"The Kaskaskia Effect stops the Menschenjägers, stops the True Men, stops the Beasts. It can be sensed, but it cannot be seen or measured. It moves like a cloud. Only simple men with clean thoughts and happy lives can live inside it. Birds and ordinary beasts can live inside it, too. The Kaskaskia Effect moves about like clouds. There are more than twenty-one and less than thirty-four Kaskaskia Effects moving slowly about this planet Earth. I have carried other Menschenjägers back for restoration and rebuilding, but the restoration center can find no fault. The Kaskaskia Effect ruins us. Therefore, we run away . . . even though the officers told us to run from nothing. If we did not run away, we would cease to exist. You are a German. I think the Kaskaskia Effect would kill you. Now I go to hunt a man. When I find him I will kill him."
The blue light went off.
The machine whistled and clicked its way into the dark silence of the wooded night.
n IV m
Conversation with the Middle-Sized Bear
Carlotta was completely adult.
She had left the screaming uproar of Hitler Germany as it fell to ruins in its Bohemian outposts. She had obeyed her father, the Ritter vom Acht, as he passed her and her sisters into missiles which had been designed as personnel and supply carriers for the First German National Socialist Moon Base.
He and his medical brother, Professor Doctor Joachim vom Acht, had harnessed the girls securely in their missiles.
Their uncle the Doctor had given them shots.
Karla had gone first, then Juli, and then Carlotta.
Then the barbed-wire fortress of Pardubice and the monotonous grind of Wehrmacht trucks trying to escape the air strikes of the Red Air Force and the American fighter-bombers died in the one night, and this mysterious "forest in the middle of nothing-at-all" was born in the next night.
Carlotta was completely dazed.
She found a smooth-looking place at the edge of the brook. The old leaves were heaped high here. Without regard for further danger, she slept.
She had not been asleep more than a few minutes before the bushes parted again.
This time it was a bear. The bear stood at the edge of the darkness and looked into the moonlit valley with the brook running through it. He could hear no sound of Morons, no whistle of manshonyagger, as he and his kind called the hunting machines. When he was sure all was safe, he twitched his claws and reached delicately into a leather bag which was hanging from his neck by a thong. Gently he took out a pair of spectacles and fitted them slowly and carefully in front of his tired old eyes.
He then sat down next to the girl and waited for her to wake up.
She did not wake until dawn.
Sunlight and birdsong awakened her.
(Could it have been the probing of Laird's mind, whose far-reaching senses told him that a woman had magically and mysteriously emerged from the archaic rocket and that there was a human being unlike all the other kinds of mankind waking at a brookside in a place which had once been called Maryland?)
Carlotta awoke, but she was sick.
She had a fever.
Her back ached.
Her eyelids were almost stuck together with foam. The world had had time to develop all sorts of new allergenic substances since she had last walked on the surface of the Earth. Four civilizations had come and vanished. They and their weapons were sure to leave membrane-inflaming residue behind.
Her skin itched.
Her stomach felt upset.
Her arm was numb and covered with some kind of sticky black. She did not know it was a burn covered by the salve which the Moron had given her the previous night.
Her clothes were dry and seemed to be falling off her in shreds.
She felt so bad that when she noticed the bear, she did not even have strength to run.
She just closed her eyes again.
Lying there with her eyes closed she wondered all over again where she was.
Said the bear in perfect German, "You are at the edge of the Unselfing Zone. You have been rescued by a Moron. You have stopped a Menschenjäger very mysteriously. For the first time in my own life I can see into a German mind and see that the word manshonyagger should really be Menschenjäger, a hunter of men. Allow me to introduce myself. I am the Middle-Sized Bear who lives in these woods."
The voice not only spoke German, but it spoke exactly the right kind of German. The voice sounded like the German which Carlotta had heard throughout her life from her father. It was a masculine voice, confident, serious, reassuring. With her eyes still closed she realized that it was a bear who was doing the talking. With a start, she recalled that the bear had been wearing spectacles.
Said she, sitting up, "What do you want?"
"Nothing," said the bear mildly.
They looked at each other for a while.
Then said Carlotta, "Who are you? Where did you learn German? What's going to happen to me?"
"Does the Fräulein," asked the bear, "wish me to answer the questions in order?"
"Don't be silly," said Carlotta. "I don't care what order. Anyhow, I'm hungry. Do you have anything I could eat?"
The bear responded gently, "You wouldn't like hunting for insect grubs. I have learned German by reading your mind. Bears like me are friends of the True Men and we are good telepaths. The Morons are afraid of us, but we are afraid of the manshonyaggers. Anyhow, you don't have to worry very much because your husband is coming soon."
Carlotta had been walking down toward the brook to get a drink. His last words stopped her in her tracks.
"My husband?" she gasped.
"So probably that it is certain. There is a True Man named Laird who has brought you down. He already knows what you are thinking, and I can see his pleasure in finding a human being who is wild and strange, but not really wild and not really strange. At this moment he is thinking that you may have left the centuries to bring the gift of vitality back among mankind. He is thinking that you and he will have wonderful children. Now he is telling me not to tell you what I think he thinks, for fear that you will run away." The bear chuckled.
Carlotta stood, her mouth agape.
"You may sit in my chair," said the Middle-Sized Bear, "or you can wait here until Laird comes to get you. Either way you will be taken care of. Your sickness will heal. Your ailments will go away. You will be happy again. I know this because I am one of the wisest of all known bears."
Carlotta was angry, confused, frightened, and sick again. She started to run.
Something as solid as a blow hit her.
She knew without being told that it was the bear's mind reaching out and encompassing hers.
It hit—boom!—and that was all.
She had never before stopped to think of how comfortable a bear's mind was. It was like lying in a great big bed and having mother take care of one when one was a very little girl, glad to be petted and sure of getting well.
The anger poured out of her. The fear left her. The sickness began to lighten. The morning seemed beautiful.
She herself felt beautiful as she turned—
Out of the blue sky, dropping swiftly but gracefully, came the figure of a bronze young man. A happy thought pulsed against her mind. That is Laird, my beloved. He is coming. He is coming. I shall be happy forever after.
It was Laird.
And so she was.
The Queen of the Afternoon
Above all, as she began to awaken, she wished for her family. She called to them, "Mutti, Vati, Carlotta, Karla! Where are you?" But of course she cried it in German since she was a good Prussian girl. Then she remembered.
How long had it been since her father had put her and her two sisters into the space capsules? She had no idea. Even her father, the Ritter vom Acht, and her uncle, Professor Doctor Joachim vom Acht—who had administered the shots in Parbudice, Germany, on April 2, 1945—could not have imagined that the girls would remain in suspended animation for thousands of years. But so it was.
Afternoon sunlight
gleamed orange and gold on the rich purple shades of the Fighting Trees. Charls looked at the trees, knowing that as the sunset moved from orange to red and as darkness crept over the eastern horizon, they would once again glow with quiet fire.
How long was it since the trees were planted—Fighting Trees, the True Men called them—for the express purpose of sending their immense roots down into the earth, seeking out the radioactives in the soil and the waters beneath, concentrating the poisonous wastes into their hard pods, then dropping the waxy pods until, at some later time, the waters which came from above the earth, and those yet in the earth, would once more be clean? Charls did not know.
One thing he did know. To touch one of the trees, to touch it directly, was certain death.
He wanted very much to break a twig but he did not dare. Not only was it tambu, but he feared the sickness. His people had made much progress in the last few generations, enough so that at times they did not fear to face True Men and to argue with them. But the sickness was not something with which one could argue.
At the thought of a True Man, an unaccountable thickness gripped him in the throat. He felt sentimental, tender, fearful; the yearning that gripped him was a kind of love, and yet he knew that it could not be love since he had never seen a True Man except at a distance.
Why, Charls wondered, was he thinking so much about True Men? Was there, perhaps, one nearby?
He looked at the setting sun, which was by now red enough to be looked at safely. Something in the atmosphere was making him uneasy. He called to his sister.
"Oda, Oda!"
She did not answer.
Again he called. "Oda, Oda!"
This time he heard her coming, plowing recklessly through the underbrush. He hoped she would remember to avoid the Fighting Trees. Oda was sometimes too impatient.
Suddenly there she was before him.
"You called me, Charls? You called me? You've found something? Shall we go somewhere together? What do you want? Where are mother and father?"
Charls could not help laughing. Oda was always like that.
"One question at a time, little sister. Weren't you afraid you would die the burning death, going through the trees like that? I know you don't want to believe in the tambu, but the sickness is real."
"It isn't," she said. She shook her head. "Maybe it was once . . . I guess it really was once"—granting him a concession—"but do you, yourself, know of anybody who has died from the trees for a thousand years?"
"Of course not, silly. I haven't been alive a thousand years."
Oda's impatience returned. "You know what I mean. And anyway, I decided the whole thing is silly. We all accidentally brush against the trees. So one day I ate a pod. And nothing happened."
He was appalled. "You ate a pod?"
"That's what I said. And nothing happened."
"Oda, one of these days you're going to go too far."
She smiled at him. "And now I suppose you are going to say that the oceans' beds were not always filled with grass."
He was indignant. "No, of course I know better than that. I know that the grass was put into the oceans for the same reason that the Fighting Trees were planted—to eat up all the poisons that the Old Ones left in the days of the Ancient Wars."
How long they would have bickered he did not know, but just then his ears caught an unfamiliar noise. He knew the sound the True Men made as they sped on their mysterious errands in the upper air. He knew the ominous buzz that the Cities gave off should he approach them too closely. He knew also the clicking noises that the few remaining manshonyaggers made as they crept through the Wild, alert for any non-German to kill. Poor blind machines, they were so easy to outsmart.
But this noise, this noise was different. It was nothing he had ever heard before.
The whistling sound rose and throbbed against the upper reaches of his hearing. It had a curiously spiral quality about it as though it approached and receded, all the while veering toward him. Charls was filled with terror, feeling threatened beyond all understanding.
Now Oda heard it too. Their quarrel forgotten, she seized his arm. "What is it, Charls? What could it be?"
His voice was hesitant and full of wonder. "I don't know."
"Are the True Men doing something, something new that we never heard before? Do they want to hurt us, or enslave us? Do they want to catch us? Do we want to be caught? Charls, tell me, do we want to be caught? Could it be the True Men coming? I seem to smell True Man. They did come once before and caught some of us and took them away and did strange things to them, so that they looked like True Men, didn't they, Charls? Could it be the True Men again?"
In spite of his fear, Charls had a certain amount of impatience with Oda. She talked so much.
The noise persisted and intensified. Charls sensed that it was directly over his head, but he could see nothing.
Oda said, "Charls, I think I see it. Do you see it, Charls?"
Suddenly he too saw the circle—a dim whiteness, a vapor train that increased in size and volume. Concomitantly the sound increased, until he felt his eardrums would burst. It was nothing ever before seen in his world. . . .
A thought struck him. It was as hard as a physical blow; it sapped his courage and manhood as nothing before had ever done; he did not feel young and strong any more. He could hardly frame his words.
"Oda, could that be—"
"Be what?"
"Could it be one of the old, old weapons from the Ancient Past? Could it be coming back to destroy us all, as the legends have always foretold? People have always said they would come back. . . ." His voice trailed off.
Whatever the danger, he knew that he was completely helpless, helpless to protect himself, helpless to protect Oda.
Against the ancient weapons there was no defense. This place was no safer than that place, that place no better than this. People still had to live their lives under the threat of weapons from long, long ago. This was the first time that he personally had met the threat, but he had heard of it. He reached for Oda's hand.
Oda, singularly courageous now that there was real danger, drew him over onto the bank, away from the cenote. With half his mind he wondered why she seemed to want to move away from the water. She tugged at his arm, and he sat down beside her.
Already, he knew, it was too late to go looking for their parents or others of their pack. Sometimes it took a whole day to round up the entire family—the thing was coming down relentlessly, and Charls felt so drained of energy that he stopped talking. He thought at her: Let's just wait it out here, and she squeezed his hand as she thought back: Yes, my brother.
The long box in the circle of light continued to descend, inexorable.
It was odd. Charls could feel a human presence, but the mind was strangely closed to him. He felt a quality of mind that he had never felt before. He had read the minds of True Men as they flew far overhead; he knew the minds of his own people; he could distinguish the thoughts of most of the birds and beasts; it was no trouble to detect the crude electronic hunger of the mechanical mind of a manshonyagger.
But this—this being had a mind that was raw, elemental, hot. And closed.
Now the box was very near. Would it crash in this valley or the next? The screams from within it were extremely shrill. Charls's ears hurt and his eyes smarted from the intensity of heat and noise. Oda held his hand tightly.
The object crashed into the ground.
It ripped the hillside just across the cenote. Had Oda not instinctively moved away from the cenote, the box would have hit them, Charls realized.
Charls and Oda stood up cautiously.
Somehow the box must have decelerated: It was hot, but not hot enough to make the broken trees around it burst into flame. Steam rose from the crushed leaves.
The noise was gone.
Charls and Oda moved to within ten man-lengths of the object. Charls framed his clearest thought and flung it at the box: Who are you?
T
he being within obviously did not perceive him as he was. There came forth a wild thought, directed at living beings in general.
Fools, fools, help me! Get me out of here!
Oda caught the thought, as did Charls. She stepped in mentally and Charls was astonished at the clarity and force of her inquiry. It was simple but beautifully strong and hard. She thought the one idea:
How?
From the box there came again the frantic babble of demand: The handles, you fools. The handles on the outside. Take the handles and let me out!
Charls and Oda looked at each other. Charls was not sure that he really wanted to let this creature "out." Then he thought further. Maybe the unpleasantness that radiated from the box was simply the result of imprisonment. He knew that he himself would hate to be encased like that.
Together Charls and Oda risked the broken leaves, walking gingerly up to the box itself. It was black and old; it looked like something the elders called "iron"—and never touched. They saw the handles, pitted and scarred.
With the ghost of a smile, Charls nodded to his sister. Each took a handle and lifted.
The sides of the box crackled. The iron was hot but not unbearably so. With a rusty shriek, the ancient door flew open.
They looked into the box.
There lay a young woman.
She had no fur, only long hair on her head.
Instead of fur, she had strange, soft objects on her body but as she sat up, these objects began to disintegrate.
At first the girl looked frightened; then, as she glanced at Oda and Charls, she began to laugh. Her thought came through, clearly and rather cruelly: I guess I don't have to worry about modesty in front of puppy dogs.
Oda did not seem to mind the thought but Charls's feelings were hurt. The girl said words with her mouth but they could not understand them. Each of them took an elbow and led her to the ground.
They reached the edge of the cenote and Oda gestured to the strange girl to sit down. She did, and made more words.
Oda was as puzzled as Charls, but then she began to smile. Spieking had worked before, when the girl was in the box. Why not now? The only thing was, this odd girl did not seem to know how to control her thoughts. Everything she thought was directed at the world at large—at the valley, at the sunset sky, at the cenote. She did not seem to realize that she was shouting every thought aloud.
When the People Fell Page 6