‘Ye Gods!’ Barney exclaimed. ‘I mustn’t miss that when it’s on circuit again! I’ll bet you found it instructive.’
‘In many ways. The script writers and director spent two days – just two days! – here on Kakakakaxo, talking to Dangerfield and “soaking up atmosphere”, before returning to Droxy to cook up their own ideas on the subject. No other research was done.’
Barney laughed briefly. ‘Who gets the girl?’
‘There is a girl, of course, and Dangerfield gets her. She’s a coy blonde stowaway on his spaceship. You know.’
‘I know. Now tell me why you found it instructive.’
‘It was all oddly familiar. After the usual preliminaries – a spectacular spaceship crash on a plastic mountainside, et cetera – a Tarzanlike Dangerfield is shown being captured by the bear-race, who stand six feet high and wear tin helmets, so help me. Dangerfield could not escape because the blonde twisted her ankle in the crash. You know how blondes are in films.
‘The pekes, for simplicity’s sake, never appear. The bears are torturing our hero and heroine to death when the crocodile men raid the place and rescue him. The crocodile men are Melmoth’s idea of our cayman-headed pals outside.’
‘Stop giving me the trailer,’ Barney said, feigning suspense. ‘Get on with the plot. I want to know how the blonde makes out.’
‘The crocodile men arrive in time to save her from a fate worse than a sprained ankle. And here’s an interesting point – these crocodile men, according to the film, are a proud and ancient warrior race, come down in the world through the encroachment of the jungle. When they get Dangerfield back to their village by the river, they don’t like him. They, too, are about to put him to death and ravage the blonde when he saves the leader’s son from foot-rot or something. From then on the tribe treats him like a god, builds him a palace, and all the rest of it.’
‘To think I missed it! It sounds like a real classic!’ Barney cried. ‘Perhaps we can get Dangerfield to give a matinee tomorrow. I can see how such a bit of personal aggrandisement would be dear to his heart.’
‘It was very sad stuff,’ Craig said. ‘Nothing rang true. False dialogue, fake settings. Even the blonde wasn’t very attractive.’
Barney sat silent for a minute, looking rather puzzledly into space, tweaking his beard. ‘It’s odd that, considering this hokum was cooked up on Droxy, it tallies surprisingly well in outline with what Dangerfield told you last night about the great past of the cayman-heads, their decline, and so on.’
‘Exactly!’ Craig agreed with satisfaction. ‘Don’t you see what that means, Barney? Nearly everything Dangerfield knows, or believes he knows, comes from a hack film shot in a Droxy studio, rather than vice versa.’
They stared at one another with growing amusement. Into both their minds came the reflection that all human behaviour is ultimately inexplicable; even the explicable is a mystery.
‘Now you see why he shied away from us so violently at our first meeting,’ Craig said. ‘He’s got almost no firsthand information on conditions here. He’s been afraid to go out looking for it. Knowing that, he was prepared to face Droxy film people – who would only be after a good story – but not scientists, who would want hard facts. Once I had him cornered, of course, he had to come out with what little he’d got, presumably hoping we would swallow it as the truth and go.’
Barney made clucking noises. ‘He’s probably no longer fit to remember what is truth, what lies. After nineteen years, the old boy must be quietly crazy.’
‘Fear has worked steadily on Dangerfield all this time. He’s afraid of people, afraid of the cayman-heads, the crocodile men. He takes refuge from his terrors in fantasy. He’s become a film god. And you couldn’t budge him off the planet because he realises, subconsciously of course, that reality would then catch up with him. He has no choice but to remain here, in a place he loathes.’
‘Okay, doctor,’ he said. ‘Diagnosis accepted. Brilliant field work – my congratulations. But, all we have collected so far are phantoms. Tell me where PES work stands after you’ve proved the uselessness of our main witness – presumably, at a standstill?’
‘By no means,’ Craig said. He pointed to Fido. The little bear was sitting on the table cuddling the pencil.
He had drawn a crude picture on paper. It depicted a room in which a bear and a peke were locked in each other’s arms, as if fighting.
A few minutes later, when Craig had gone into the laboratory with an assortment of coleoptera and anoplura culled from Dangerfield’s hut, Barney saw the old hermit himself coming across to them, hobbling rapidly among the pygmy shelters with the aid of a stick. Barney called to Craig.
Craig emerged from the lab looking at once pleased and secretive.
‘Those three pygmy carcasses Tim brought into the lab,’ he said. ‘I presume Tim cut them up – it doesn’t look like your work. Did he say anything to you about them?’
Barney explained the point Tim had made about the roundworms.
‘Is there anything wrong?’ he inquired.
‘No, nothing, nothing,’ Craig said, shaking his head. ‘And that’s all Tim said … Where is he now, by the way?’
‘I’ve no idea! The boy’s getting as secretive as you. He must have gone outside for a breath of fish. Shall I give him a call?’
‘Let’s tackle Dangerfield first,’ Craig said.
They opened the door. Most of the cayman-heads had dispersed. The old man refused to come into the overlander, his nose standing out from his head like a parrot’s beak as he shook his head. He wagged a finger angrily at them.
‘I always knew no good would come of your prying,’ he said. ‘Now that young fellow of yours is being killed by the pygmies – serves him right, too. But goodness knows what they’ll do when they’ve tasted human flesh – tear us all apart, I shouldn’t wonder. I doubt if I’ll be able to stop them.’
He had not finished talking before Craig and Barney had leapt from the overlander.
‘Where’s Tim? What’s happened to him?’ Craig asked.
‘I expect it’ll be too late by now,’ said Dangerfield. ‘I saw him slip into the cliff temple, the young fool. Now perhaps – ’
But the PES men were already running across the clearing, scattering brilliant birds about their heads. They jumped the shelters in their path. As they neared the temple, they heard the clacking of the cayman-head pack. When they reached the heavily ornamented doorway, they saw a tight crowd of the creatures, all fighting to get into the cliff.
‘Tim!’ bawled Barney. ‘Tim! Are you there?’
No answer came. The pack continued struggling to get into the temple.
‘We can’t massacre this lot,’ Craig said, glaring at the cayman-heads before them. ‘How’re we going to get in there to Tim?’
‘We can use the cry gas in the overlander!’ Barney said. ‘That will shift them.’ He doubled back to their vehicle and in a minute brought it bumping across the clearing. The roof of the overlander snagged several branches, breaking the weavers’ carefully constructed roof and sending angry birds flying in all directions. As the vehicle lumbered up, Craig unstrapped an outside container and pulled out a hose; the other end of it was already connected to internal gas tanks. Barney threw down two respirators and put one on himself.
Donning his mask, Craig slung the spare over his arm and charged forward with the hose. The gas poured over the nearest cayman-heads, who fell back like magic, coughing and pawing at their goat-yellow eyes. The two men entered the temple; they moved down the corridor past bodies fighting to get out of their way. The croaking was deafening; in the dark and mist, Craig and Barney could hardly see ahead.
The corridor changed into a pygmy-sized tunnel, running upward through the mountain. The two ecologists had to struggle every foot of the way, and then …
The supply of cry gas gave out. Craig and Barney stopped, peering at each other in shock.
‘I thought the gas tanks were full?’ Craig
asked.
‘They were. Maybe one of the cayman-heads bit through the hose.’
Their retreat was cut off: the cayman-heads at the mouth of the temple would have recovered by now, and be waiting for them. So they moved ahead, throwing off their respirators and pulling out blasters.
They turned a corner and stopped. This was the end of the passageway. The tunnel broadened into a sort of anteroom on the far side of which stood a wide wooden door. A group of cayman-heads were scratching at it; they turned and confronted the men. Tears stood in their eyes: a whiff of the gas had reached them, and served only to anger them. Six of them were there. They charged.
‘Get ’em!’ Barney yelled.
The dim chamber twitched with blinding blue-white light. But the best hand weapon has its limitations, and the cayman-heads had speed on their side.
Barney scarcely had time to dispatch one of them, and then another landed squarely on him. For a small creature, it was unbelievably powerful. He fell backward, bellowing, as the jaws gaped up to his face. He tried to writhe away as he fired the blaster against the leathery stomach. The creature fell from him, and in a dying kick knocked the weapon from his hand.
Before Barney could retrieve his blaster, two more cayman-heads landed on him, sending him sprawling. He was defenceless against their claws.
Blue light leaped and crackled over him. An intolerable heat breathed above his cheek. The two cayman-heads rolled over beside him, their bodies black and charred. Shakily, Barney stood up.
The wooden door had been flung open. Tim stood there, holstering the blaster that had saved Barney’s life.
Craig had settled his attackers. They lay smouldering on the floor in front of him. He stood now, breathing deeply, his tunic sleeve torn. The three men looked at each other, grimy and dishevelled. Craig was the first to speak.
‘Close … too close,’ he muttered.
‘I thought we’d had it then; thanks for the helping hand, Tim,’ Barney said.
His beard had been singed, its edges turned a dusty brown. He felt his cheek tenderly where a blister was already forming. Sweat poured from him; the heat from the thermonuclear blasts had sent the temperature in the anteroom soaring.
‘I’m sorry you came in after me,’ Tim said, ‘I was safe enough behind this door. I’ve been doing a little research on my own, Craig – you’d better come in and see this place for yourself, now that you’re here. I have discovered the Tomb of the Old Kings that Dangerfield told us about! You’ll find it explains quite a lot we did not know.’
‘How did you manage to get as far as this without the cayman-heads stopping you?’ Craig asked.
‘Most of them were clustered around the overlander calling for Barney’s blood when I entered. They only started creeping up on me when I was actually inside.’
They entered the inner room. Tim barred the door before shining his flashlight down the long room. Its builders had known what they were doing. Decoration was kept to a minimum, except for the elaborate door arch and the restrained fan vaulting of the ceiling. Attention was focused on a large catafalque, upon which lay a row of sarcophagi. Everything was deep in dust, and the air was musty.
Tim pointed to the line of little coffins, which were embellished with carvings.
‘Here are the remains of the Old Kings of Kakakakaxo,’ he said. ‘And although I may have made myself a nuisance, I think I can claim that with their aid I have solved the mystery of the lost race of this planet. It’s like a jigsaw puzzle. We already had most of the pieces. Dangerfield supplied nearly all of them – but the old boy had fitted them together upside down. You see, to start with, there is not one lost race, but two.’
‘A nice buildup, Tim. Now let’s have some facts,’ Craig said.
‘You can have facts. I’m showing them to you. This temple – and doubtless others like it all over the planet – was hewn out of the rock by two races who have engraved their own likenesses on these sarcophagi. Take a look at them! Far from being lost, the races have been under our noses all the time: they are the beings we call the pekes and bears. Their portraits are on the sarcophagi, and their remains lie inside. Their resemblance to Droxian animals has blinded us to what they really are – the ancient top dogs of Kakakakaxo!’
‘I’m not surprised,’ Barney said, turning from an inspection of the stone coffins. ‘The bear people are brighter than the cayman-heads. As I see it, the caymans are pretty stodgy reptiles whom nature has endowed with armour but precious little else. I had already decided that that was another thing Great God Dangerfield had garbled; far from being an ancient race, the caymans are neoteric, upstart usurpers who have only recently appeared to oust the peke and bear people.
‘Dangerfield said they know about the glaciers. They probably drifted down from the cold regions until the river brought them to these equatorial lands. As for the bear people – and I suspect the same goes for the pekes – their chatter, far from being the beginning of a language, is the decadent tail end of one. They were the ancient races, already in decline when the parvenu pygmies descended on them and completed their disintegration.’
‘The helminthological evidence supports this theory,’ Tim said eagerly. He turned to Craig. ‘The cayman-heads are too recent to have developed their own peculiar cestodes; they were almost as much harmed by interior parasites, the roundworms, as was Daddy by his fiffin. In a long-established host–parasite relationship, the amount of internal damage is minimal.’
‘As was the case with the peke and bear cestodes I uncovered,’ Craig agreed.
‘As soon as I saw these roundworms, I realised that Dangerfield’s claim that the pygmies were the ancient species and their “pets” the new might be the very reverse of the truth. I came over here hoping to find proof: and here it is.’
‘It was a good idea, Tim,’ Barney said heartily, ‘but you shouldn’t have done it alone – far too risky.’
‘The habit of secretiveness is catching,’ Tim said.
He looked at Craig, but the chief ecologist seemed not to have heard the remark. He marched to the door and put an ear to it. Barney and Tim listened, too. The noise was faint at first, then became unmistakable – a chorus of guttural grunts and croaks. The cry gas had dispersed. The pygmies were pressing back into the temple.
The noise took on weight and volume. It rose to a climax as claws struck the outside of the door. Craig stood back. The door shook.
‘This is not a very healthy place,’ Craig said, turning back to the others. ‘Is there another way out?’
They moved down the long room. Its walls were blank. Behind them, the door rattled and groaned. At the far end of the chamber stood a screen; there was a narrow door behind it. Barney pushed the screen away and with one thrust of his great shoulders sent the door shattering back. Rusted hinges and lock left a bitter, red powder floating in the air. Climbing over the door, they found themselves in a steep and narrow tunnel, where they were forced to go in single file.
‘I should hate to be caught in here,’ Tim said. ‘Do you think the cayman-heads will dare enter the tomb room? They seem to regard it as sacred.’
‘Their blood’s up. A superstition may not bother them,’ said Barney.
‘What I still don’t understand,’ Tim said, ‘is why the cayman-heads care so much for the temple if it has nothing to do with them.’
‘You probably never will,’ Craig said. ‘The temple may be for them a symbol of their new dominance, and one man’s symbol is another man’s enigma. I can hear that door splintering; let’s get up this tunnel. It must lead somewhere.’
One behind the other, they literally crawled along the shaft It bore steadily upward at an angle of forty-five degrees. On all sides, the mountain made its presence felt, dwarfing them, threatening to engulf them.
They had climbed some distance when Barney stopped.
‘The way’s blocked!’ he exclaimed.
The tunnel was neatly stoppered with a solid substance. ‘Rock fall!’
he cried.
‘We can’t use a blaster on it in this space,’ Tim said, ‘or we’ll cook ourselves.’
Craig passed a knife forward.
‘Try the blockage with this,’ he said, ‘and see what it’s made of.’
The substance flaked reluctantly as Barney scraped. They examined the flakes; Tim recognised them first.
‘This is guano – probably from bats!’ he exclaimed. ‘We must be very near the surface. Thank goodness for that!’
‘It’s certainly guano,’ Craig agreed, ‘but it’s almost as hard as stone with age. You can see that a limestone shell has formed over the bottom of it: it may be hundred of years old. There may be many feet of guano between us and the surface.’
‘Then we’ll have to dig through it,’ Barney said.
There was no alternative. The ill-smelling guano became softer as they dug upward, until it reached the consistency of moist cake. They rolled lumps of it back between their knees, sending it bouncing back, down into the mountain. It clung stickily to them, like paste.
Twenty-five feet of solid guano had to be tunnelled through before they struck air. Barney’s head and shoulders emerged into a small cave. A six-legged, doglike creature backed growling into the open and fled. It had taken over the cave for a lair long after the bats had deserted it.
The others followed Barney out, to stand blinking in the intense blue light. They were plastered with filth. Without speaking, they left the cave and drew in lungfuls of fresh air.
Trees and bushes surounded them. The ground sloped steeply down to the left. When they had recovered, they began to descend in that direction. They were high up the mountainside; Cassivelaunus gleamed through the leaves above them.
‘There’s nothing else to keep us on Kakakakaxo,’ Barney said. ‘Dangerfield will be glad to see the back of us. I wonder how he’ll like the colonists? They’ll come flocking in once HQ gets our clearance. They’ll find some opposition, but there’s nothing here the biggest fool can’t handle.’
‘Except Dangerfield,’ Craig interjected.
The Complete Short Stories- The 1950s - Volume One Page 78