The dead hour before the dawn; the time, on any planet in the universe, when the pulse of life falters before quickening. Craig entered the overlander with his tape recorder under one arm. Setting it down, he put coffee on the hot-point, rinsed his face with cold water, and roused the two sleepers.
‘We shall be busy today,’ he said, patting the recorder. ‘We now have plenty of data on Kakakakaxo to work on – very dubious material, I might add. I recorded a long talk with Dangerfield, which I want you both to hear.’
‘How is he?’ Tim asked as he slipped on his tunic.
‘Physically, not in bad shape. Mentally, pretty sick. Suddenly he is chummy and communicative, then he’s silent and hostile. An odd creature … Not that you’d expect other than oddity after twenty years in this stagnation.’
‘And the fiffin?’
‘Dangerfield thinks it is the larval stage of a dung beetle, and says they bore through anything. He has had them in his legs before, but this one only just missed his lungs. The pain must have been intense, poor fellow. I gave him a light hypalgesic and questioned him before its effect wore off.’
Barney brought the boiling coffee off the stove and filled three beakers.
‘All set to hear the playback,’ he said.
Craig switched the recorder on. The reels turned slowly, re-creating his voice and Dangerfield’s.
‘Now that you are feeling better,’ Craig-on-tape said, ‘perhaps you could give me a few details about life on Kakakakaxo. How efficiently can these so-called pygmies communicate with each other?’
A silence followed before Dangerfield replied.
‘They’re an old race, the pygmies,’ he said at length. ‘Their language has gradually worn down, like an old coin. I’ve picked up all I can in twenty-odd years, but you can take it from me that most of the time they’re just making noises. Their language only expresses a few basic attitudes. Hostility. Fear. Hunger.’
‘What about love?’ Craig prompted.
‘They’re very secretive about sex; I’ve never seen ’em mate, and you can’t tell male from female. They just lay their eggs in the mud … What was I saying? … Oh yes, about their manner of speech. You’ve got to remember, Hodges, that I’m the only human – the only one – ever to master this clicking they do.’
‘Have you been able to explain to them where you came from?’
‘That’s a bit difficult for them to grasp. They’ve settled for “beyond the ice”.’
‘Meaning the glaciers to the north and south of the equatorial belt?’
‘Yes; that’s why they think I’m a god, because only gods can live beyond the ice. The pygmies know all about the glaciers. I’ve been able to construct a bit of their history from similar little items – ’
‘That was one of the next things I was going to ask you about,’ Craig-on-tape said, as Barney-in-the-flesh handed around more coffee.
‘The pygmies are an ancient race,’ old Dangerfield said. ‘They’ve no written history, of course, but you can tell they’re old by their knowing about the glaciers. How would equatorial creatures know about glaciers, unless their race survived the last Ice Age? Then this ornamented cliff in which many of them live – they could build nothing like that now. They haven’t the skill. I had to help them put this hut up. Their ancestors must have been really clever; these contemporary generations are just decadent.’
Craig’s voice came sceptically from the loudspeaker: ‘We had an idea that the temple might have been built by another, vanished race. Any opinions on that?’
‘You’re on the wrong track, Hodges. The pygmies look on this temple as sacred; somewhere in the middle of it is what they refer to as “The Tomb of the Old Kings”, and even I have never been allowed in there. They wouldn’t behave like that if the place didn’t have a special significance for them.’
‘Do they still have kings?’
‘No. They don’t have any sort of rule now, except each man for himself. The five pygmies fighting outside the hut, for instance; there’s nobody to stop them, so they’ll go on until they are all dead.’
‘Why should they fight over the pelts?’
‘It’s a custom, that’s all. They do it every night; sometimes one of them wins quickly, and then it’s all over. They sacrifice their slaves in the day and squabble over their bodies at night.’
‘Can you tell me why they attach such importance to these little animals – their slaves, as you call them?’
‘Oh, they don’t attach much importance to the slaves. It’s just that they make a habit of catching them in the forest, since they regard the pekes and bears as a menace to them; their numbers have increased since I’ve been here.’
‘Then why don’t the pygmies kill them outright? And why do they always keep the two groups separate? Anything significant in that?’
‘Why should there be? The pekes and bears are supposed to fight together if they are allowed to intermingle, but whether or not that’s true I can’t say. You mustn’t expect reasons for everything these pygmies do. They’re not rational the way a man is.’
‘As an ecologist, I find there is generally a reason for everything, however obscure.’
‘You do, do you?’ The hermit’s tone was belligerent. ‘In nineteen years here, I haven’t found one. Look, it’s no good staring at me with one eyebrow cocked. I don’t like your superior ways, whether you’re a good doctor or not.’
‘You were saying the pygmies were not rational.’
‘True. They’re living automatically on past glory. You can’t do anything with ’em. I’ve tried. At least they acknowledge my authority … It’s a terrible thing to grow old. Look at my hands.’
Craig reached forward and switched the recorder off. Outside, the first light pencilled in the outlines of trees.
‘That’s about all that’s relevant,’ he said. ‘The rest of Dangerfield’s remarks were mainly autobiographical.’
‘What do you make of it, Craig?’ Barney Brangwyn asked.
They heard the first weaver birds wake and cry in the trees as Craig replied.
‘Before Dangerfield crashed on Kakakakaxo, he was a salesman, hopping from one frontier planet to another. He was untrained as an observer.’
‘I think you feel as I do,’ Barney said. ‘Dangerfield has misinterpreted just about everything he has seen. It’s easy enough to do on a strange planet, even if you are emotionally balanced. Nothing in his statement can be trusted; it’s useless, except perhaps as case history.’
‘I wouldn’t go so far as to say that,’ Craig remarked, with his usual caution. ‘It’s untrustworthy, yes, but not useless.’
‘Sorry, but I’m adrift,’ Tim Anderson said, getting up and pacing behind his chair. ‘Why should Dangerfield be so wrong? Most of what he said sounded logical enough to me. Even if he had no anthropological or ecological training to begin with, he’s had plenty of time to learn.’
‘True, Tim, true,’ Craig agreed. ‘Plenty of time to learn correctly or learn wrongly. I’m not trying to pass judgement on Dangerfield, but there is hardly a fact in the universe not open to two or more interpretations. Dangerfield’s attitude to the pygmies is highly ambivalent, a classical love-hate relationship. He wants to think of them as mere animals, because that would make them less formidable for him; at the same time, he wants to think of them as intelligent beings with a great past, because that makes their acceptance of him as their god more impressive.’
‘And which are the pygmies, animals or intelligent beings?’ Tim asked.
‘That is where our powers of observation and deduction come in,’ Craig said.
Tim was irritated. His companions could be very uninformative. He wanted to get away from them and think things over for himself. As he left, he remembered the jar he had put the fiffin larva into; he had forgotten to place it in the overlander’s lab.
Two jars were already clipped in the rack above the lab bench. They contained two dead tapeworms; by the labels on the jars, h
e saw that Craig had extracted them from the entrails of the animals sacrificed the afternoon before. The cestodes, one of which came from the peke, one from the little bear, were identical; white tapes some twenty-four inches long, with suckers and hooks at the head end. Tim stared at them with interest before leaving the overlander.
Outside, dawn was seeping through the trees. He drew the cold air into his lungs; it was still flavoured with fish. The weaver birds were beginning to call overhead. A few pygmies were about, moving sluggishly in the direction of the river. Tim stood there, shivering slightly in the cold, thinking of the oddity of two diverse species harbouring the same sort of tapeworm.
The nightlong fight over the dead animals was ended. Of the five pygmies involved, only one remained alive; it lay with the gutted bear in its jaws, unable to move away. Three of its four legs had been bitten off. Tim’s horror dissolved as he saw the whole situation sub specie aeternitatis, with pain and death an inevitable concomitant of life; perhaps he was acquiring something of Craig’s outlook.
He picked up three of the dead pygmies, shouldered them, and, staggering slightly under their combined weight, carried them back to the overlander. He met Craig taking breakfast over to Dangerfield.
‘Hello,’ Craig exclaimed cordially. ‘What are you going to do with them?’
‘I thought I’d do a little dissection,’ Tim said guardedly.
Once in the lab, he donned rubber gloves and slit open the pygmies’ stomachs one by one, attending to nothing else. Removing the three intestinal sacs, he found that two of them were badly damaged by worms. Soon he had uncovered half a dozen roundworms, pink in colouration and still alive; they made vigorous attempts with their vestigial legs to climb from the crucible in which he placed them.
He went excitedly in to Barney Brangwyn to report his findings. Barney was sitting at the table, manipulating metal rods.
‘This contradicts most of the laws of phylogeny,’ Tim said, peeling off his gloves. ‘According to Dangerfield, the pekes and bears are both recent arrivals on the evolutionary scene; yet their endoparasites, which Craig has preserved in the lab, are well adapted to their environment inside the creatures; in most respects they resemble the ancient order of tapeworm parasitic in man. The roundworms from the cayman-heads, on the other hand, bear all the marks of being recent arrivals. They are still something more than virtual egg factories, they retain traces of a previous, more independent existence – and they cause unnecessary damage to their host, always a sign that a suitable status quo has yet to be reached between host and parasite.’
Barney raised his bushy eyebrows and smiled at the eagerness on Tim’s face.
‘Very interesting indeed,’ he said. ‘What now, Doctor Anderson?’
Tim grinned, struck a pose, and said, in a creditable imitation of Craig’s voice, ‘Always meditate upon all the evidence, and especially upon those things you do not realise are evidence.’
‘Fair enough,’ Barney agreed, smiling. ‘And while you’re meditating, come and give me a hand on the roof with this patent fishing rod I’ve made.’
‘Another of your crazy ideas, Barney?’
‘We’re going hunting. Come on, your worms will keep!’
Getting up, he produced a long, telescopic rod Tim recognised as one of their spare aerials. The last and smallest section was extended; to it Barney finished tying a sharp knife.
‘I’m still hankering to catch myself one of the local pets without getting eaten at the same time,’ Barney said.
Climbing up the stepped pole that led into the tiny radio room, he removed the circular observation dome that gave an all-around view of their surroundings. He swung himself up and onto the roof of the overlander. He crawled forward on hands and knees. Tim followed.
‘Keep down,’ he muttered. ‘If possible, I’d like this act of folly to go unobserved.’
A gigantic tree spread its boughs over them. They were well concealed. Cassivelaunus was breaking through a low cloud, and the clearing below was still fairly silent. Lying flat on his stomach, Barney pulled out the sections of aerial until he had a rod several yards long. Steadying this weapon with Tim’s aid, he pushed it forward.
The end of it reached to the nearest pygmy shelter. Outside that shelter, two captive animals sat up, scratched, and watched with interest as the knife descended. Its blade hovered over the bear, shifted, and began rubbing gently back and forth across the thong that secured the animal.
The thong fell away. The bear was free. It scratched its yellow head in a parody of bewilderment. The neighbouring peke clucked encouragingly at it. A procession of pygmies appeared among the trees. Hearing them, the bear was spurred into action.
Grasping the aerial in its black hands, the bear swarmed nimbly up. It jumped onto the overlander roof and faced the men, without showing fear.
Barney retracted the aerial. This manoeuvre was glimpsed by the returning pygmies. They began to clack and growl. Other pygmies emerged from their shelters, scuttling towards the overlander and staring up.
The cayman-heads emerging from the forest wore the look of tired hunters, returning with the dawn. Over their shoulders, roughly tied, lay freshly captured bears or pekes. These pygmies unceremoniously dropped their burdens and scuttled at a ferocious pace to the PES vehicle.
Alarmed by the commotion, the weavers poured from their treetop homes, screeching.
‘Let’s get in,’ Barney said.
Picking up the bear, which offered no resistance, he jumped down inside the overlander.
At first, the creature was overcome by its surroundings. It stood on the table and rocked piteously from side to side. Recovering, it accepted milk and chattered to the two men. Seen close, it bore little resemblance to a bear, except for its fur covering. It stood upright as the cayman-heads did, attempting to smooth its bedraggled fur with its fingers. When Tim proffered his pocket comb, it used that gratefully, wrenching diligently at the knots in its long coat, which was still wet with dew.
‘Well, it’s male, it’s intelligent, and it’s more fetching than its overlords,’ commented Tim. ‘You have what you wanted, but the wolves are at the door, howling for our blood.’
Through the window, Barney saw that the pygmies surrounded the overlander in ever-growing numbers, waving their claws, snapping their jaws. In the blue light they looked at once repulsive, comic, and malign.
‘Evidently we have offended against a local law of property. Until they cool down, Craig’s return is blocked; he’ll have to tolerate Daddy Dangerfield for a while.’
Tim did not reply; before Craig returned, there was something else he wished to do. But first he had to get away from the overlander.
He stood uncertainly, and then Barney turned his attention again to his new pet. Tim quickly climbed up into the radio nest unobserved, opened the dome, and stood once more on the roof of the overlander. Catching hold of an overhanging bough of the big tree, he pulled himself into it; working his way along, screened from the clacking mob below, he got well away from them before dropping down from a lower branch on to clear ground. Then he walked briskly in the direction of the cliff temple.
Dangerfield switched the projector off. As the colours died, he turned eagerly to Craig Hodges.
‘There!’ he exclaimed, with pride. ‘What do you think of that?’
Though his chest was still bandaged, the hermit moved easily. Modern healing treatments had speeded his recovery; he looked ten years younger than the old man who had yesterday suffered from fiffins. The excitement of the film he had just been showing had brought a flush to his cheeks.
‘Well, what do you think of it?’ he repeated, impatiently.
‘I’m wondering what you think of it,’ Craig said.
Some of the animation left Dangerfield. He looked around the stuffy confines of his hut, as if seeking a weapon.
‘You’ve no respect,’ he said. ‘I took you for a civilised man, Hodges. But you persist in trying to insult me in underhanded wa
ys. Even the Droxy film men recognised me for what I am.’
‘You mean for what you like to think you are,’ Craig said. Dangerfield swung a heavy stick. Craig brought up his arm, and the blow landed close to his elbow. He seized the stick, wrenching it from Dangerfield’s grasp and tossing it out of the door.
The two men stood confronting each other. Dangerfield’s gaze wavered, and he turned away. Craig left the hut.
He walked briskly across the clearing towards the cayman-heads. As he drew nearer, part of the rabble detached itself from the overlander and moved towards him, jaws creaking open. Without slackening his stride, he pushed between their scaly green bodies. The cayman-heads merely croaked excitedly as Craig passed. Jostling, shuffling their paws in the dirt, they let him get by. He mounted the step of the overlander and entered unmolested.
Craig read something of the relief and admiration on Barney’s face.
‘They must have guessed how stringy I’d taste,’ he remarked. That was all that was said.
He turned his attention to Barney’s bear-creature, already christened Fido. The animal chattered perkily as Barney explained how he got it.
‘I’ll swear Fido has some sort of embryo language,’ Barney said. ‘In exchange for a good rubdown with insecticide, he has let me examine his mouth and throat. He’s well enough equipped for speech.’
‘Show him how to use a pencil and paper, and see what he makes of it,’ Craig suggested, stroking the creature’s yellow crest.
As Barney did so, he asked Craig what had kept him so long with Dangerfield.
‘I was beginning to think the lost race of Kakakakaxo had got you,’ he said, grinning.
‘No. He has been showing me a film intended to impress me with the greatness of Dangerfield.’
‘A documentary?’
‘Anything but! A squalid film made by Melmoth Studios on Droxy, supposedly based on the old boy’s life. They presented him with a copy of it and a projector as a souvenir. It’s called “Curse of the Crocodile Men”.’
The Complete Short Stories- The 1950s - Volume One Page 77