Men were coming out from the ship now, roused by the shouting and the calls. Peter turned abruptly. “Stanley,” he said. “Now is the time to talk to Stanley.”
Comyn followed him, still half dazed, oppressed with a sense of loss and a desire not to be near that grove of slender trees. The wind blew warm, laden with nameless scents, and in the sky were foreign constellations made pallid by the moons. The voices of the men rose loud and harsh, spreading outward from the ship.
He saw Peter call four men and give them rapid orders, pointing to the grove. The men had rifles. They moved past Comyn, and one of them, a big fellow named Fisher, said:
“Are they armed? Are they going to attack?”
“I don’t think so. They seemed to be…just looking.”
Fisher’s face had sweat on it, and his shirt was dark under the arms. He wiped his sleeve across his mouth and glanced without love at the shadows under the boughs.
“This trip had better pay off,” he said. “I haven’t liked it so far.”
He started on, and Comyn said, “Don’t take any chances.”
Fisher said profanely that he would not.
By the time Comyn reached the ship the four had vanished into the edge of the grove. He did not envy the men their posts as sentinels.
There was a small group around the foot of the ladder. Peter and Stanley were the core of it. The others watched and listened, nervous men, unhappy men, not liking the night.
Peter was saying, “Let’s get this straight now. I want everybody to understand. You refuse to tell us what you know about these…people, whether they’re dangerous or not?”
Stanley slid the end of his tongue across his lips, which were pale and dry. “Not for nothing, Peter. If anything happens it’ll be your fault, not mine, because you wouldn’t make a fair deal.”
“He refuses,” Peter said to the men who were listening. “You all heard that.”
There was a mutter of assent. It had an ugly tone beneath it, and Stanley turned, as though he would go back inside the ship.
The men closed in, barring his way. Peter said, “All right, let’s take him out there.”
Several of them took hold of Stanley. Simon Cochrane, one of the pilots, an astrophysicist, French the doctor, others. They had stopped being scientists or experts, men with important jobs. They were just men now, afraid and angry. Stanley cried out.
Peter slapped him across the mouth, not hard. “You wouldn’t believe this, Bill, but it’s the principle of the thing. The stuff about the landing was for money. This is for lives. There’s a difference. I don’t like being blackmailed for people’s lives.” He started out across the plain. “Bring him along.”
They brought him. Comyn went with them. He knew what Peter was going to do, and so did Stanley, but Stanley asked.
“Nothing,” said Peter. “Just tie you to a tree in the grove and then drop back a way and see what happens. If you have all this knowledge you claim to have you know whether there’s any danger or not. If there isn’t you won’t be afraid, and nothing will happen to you. If there is—well, we’ll find that out too.”
Stanley’s feet dragged in the long grass. But they took him into the edge of the grove, under the first fringe of golden boughs that were tarnished copper now in the moonlight. There was silence between the trees and patches of gliding light and a little wind that whispered.
“Not here,” said Peter. “Further in.”
Deeper in were more of the slender trunks and beyond them was the forest, the dark forest that lay between them and the mountains. The forest where the unknown ones had gone.
They treaded softly, shock-guns ready, their eyes searching every shadow with caution and alarm. Five steps, ten, twenty—and Stanley broke.
“Don’t do it, Peter! Don’t leave me here! I don’t know…I don’t know!”
Peter stopped. He pulled Stanley into a drift of moonlight and studied his face.
“I don’t know,” Stanley said miserably. “Ballantyne described these—these people. He met them, all right. But that’s all he said about them in the log.”
Comyn asked, “Are they the Transuranae?”
“I suppose so. He didn’t name them. He just said they were here.”
“Was he afraid of them?”
“He didn’t say so.”
“What did he say?”
“That was all. He told what the place was like, all the tests they ran, then about the people and then the log ended. He never made any more entries. Except one.”
“Go on.”
“It was only one word and it wasn’t finished. It was in ink, all over the page: TRANSURAN—” Stanley shut his teeth tight on the beginning of unhealthy laughter. “It was that one unfinished word that made me take the logbooks. I thought I had the Cochrane fortune right there. And then Ballantyne himself gave that part of it away. Let’s get out of here, Peter. Let’s get back to the ship.”
“Then you were lying,” said Peter mercilessly, “when you said you knew the location of the ores.”
Stanley nodded.
Peter studied him a moment longer. Then he turned and walked back through the grove. The others followed. Peter spoke briefly to the sentinels. They passed out onto the plain again, onto the path of trampled grass. Stanley walked a little apart. They were not holding him now.
Some of the men were already back inside the ship when lightning began to flash and crack among the trees. A man yelled, high and shrill with fright, and there was a sudden bursting-forth of the bird-like calls. This time a single note repeated, receding away into the forest. It was a note of lamentation. The bolts of lightning flared and flared, the wild discharge of panic.
Presently all quieted. The single mourning note had faded to a distant wail that lost itself against the mountains. Fisher and another man came out of the grove, dragging a limp white form between them.
“They tried to rush us,” Fisher yelled. “They were coming, but we drove ’em off.” His face shone with clammy moisture and his voice was ragged. “We got one still alive.”
Once more Comyn crossed the stretch of plain toward the woods. He walked beside Peter, his eyes fixed on the naked body that dragged from the sweaty hands of Fisher and his mate. The head hung forward, hidden by a fall of dark hair. He could not see the face.
They met in the center of the open space. Fisher grunted and the body rolled onto the grass. Comyn drew his hand across his face and looked down.
Peter drew in a long, unsteady breath. “I know that man,” he said in an oddly stilted way. “It’s Vickrey.”
TWELVE
The ship’s small hospital was a cubicle of brilliant light, sterile, white, barbed with glints of chromium and surgical steel. Vickrey lay on the table. He had caught the edge of a shock-beam, and he had not yet returned to consciousness. French was working over him, his rubber-gloved hands touching Vickrey with a curious reluctance, his mouth drawn down to a narrow line. On Vickrey’s arm was a patch of tape, covering the place whence a tissue sample had been taken.
Comyn stood out of the way, with his back against the wall, and watched. Time and countless millions of miles and many events rolled back, and he was in another hospital room on another world, and another man lay before him unconscious. Again he saw the subtle rippling and motion of the flesh, as though the body cells had an unnatural life of their own. And he was sick.
Peter Cochrane whispered, “Ballantyne was like that.”
Comyn answered, “When I first saw him. Before he was…dead.”
Peter stood beside Comyn. Their shoulders touched in the cramped space. It seemed very hot and close under the glaring lights, and yet they felt cold. Vickrey breathed. His face was closed and secret, and his body stirred: the muscles, the tendons, the thin covering flesh. He was not wasted and worn as Ballantyne had been; there was a health to his leanness.
Peter whispered, “He’s changed. He looks younger. I don’t understand that.”
Roth came back
into the hospital from his laboratory and laid a written report on French’s desk. “I tested the tissue sample,” he said. “It’s the same as Ballantyne’s, except that the concentration of transuranic elements is greater. Much greater.”
“Quiet,” French said. “He’s coming round.”
Silence. The man on the table turned his head and sighed. After a minute he opened his eyes. They looked first, with a vague curiosity, at the low white ceiling, and then at the white walls and the cases of bright instruments, and then at the men who stood near. The vague curiosity sharpened into alarm, into terror, into the look of a stunned wild thing that wakes to find a cage around it. Vickrey sat up on the table and cried out—a shrill-edged fluting call, infinitely strange to come from the throat of an Earthman.
Peter said, “Vickrey. Vickrey, it’s all right, we’re friends.”
Again the desperate call, the unhuman cry for help. It set Comyn’s nerves on edge, but it was not as bad as Vickrey’s face—an ordinary face, an Earthman’s face, but altered and made alien, the mouth distorted in the forming of that wild cry, the eyes…
The eyes. Comyn was not an especially imaginative man, and he could not have said what it was about Vickrey’s eyes that made them abnormal and frightening in a man’s face. There was no menace in them and no madness; it was not any overt quality. It was something else, something lacking. He caught their direct stare and it jarred him in a queer way that set the hairs to pricking on the back of his neck.
Peter said again, “Vickrey! You remember me, Peter Cochrane. You’re safe now, Vickrey, You’re all right. Don’t be afraid.”
For a third time the bird-like call came incongruously from the lips of a mathematician who had once had a wife and children and a position in the world of science.
Abruptly, Peter swore. “Come off it, Vickrey. You’re not one of those creatures. You’re an Earthman, and you know who I am. Stop pretending.”
Vickrey moaned.
Comyn asked the question he had asked before, of another man, in another room. “Where is Paul Rogers?”
Vickrey turned his head and looked at Comyn with those fey eyes, and after a long time he spoke, in words so difficult and slurred that they were hardly English.
He said, “It was Strang you killed.”
Peter Cochrane started. “Strang! Was he—”
“In the grove. Men with guns. Strang fell. We picked him up and started away. Then I—” He shook his head. His hair had grown long and there were bits of leaf and grass in it from where he had been rolled on the ground.
Peter said slowly, “The men said you attacked them.”
Vickrey made a sound that might have been a laugh or a sob. “No,” he said. “No. We didn’t even see them.”
There was a hot and sudden light in Peter’s eyes. “Those bloody fools,” he said. “Panic. Sheer panic. I shouldn’t have sent them out there.”
Comyn said to Vickrey, “We came here partly to find you. Were you trying to come back?”
“No!” Vickrey put his elbows on his knees, raised his hands and laid his head between them. “We stayed behind. We thought that men might try to take us back. But the People wanted to see the ship. We waited, and then someone shouted, shouted Rogers’ name and another, and Rogers heard. And he wanted to look at the man who shouted. So after a while we four crept back into the grove. I didn’t have to. I guess I was—” Once more he stopped in mid-sentence. Presently he said, with infinite sadness, “Strang is dead.”
“I’m sorry,” Peter said. “The men didn’t mean to. They were scared by all the talk about the Transuranae.”
Vickrey straightened up, as sharply as though someone had touched him with a knife. “What do you know about the Transuranae?”
“Nothing, except what Ballantyne wrote in his log.”
“But he didn’t keep the log after—” Vickrey stood up. His strength seemed to have come back to him with amazing swiftness. “Ballantyne! He got back to Earth, then.”
Peter nodded.
“And,” said Vickrey, “he died.”
“Yes. Did you know he would?”
“Of course. We all knew. But he was too crazy, too inhibited, too afraid to take what the Transuranae had given him. He would not stay.”
“What had they given him, Vickrey?”
“Life,” said Vickrey. “Life or death, and he made up his own mind. He didn’t think it was decent to live.”
“I don’t understand you.”
“If you did, you’d be like me, like Ballantyne. You’d have the choice to make, too. Listen, take your ship and men and go very fast. Forget that Rogers and Kessel and I ever existed on Earth. Find another star, space is full of them. Otherwise, it’ll be as it was with us. Most of you will stay, but some will go back and—yes, I can see in your faces. It was a very ugly death.”
For the first time French spoke. He had been reading Roth’s report, looking from it to Vickrey, and thinking hard.
“It’s a change, isn’t it?” he said. “It wasn’t complete in Ballantyne.”
“A change,” said Vickrey. “Yes. Ballantyne left too soon. He—it horrified him, somehow. Too much the puritan, I guess, at heart. And yet if he had waited…”
French said, “It’s complete in you.”
Vickrey didn’t answer that. Instead he looked at Peter Cochrane and said, “You’ll let me go? You’re not going to take me back to Earth?”
Peter put out his hand in what was almost a gesture of pleading. “You can’t stay here forever with these primitives. You’re an Earthman, Vickrey. You have a career, a wife and children. I know you’ve been under some strange influence here, but you’ll come out of it. And whatever your, well, your illness may be, medical attention—”
Vickrey cut him short with a cry. “Illness! No, you don’t understand! I’m not ill, I can never be ill. I can be injured, I can be killed. But those are accidents, and barring them to live—not forever, but close enough to it that the human mind is not conscious of the difference.”
He came up to Peter Cochrane, and there was fear in him, a desperate fear. “I belong here now. You can’t force me to go back.”
“Listen,” said Peter, trying hard to be gentle. “When you first came to, you couldn’t remember how to talk. Now your speech is as clear as mine. It’ll all come back to you just as easily, the old ways, your own ways. And your wife…”
Vickrey smiled. “She was good to me. I’m not sure I ever loved her. But we’d have no use for each other now.” Then the fear came back and he cried out, “Let me go!”
Peter sighed. “I think you’d better stay here and rest a while. You’ll feel differently in a day or two. Besides, we need your help.”
“I’ll help you,” Vickrey said. “I’ll tell you anything you want—but you must let me go!”
Peter shook his head. “You’d bolt off into the forest and be gone with the Transuranae again, and we’d never find you.”
Vickrey was still for a long minute and then he began to laugh. And the laughter slipped off shockingly into one of those eerie calls, a double note that trailed away in a throbbing minor wail. Peter reached out and shook him.
“Stop it,” he said. “Stop acting like a fool.”
Vickrey caught his breath. “You think my people—you think they are the Transuranae?”
“Aren’t they?”
“No.” Vickrey shook off Peter’s grasp and turned away, his hands clenched now into fists, his naked body quivering with tension. “I know what you want. We wanted them too! The transuranic ores. But you can’t get them. It isn’t possible! They already belong.”
“To what?”
“To the Transuranae. And I tell you to leave them alone. But you won’t.”
“No. We’re better equipped than you were. We can handle anything, if we just know what to expect. What are the Transuranae like? Are they people, beasts, what?”
Vickrey looked at him, almost in pity. “They are nothing you ever dreamed o
f,” he said softly. “And they’re nothing I can describe or explain. Let me go now. I can’t stand being shut up like this. I’ll point out the way for you to their place, where the ores are. Let me go.”
“You know I can’t do that,” Peter said. “For your own sake, and for the others, too, Rogers and Kessel.”
“You can’t understand,” whispered Vickrey. “You won’t understand that we can’t go back among men. We don’t want to go back!”
His voice, on those last words, had risen to a kind of scream, and French said worriedly, “Be careful, Peter.”
Comyn said, “I think Vickrey’s telling the truth.” He stepped forward casually, so that he stood between Peter Cochrane and the door. “And I think you’re handing him a lot of crumbs for the birds. I don’t think you care about his sake or Rogers’ or Kessel’s, one way or the other. All you want is the ores, and you’re afraid to turn him loose to lead you there—he might just disappear. So you’re going to—”
Behind him, so suddenly that the edge of it hit him before he could get out of the way, the door opened. Simon Cochrane had been outside the ship in command of the guard detail, and now he stood in the opening, his rifle still in his hand, his face intent and nervous.
“Peter,” he said, “you’d better come—and bring him along too.” He nodded to Vickrey and then pointed off in the direction of the mountains. “There’s something going on out there.”
THIRTEEN
One of the moons had SET, and the shadows were deeper in the distant gorge. The breeze had quieted, and the night was warm and very still. Simon held up his hand.
“Listen,” he said.
They listened, and in the stillness Comyn heard the sound of many voices, sweet and far off among the dark feet of the mountains, calling, answering, drawing together from the groves and the forests and the moon-washed plains.
“They’re gathering,” Simon said. “Ask him what it means.”
The sweet unhuman voices called. And now from a point about the mouth of the gorge, more and more of them began to join together, and a cold quiver shot down Comyn’s spine. He had heard that before, that double note that died away in a minor wailing.
The Big Jump Page 10