But being able to look down on it did not make him able to feel superior to it.
He was still seventy-six probability lines away from his own world Away from Lynda,
Lynda. He thought about her, about the smooth warmness of her flesh, the way they had embraced in the darkness of their room; the way she smiled with her crooked tooth; the ease with which she accepted all of the frightening things about him. He felt a deep, bitter remorse that he might never see her again. For how would he return to the ship? And even if he did accomplish that feat, how would he reach the cart? And once having reached the cart, how would he know the method of operation to return to his own probability line? And, if he got home, would Lynda still be alive? Would the vacii have discovered her behind the second beam projector; would they have sent a detail of sucker-mouthed guards through to kill or capture her?
His thoughts were abruptly wrenched away from Lynda and what problems she might have. Below, at the point where the alien compound took over from the forest, a search party of vacii were entering the trees. In ten or fifteen minutes, they might top the edge of the valley, be right up here on the first slopes of the mountain with him. He stood, took one last look, and started back through the trees, running now that the blanket of needles was thinner and more light seeped through to show him the way.
Half an hour later, he stopped at a formation of rocks that marked the head of a second valley running perpendicular to the first. He had exerted himself to his outside limits; now his breath came hard, and the cold mountain air burned his lungs. He sat down to allow his quivering muscles time to settle and relax, and he leaned his head against a pillow of rocks.
Five minutes later, he woke with a start, cursing himself for letting his weariness overcome him during so dangerous a time. Maybe he was growing even more human than the computer realized, for he was becoming increasingly susceptible to the foibles of a normal man. Then he stopped cursing and wondered what it was had wakened him.
His nose brought him the first clue: a cloying stench of perspiration that was not his, a heavy animal smell like something one might run across at a large zoo on a humid summer day. He brought his head up quickly, though it seemed bolted to his chest, and looked into the coal black eyes of the beast-eyes set two inches deep under a shelved forehead. Its nostrils were wide and black, flared in a pebbly black, as the pug nose which trembled and blew steam at him. The enormous, dark-lipped mouth opened, showing yellow, square teeth. Salsbury guessed this was supposed to be a smile. But he remembered that he had often smiled at a good-looking dinner.
The beast blew steam and blinked.
Salsbury brought his gun out of his holster with a slickness that would have done well against Wyatt Earp. But even as he was depressing the trigger, the beast's stubby-fingered paw flicked at his wrist and knocked the weapon to the ground. He reached for it. The beast grabbed him by the back of the shirt before he could touch the butt, lifted him off the ground and held him at arm's length. He struggled but could not free himself. Sarcastically, he wondered where it would decide to bite first.
CHAPTER 16
While the gorilla-thing with the slimy yellow teeth held Victor up for approval like a matron shopper inspecting a piece of meat, another one of the beasts came into view behind the first. It shuffled up to Salsbury, its heavy feet making surprisingly little noise, and stared, blinking its four-pound corrugated eyelids over its sunken, black eyes. It ran a thick pink tongue over its own rotting teeth, as if it enjoyed the taste of its own halitosis. It was fully as large as the first, a good eight and a half feet tall, even though slightly stooped and hunch-backed. Its long arms did not drag on the ground, but they were long enough so that it didn't have to bend to scratch its feet.
The second gorilla made a hooing and hawing sound in Salsbury's face which made no sense to the man, though he could discern patterns to the speech. The smell that came from its mouth was bad enough to derail a train and corrode the locomotive into a pile of worthless scrap. He tried not to breathe until he saw the thing inhaling, then sucked in air before his atmosphere could be contaminated again.
As the two Tarzan movie rejects hooted at each other, he began to understand what a butterfly must feel like when picked up to be examined for the beauty of its wings. He didn't like the feeling one bit. If they were planning to rip him up and divide him for supper, he wished to hell they would get on with it. But they continued to stare where he dangled from the first beast's mitt. When he could take it no longer, he released a horrendous scream and began flailing at the same time, remembering from his judo combat knowledge that a good scream will often frighten the opponent bad enough to throw him off balance, as well as having a therapeutic effect on the screamer.
The gorilla holding him was not impressed by such tactics, however. Perhaps it knew judo too, he thought. It only snorted and batted at him with its free paw. The blow rattled his brains back and forth from side to side of his skull, left his teeth trembling in their sockets. He decided to just hang there and be an exhibit no matter how nerve-wracking that might be. It was safer.
A few minutes later, tired of examining him, the gorilla dropped him. The ground came up hard, but it was a welcome relief from the scrutiny he had just undergone. He came to his knees, spat out a little blood that was leaking from the gums around half the teeth in his mouth, grabbed handfuls of rocks to pull himself erect. While he was going through that tedious process, the two heavies stood and watched, blinking huge eyelids and showing fat, wet tongues now and again. They looked like two boys watching a housefly crawl about after they had torn off its wings.
Vic called them a string of foul names.
They didn't react.
As the world settled down and ceased the slightly nauseating wobble that had made the trees and rocks move around him in jerky circles, Salsbury looked for a way out of there. To his right, the path led down into the new valley. But he had a strong suspicion his brute friends had come that way, and he did not relish the opportunity to meet more of their kind. That left the path he had taken to get here. He could double back on it, perhaps leave it and pass the vacii search party coming up. He started back that way, walking backwards, smiling, trying to look nonchalant but not knowing what expression these creatures would take nonchalance for. The gorillas watched him stupidly, blinking their lids and yawning. When he was thirty feet away, he turned and ran.
It looked good. They might have brute strength, but he was the one with the brains, the cleverness. He could outwit them every time now that he had gotten a head start. He was thinking all sorts of glorious thoughts like that when one of the monsters went leaping past him, covering three times the ground Salsbury could manage in a single stride. Fifty feet along the path, it stopped and turned to face him, grinning so that its broad yellow teeth gleamed in the thin moonlight.
Salsbury turned and started back, came face to face with the second beast. It was grinning too.
He turned, jumped from the path into the ferns and rocks, ran a short distance and stopped to look back. The first gorilla was loping easily after him.
He felt like a mouse in cats' territory.
Desperately, he looked around for something to use as a weapon, wishing he had managed to recover his gun from the clearing before making his break. The bombs in the rucksack were useless, because he couldn't detonate them, and because a nuclear explosion would mean his death as well as theirs. A fist fight was out of the question. One blow to the jaw or chest of those monstrosities, and he would shatter every bone in his hand. He bent over and found some two and three pound rocks. He hefted one in each hand, threw them. One bounced off the beast's chest, the other off its shoulder.
It came on, oblivious of his attack.
He tossed six other stones before it was on top of him. It batted his last missile out of his hands, struck a blow alongside his head that sent him sprawling.
Victor started to get up, doggedly plotting more resistance, clutching at rocks to throw even
as he used his hands to support himself. But before he was even properly on his feet, the jumbo slapped him again with a back of the hand blow across the seat of his pants and sent him crashing forward onto the ground again.
He laid still for a while, then got his feet under him, stood, feeling like a man three hundred and ten years old, turned in time to collect another paw in the chest that sent him down hard. Furious, he grabbed a rock, rolled, and threw it with all his strength. It bounced off the massive skull with a loud and hollow tok, but didn't fell the ogre. In fact, the thing didn't even stop grinning. It just waited until he was on his feet once more, then shoved him backwards so that he plopped hard on his behind.
At last, he got the point. He wasn't supposed to try to get away or to fight back. As long as he attempted either of these, he was a target for their blows, nothing more. He sat still and did not reach for anything to throw. A few minutes later, the gorilla nodded its head appreciatively, satisfied Salsbury had learned his lesson.
The other beast came up beside Salsbury's self-appointed keeper. They grumbled back and forth in low, guttural voices. When they made their mysterious decision, the keeper lifted Salsbury, slung the man beneath its hairy arm as if he were a babe, and loped back the path, back to the clearing where the other gorilla collected the gas pellet gun. Then, moving with a swift, jarring steadiness, they went down the trail into the new valley, where the trees once again grew thick over their heads, the floor beneath them smoother and less cluttered.
Half an hour later, they came out of the trees into a clearing before an impressive face of sheer rock that formed an unscalable wall of this side of the valley. Far overhead, the moon was half-hidden by the thrusting cliff top which looked, in silhouette, like a broken tooth. There was a fire going at the base of the wall, the flames spitting four feet or more into the cool night air. In the orange-red glow of the fire, Salsbury could see the gorilla settlement strung out along the cliff and built up the side of it, utilizing the caves as well as crude mud and wood buildings constructed to use the cliff as their fourth wall. He raised his appraisal of the gorillas. They were not merely beasts, but in the first intriguing stages of civilization. In this time line, perhaps man had not developed intelligence, while creatures of this sort had. Not much intelligence. And of a distinctly ugly hostile nature.
Then he was impressed with a thought that seemed absurd yet realistic, and surveyed his captors again. He had been calling them gorillas because, in the darkness and from the manner in which they acted and moved, that was the most appropriate comparison he could make. Now in the light of the campfire, he could see that he had been wrong; these were not men, surely, but neither were they apes. They did not, after all, have truly simian features. Their faces were broad, heavy, with none of the typical monkey sharpness. As he looked at them, he fancied there really were more human genes in them than animal. They were most likely a freak of evolution. In his world, his probability, they had not come along. Or, if they had, their line of intelligence was defeated by Cro-Magnon man, and they had become extinct. Here, they were going to flourish one day, possibly even reach the point of a highly technical civilization.
Salsbury's keeper dropped him in front of the fire with the same brutish carelessness he had used earlier. He called out to a sentry located ten feet above the ground in a dark nook of stone. The guard came down in a single leap that would have shattered a man's ankles, bounded to them and jabbered with the two with Salsbury. He took his turn staring at the man, prodding him with stubby fingers, breathing in his face and pitting his skin (or so it seemed to Salsbury) with his halitosis. When he was finished, he grunted some more with the other two. Then the keeper picked Victor up again, and they continued their hairy, smelly odyssey.
He had the passing thought that, if this were an odyssey, it was proceeding all wrong. The hero was not winning.
With Salsbury firmly under his arm, the gorilla swung onto the cliff and began going up, using only its toes and free hand, hooking those blunt fingers over stones so sharp they should have jammed through his palm and out the back of his hand. The climb was totally impossible. That was quite evident. They continued up. Sixty feet off the ground, with Salsbury's head hanging down and pounding with an overflow of blood, they swung into the mouth of a cave where a smaller fire burned, just a few tongues of flames and a pile of hot coals which seemed as much ceremonial as practical.
Keeper, as Victor had come to think of the creature, hooted into the blackness and started back the tunnel, moving more cautiously here because he had to bend some to keep from cracking that magnificent skull against the stumps of broken stalactites. Before they had gone a dozen feet, another light appeared farther back in answer to Keeper's call. In the burgeoning glow, Salsbury saw another half-man lighting a pile of twigs and logs with the end of a torch that, obviously, was always kept lit.
They moved out of the entrance passageway into the heart of the cave-a room fully thirty-five feet wide and fifty long-where ten more half-men were sitting and lying on piles of grass and leaves. The creatures were in various stages of alertness, and they seemed, as a lot, to be in a grumpy mood after being so rudely wakened. They hooted and snarled at Keeper, threw handsful of bedding materials at him. But when they caught sight of Salsbury, they came to sitting positions, their heavy-lidded eyes wide with interest, their paws wiping sleep matter away so they could get a better look.
Victor was the curiosity, the find of the week of the century, perhaps. They could not have much in the way of entertainments in such a beginning society. Salsbury was the equivalent of a circus. If they could have built a zoo, he would have been their star attraction and advertised for miles around. And when he died? Why, they would stuff his body and mount it to be stashed in the equivalent of the ape men's Smithsonian. He knew now how a freak must feel; how it must be to be radically different; not just different in color or the slant of one's eyes which is, alone, enough for some men to stare twice, but so different that the mind boggles a little to contemplate your existence.
Their minds were boggling.
He was deposited on a stone ledge two feet off the floor to one side of the cave. There was no sense in making a try for the entrance to the cave, for the freedom of the night. If Keeper did not pounce on him before he was a third of the way to fresh air, another of the half-men would. He sat and endured the bad breath and prodding. They chattered and jabbered, hooted and yelped at him, then waited expectantly, as if they thought he might reply. He spoke a bit in English, but this did not satisfy them. They only frowned, which was a truly frightening and awesome expression to behold on those craggy faces, and began muttering among themselves again. He imagined they thought him too stupid to speak intelligently.
Some minutes later, female half-men entered the room, their great sagging breasts matted with a softer coating of hair than that which adorned the chests of their huskier menfolk. They moved with a refined gracefulness which Salsbury had glimpsed in the males, bearing bowls of a steaming gray-green gruel. These monsters, he knew, would require large quantities of food to sustain their mammoth bodies and to allow them the speed and versatility of movement they enjoyed. They now were ready to eat
After everyone was served, a white-haired half-man who seemed to be in charge of the group grunted something to the most firm-breasted female. She looked as if she was about to disagree or refuse him, then thought better of it. Timidly, as if she were frightened near to death of Salsbury, she edged up to the ledge where he rested and placed a bowl of gruel in front of him, then skittered nervously out of the cavern into an adjoining room, much to the delight of the men who guffawed and chortled like a bunch of schoolboys planning deviltry of the first order.
Victor had not eaten since that half sandwich hours before entering the portal between probabilities, for he had been too nervous. Since then, he had been put through quite a bit and was nearly physically exhausted. Yet he could not bring himself to eat the soupy mixture that had been placed befo
re him. It was the color of polluted water and swimming within it were bits of dark, stringy meat of questionable origin. The smell that rolled off the surface of the stuff was reminiscent of spoiled meat, rotting vegetables, and stale corn soup. He gagged, shoved it aside, and looked back to the rest of the assemblage.
Keeper and the others were eating heartily and talking animatedly among themselves like women at a card party. The only difference was that these gossipers did not smell of perfumed soaps and bath powders. And they lacked the table manners those matrons would have shown.
The women were called, and everyone had a second bowl of the slop except Salsbury who only wished they would remove his first uneaten portion. Some of the women smiled toothy yellow smiles, and he suspected they were being complimented on their culinary finesse. The firm-breasted half-woman who had gingerly offered him a bowl of gruel took it away, looking at him strangely, as if she could not fathom why an inferior creature like him would not go for civilized food.
When everyone was finished, and when Salsbury had become a rather accepted phenomena, the other half-man who had been with Keeper produced the gas pellet pistol and held it aloft for the assembly to inspect. There were a number of startled grunts, and Victor received several stares of re-evaluation. The only place they would have seen something that well machined would have been down the mountainside in the vacii settlement. Surely the vacii had come among them-though perhaps the aliens would not have bothered experimenting on such a raggedy, moronic group as this-and would have left reminders of their superiority by demonstrating their weaponry a few times.
Put that down! Salsbury shouted.
They looked at him stupidly.
You'll kill each other! That was not really such a bad prospect, but they might also kill him in the process.
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