.
‘I don’t doubt that that’s what Dangerfield calls a fiffin,’ he said. He forced himself to disinfect and dress the hermit’s wound. He was bending over the bed when Craig came in to relieve him, carrying a tape recorder. Tim explained what had happened and staggered out into the open air.
Outside, in the darkness, the five cayman-heads still fought their intermittent battle. On every plane, Tim thought, endless, meaningless strife was continuing; strife and life – synonymous. He wanted to stop trembling.
The Complete Short Stories- The 1950s - Volume One Page 76