The Golden People

by Fred Saberhagen

  "Looks like a herd of large herbivores over there." Brazil was pointing to a scattering of animate dots on the plain ahead. Under moderate magnification these became deerlike creatures—another major interplanetary evolutionary theme identified on Golden. As the scout drew closer the lenses showed that the deer-like creatures had developed their own variation on the theme, in the form of stretch-able necks. In a few minutes the scout passed directly over the herd, gliding on the invisible force of its silent engines, still too high for its presence to alarm the animals.

  Adam continued to sweep the landscape below the scout, and the air around it, with his instruments. He even scanned nearby birds suspiciously several times. "I don't see any Field-generating superbeings."

  "Maybe they've all dried up and blown away. Are you keeping one eye on the Field, Junior? I have most of my attention on it."

  "Ah, roger. I have one screen on radar."

  But the Field only waited indifferently, whether they watched it or not. The smooth cliff of it rising up around them on all sides, as motionless as stone.

  Boris drove the scout steadily lower. Inside another hour they were circling the Stem area just off the deck, dipping below hilltops and nearly brushing trees with the bottom of the scout's nearly-spherical metal hull. Some of the flora below them stood fifteen meters tall and closely resembled the hardwood trees of Earth.

  As their altitude decreased, Boris slowed their speed as well. Now the scoutship was moving not much faster than a man might run. Birds, singly and in squawking flights, fluttered out of its path, their cries coming plainly into the cabin through the outside microphones. On the ground an occasional animal fled, or crouched snarling in the scoutship's moving shadow.

  Brazil said: "Looks like a big trail over there, going down that ravine toward the river."

  "Animals only?"

  "Maybe." Boris turned the scout, and drove it down the ravine, going lower and slower than ever; and there was the little village, no more than a cluster of teepees whose colors blended with the muddy earth. The themes of Galactic life extended to humanity, on many worlds, and that the native humans on a planet as Earthlike as this one should morphologically resemble their cousins from Earth came as no real surprise.

  But the native dwellers on Golden, or this sampling of them at least, were less sophisticated. For a long second, naked humanoid figures stood about their village in frozen poses, gaping up at the approaching scoutship, a gigantic mass of bright metal drifting silently through thin air; then the people below dropped fishnets and cooking pots and exploded into frenzied motion.

  "Wow—get all those cameras going!" Boris ordered as he turned the scout again, taking it out over the river and there backing it slowly away from the village. "We'll disappear for a while— starting a major panic isn't going to do us any good."

  And now the delayed voices from Alpha One began to gabble in the ears of the two planeteers in the scout, urging them to turn viewscreens on this or that detail in the fast-emptying village.

  Joined by other scoutships carrying other planeteering teams, Colonel Brazil and Spaceman Mann made one approach after another to the Stem area during the next few days. There were interesting discoveries, but no truly surprising ones, and none that appeared to have any direct connection with the Field. Nor were there any observable changes in that mysterious phenomenon. Whatever unknown powers there might be on Golden appeared to be still indifferent to the presence of the explorers from Earth.

  There arrived a morning when Colonel Boris Brazil, with Spaceman Adam Mann aboard, launched early from Alpha One, and drove his scoutship down early into the Field—free funnel leading to the planet's surface. On this flight the Colonel circled the Stem area only once, to let the red sunrise at surface level catch up with his measured descent. Then he drove toward a grassy hill near the river, a spot that had been carefully selected on an earlier trip.

  The scout sank gently; landing struts extended themselves to touch down in the grass. The little ship settled quietly to rest on the hilltop.

  The two men inside it examined the outside environment carefully, with eyes and radar and infrared. Here and there life moved, in the grass, in the tall reeds and bushes along the shore, and under the surface of the river.

  Life moved, apparently going about its own business. Still nothing challenged their arrival.

  "No reaction. Alpha One," said Brazil finally.

  "Roger, proceed as briefed," said the delayed voice.

  Brazil turned in his seat, and fixed Adam with what a stranger might have interpreted as an angry stare. "Well, Junior, I need a body outside, to lure these Field-formulating superbeings into my snare. Get your ass moving."

  Adam unfastened himself from his chair and stood up, already wearing his groundsuit. He gave his boss a half-smile through his faceplate and moved from the control cabin to the final decontamination chamber, in which he stood with his suited arms raised and legs spread, while poison gas and ultraviolet sterilized the outside of his suit, a last step in the effort to protect native life against possibly dangerous Earthly microorganisms.

  Adam was going to be First Out. First Out, on this planet, where Total Investigation was a certainty. He had to remind himself that such an assignment didn't necessarily mean that he was the best planeteer around. Without argument, it meant he was expected to be one of the best.

  A hatch opened in the seamless-looking hull near the base of the landed scoutship, and a short ramp extended itself to the ground. A human figure, anonymous in an armored groundsuit, appeared in the opening. The morning sun glinted on its faceplate as the figure walked slowly down the ramp and into the kneehigh grass. A representative of Earth—descended humanity had set foot upon the soil of yet another planet.

  Adam's boots left a dark trail in the dew-silvered grass as he walked a slow circle, going completely around the scout. The sun was well clear of the horizon now, and he could see for kilometers in every direction. There was not another human being in sight, or, at the moment, even an animal, with the exception of a few birds high and far away to the south. The looming amplexicaul curve of the Field was of course still invisible to his eyes. The Field appeared to make no difference at all to anything that he could see. There was hardly a cloud in all the kindly blue vastness of Golden's sky.

  He had a sense that the whole planet was—not exactly watching him, maybe, but still aware of him, even if only in the back of its collective mind. Aware and waiting for what he might do.

  "How's it going, Mann?" asked General Grodsky's voice. A majority of the hundreds of people aboard Alpha One, all of them who had the chance, were probably watching the video relay, sent to them through the scoutship from the tiny camera in Adam's helmet.

  "Fine, sir," he answered. "It just looks good." The words were of course inadequate, but at the moment, with no new facts to report, such words were the best he could come up with.

  According to plan, Adam now turned his back on the parked scoutship, and walked about fifty meters to a place from which he could look down-hill to a bend of the river. A heavy growth of short trees and tall reed-like plants lined both banks closely. On worlds where native human beings existed, rivers were considered good places to spot them, traveling, fishing, or just getting a drink. In his mind Adam quickly ran through the basic procedures for first contact with Apparent Primitives. But at the moment there were no Apparent Primitives in sight.

  As Adam turned and started to walk away, a small creature sprang away out of the long grass near his feet, giving him a start. More startled than its human discoverer, the thing went bounding away from him like a jackrabbit, down the slope toward the river. By all appearances it was an inoffensive herbivore. After the first few meters of its darting flight it began to tumble clownishly, leaping and playing with the exuberance of an otter. Near the heavy bush by the river the small animal stopped, looking back uphill at Adam with apparent good cheer.

  Adam returned the look, grinning downhill. Then he g
azed around him again at the peaceful river and hills and sky. He surprised himself, with a wish to—well, to pray. He was not ordinarily a consciously religious man. But now he felt a wish to pray, maybe to Whom it May Concern, that this world, new to its discoverers, could be treated right by them, that good would come from their discovery. It was a strange moment for Adam, one in which he felt himself in communion with—with the powers of the universe, perhaps. He had rarely had a similar feeling in his life, and never since Alice—

  Something huge was moving, very quietly, down in the thick bush by the river. Then it burst into the open, a massive, bloated-looking quadruped that pounced with startling speed. The rabbit-thing was taken by surprise. One heavy clawed foot caught it in the middle of its first frightened leap, and crushed it down into the grass and dirt, where it wriggled helplessly and let out shrill faint screams.

  Its prey secured, the big animal paused, speed leaving its movements as if a switch had been opened. The predator was a little smaller, Adam thought, than an adult hippopotamus, but just as graceless.

  Adam thought that he had seen this large species before, or one very closely related to it. But those sightings had been distant ones, to which he had paid little attention amid the superabundance of new things to be observed. He had really seen nothing of the species but its gross overall shape, until now.

  Now, when this specimen turned its head and looked up the hill at Adam from only fifty meters away, he felt a chill, even armed and armored as he was. Because the face of the gross beast was human. Not just a close resemblance. Almost exactly Earth-descended human in all its features, enlarged though they were to fit the massive head.

  Adam could hear Brazil muttering something; his own shock was shared. Adam dialed magnification into his faceplate. Now, inspecting the beast's face at an effectively closer range, he could see that it was covered with very short pale fur, from a distance resembling light-colored human skin. The red-rimmed yellow eyes of the animal were human in configuration, down to the smallest visible details of the lids and lashes. Something about the lids gave the eyes a look of arrogance, and above those haughty human eyes there rose a smooth shield of some horny substance, in a shape that in a man might very well have been described as a noble forehead. But behind this frontal shield the skull sloped off sharply into a dark and matted mane—there was no room for a proportional brain behind that mask-like face.

  There was nothing like an animal's snout on that flat face, but a human nose instead. Not even the great width of the mouth, the heavy jaw, or even the size of the omnivorous teeth—bared now in a sudden yawn—could destroy the impression, the illusion, of man-larger-than-life. Nor could the ears, half-hidden by the mane, and curving along the head in a shape that looked neither human nor animal. Only when the eye reached the longish scaly neck did the illusion fail.

  Over most of its body the big animal wore the hide of an elephant, gray and wrinkled, scantily clothed with a thin coat of greenish-black hair. The feet were obviously weapons, half-adapted for gripping and clawing as well as for locomotion. Mud was beginning to cake dry now on the thick legs of this specimen, and a trickle of green slime drooled from a corner of the frowning mouth. Omnivore, thought Adam. It must have been feeding on some river plants, and then it decided to go for a morsel of meat.

  With his right hand on the butt of his bolstered sidearm, he stared back at the creature. The mask-like face, taken by itself, would have to be called handsome—there was no other word for it. But when Adam saw it on the beast, the total effect was so hideous that he half wished, perhaps more than half, that the thing would charge him, that he might have a good reason to kill it.

  "Ugly thing there," said a fascinated voice in Adam's helmet. "What's that it's caught?"

  "Rabbit-theme," he answered, without taking his eyes from the bigger creature's face. "I think probably mammalian."

  The big animal now turned its full attention back to its victim, bent its long neck slowly and chewed with delicacy. The faint screams went to a higher frequency. Adam thought: Like an Earth housecat, playing with a victim. But on a deeper, stronger level, he was thinking also: Come on, you obscenity, come up where and try that on me. Come on.

  But he was a damned fool, to be upset by the sight of one animal eating another one. He watched a little longer, answering a few more questions from above, then turned his back and went on with his job.

  An hour later, when Adam had finished the rest of the scheduled First Out procedures, and was back in the control room of the scoutship, he found Brazil looking at him with an oddly fascinated expression. The first thing the Colonel said was: "I wonder why your big playmate out there didn't have wings."

  Adam let himself sink into the right-hand seat with a tired sigh. "Wings? Why?"

  "The original did; Geryon was his name. Remember? Or don't you like to read?"

  "Jur—who?" But something in Adam's memory stirred faintly. Was it something he had read? Or something else?

  But what?

  "G-e-r-y-o-n." The Colonel spelled it out. "A thing Dante met when he was visiting the Inferno. It had the face of a just and kindly man. And wings. Among other attributes."

  Adam gave a half-laugh. "He encountered it in a likely place, I think. Kind of took me by surprise, out there."

  Chapter Six

  By the third standard day after First Landing, scoutships were shuttling in an almost continuous pattern between Alpha One and the tiny accessible area of Golden's surface that the explorers had come to call the Stem. As everyone had expected, General Grodsky had decreed Total Investigation here; that meant that eventually everything within reach on Planet Golden was to be sampled and studied. Planeteer teams had already begun analyzing the air, the water, the soil, and many of the smaller forms of life. As yet no attempts had been made to obtain specimens of the larger animals. For one thing, the human natives might be inconvenienced or outraged by such activity, and for another, until more had been learned by observation there was at least a theoretical chance of getting an intelligent, non-primate-theme human being in the game bag by mistake. A very few such races were known to exist in the Galaxy, of intelligent beings therefore classified as human, but with no more physical resemblance to Earth-descended humans than to marigolds or mollusks.

  The indications so far on Golden were that life here held at least fairly closely to the commonest Galactic theme patterns for Earth-type planets. Beside the natives who were obviously intelligent beings in the primate theme, there were deer-types and giraffe-types to be seen grazing on the green plains. Species of large animals strongly centered in the cat-theme of Galactic evolution had been observed, preying as might be expected upon the larger herbivores. And here on Golden, as on every habitable world that explorers from Earth had yet examined, there were also apparent exceptions to the standard Galactic themes—here, most notably so far, the species of large omnivores that were already being called geryons.

  Day and night the radar equipment of the Earth-descended explorers never ceased for a millisecond to scan the Field. But still the Field was never observed to move or change. Every attempt to measure or analyze it had so far proven fruitless, as every technologically advanced instrument brought into contact with it died on contact. The Field simply existed, as it had since Fakhuri's first sighting, shrouding the planet completely except for the tiny Stem area of the surface.

  On the third day after First Landing—Golden's rotation was only very slightly slower than that of Earth—a small group of women and men in protective groundsuits approached on foot the invisible but very sharply defined line where the Field came down in a nearly vertical wall to meet the soil of Golden.

  These planeteers carried with them long wired probes, similar to the ones that had earlier been lowered into the Field from a scoutship. It was soon discovered that at ground level the result was the same. Electrical currents died as soon as any part of the wire carrying them was introduced into the Field. The surface of the Field was soon
found to be very smooth in every region tested, and very sharply defined. The anomalous condition—now a favorite term of description—was soon shown to extend, in the same plane as aboveground, for at least a few meters below ground level. Plans were begun for deeper exploratory excavations.

  Electrical devices of any kind invariably went dead when they were shoved across the invisible boundary. Yet the boundary appeared to mean nothing to birds and animals, or to the native people who like the birds and animals were observed passing in and out of the Field at will, with the bioelectric activities of their bodies presumably unaffected by it.

  "Do you know what the word is on Golden?" asked Adam through his groundsuit's airspeaker. He was sighting carefully into a radar instrument as he spoke, and a moment later he began to drive another marking pole into the soft ground, just inside the newly charted boundary of the Stem.

  Kwame Chun Li, the only planeteer on this mission who was less of a veteran than Adam, moved his electrical probe a little further on, positioning it in accordance with Adam's gestures. " 'Presumably'?" Chun Lui offered. "I hear the physicists are having it programmed into their writers on a single key."

  " 'Apparently' is the one I had in mind," said Adam.

  Small Earth animals, pushed into the Field inside a wheeled cage, showed no immediate effects from the exposure, and gave no sign that they were even aware of a change in their environment. But the second time the experiment was tried, and on a number of tries thereafter, the small padlock securing the door of the animals' cage fell open. On examination the locks showed no sign of damage, nor could they ever be made to repeat their bizarre behavior outside the Field. A whole new set of experiments, having to do with the behavior of mechanism inside the Field, was launched.

  Levers, screws, and other simple machines, when not part of any complex system, were always observed to perform normally inside the Field. But anymore complex mechanical combinations or systems tended to display wildly erratic behavior. A fine antique chronometer, put at risk by the devoted scientist who owned it, was almost—but not quite—certain to run at the wrong speed, or even backwards, when it was pushed across the border.