Close to Critical

by Hal Clement

  He came to himself with a start, and brought his mind back to the present. Theorizing was useless just now; he must decide whether to retrace his steps along the peninsula, and risk running into his ex-captors, or wait until the lake dried up and chance their catching him. It was hard to decide which was the smaller risk, but there was one check he could make.

  He walked to the water’s edge, looked at the liquid carefully, then slapped it vigorously. The slow ripples which spread up the edge of the lake and out over its more or less level surface did not interest him; the drops which detached themselves did. He watched as they drifted toward him, settling slowly, and noted with satisfaction that even the largest of them faded out without getting back to the surface. Evidently the lake did not have long to go; he settled down to wait.

  The breeze was picking up slowly as the plants awoke to the new day. He could smell it. He watched eagerly for its effect on the lake—not waves, but the turbulent hollows hi the surface which would mark slightly warmer bodies of air passing over it. That would be the sign; trom then on, the surface would probably drop faster 4own the lake bed than he could travel. The breeze should keep the air breathable, as long as he didn’t follow the water too closely—yes, it couldn’t be long now; the very point where he was standing was below the surface level of some parts of the lake. It was drying up.

  The difference increased as he waited, the edge of the water slipping back hi ghostly fashion. He followed it with caution until a wall of water towered on either side. It began to look as though the peninsula were really a ridge across the lake; if so, so much the better.

  Actually, it didn’t quite reach. He had to wait for a quarter of an hour at the ridge’s end while the rest of the lake turned back to air. He was impatient enough to risk breathing the stuff almost too quickly after the change, but managed to get away with it. A few minutes more brought him up the slope to the tall vegetation on the east side of the erstwhile lake. Before plunging among the plants, where he would be able to see nothing but the floaters overhead, he paused a moment to look back across the dry bottom to the point where he had first seen the water—still no pursuers. Another floater or two were drifting his way; he felt for his knives, and slightly regretted the spears he had lost. Still, there was little likelihood of danger from a floater behind him as long as he traveled at a decent speed—and that’s what he’d better be doing. He plunged into the brush.

  Travel was not too difficult; the stuff was flexible enough to be pushed out of the way most of the time. Occasionally he had to cut his way, which was annoying less because of the effort involved than because it meant exposing a knife to the air. Knives were getting somewhat scarce, and Fagin was rather tight with those remaining.

  The morning wore on, still without sight of pursuers. He made unusually good speed much of the time because of a remarkable lack of wild animals—par for a forty-mile walk being four or five fights, while he had only one. However, he more than lost the time gained when he ran into an area rougher than any he had ever seen. The hills were sharp and jagged instead of rounded; there were occasional loose rocks, and from time to time these were sent rolling and tumbling by unusually sharp quakes. In places he had to climb steep cliffs, either up or down; in others, he threaded his way through frighteningly narrow cracks—with no assurance that there was an opening at the other end. Several times there wasn’t, and he had to go back.

  Even here he left a trail, the local plant life being what it was; but with that area behind him he found it even harder to justify the feeling that he was being pursued.

  If his ex-captors really followed through that, they deserved to catch him! But still, however often he let his attention cover his rear, no sign of them appeared.

  The hours passed, Nick traveling at the highest speed he could maintain. The one fight he had scarcely delayed him at all; it was a floater that saw him from ahead and dropped nearly to ground level in time to intercept him. It was a small one, so small that his arms outreached its tentacles; and a quick slash of one of his knives opened enough of its gas-bladders to leave it floundering helplessly behind him. He sheathed the weapon and raced on with scarcely diminished speed, rubbing an arm which had been touched lightly by the thing’s poison.

  The limb had ceased to sting, and Altair was high in the sky, when he finally found himself in familiar surroundings. He had hunted before this far from the home valley; rapid as changes were, the area was still recognizable. He shifted course a trifle and put on a final burst of speed. For the first time, he felt sure of being able to deliver a report of his capture, and also for the first time he realized that he had not tried to organize one. Just telling what had happened to him, item by item, might take too long; it was important that Fagin and the rest get away quickly. On the other hand, it would take a pretty complete explanation of the state of affairs to convince the teacher of that fact. Nick unconsciously slowed down as he pondered this problem. He was dragged from this reverie only by the sound of his own name.

  “Nick! Is that really you? Where have you been? We thought you’d slept out once too often!”

  At the first sound, Nick had reached for his knives; but he checked the movement as he recognized the voice.

  “Johnny! It’s good to hear proper talk again. What are you doing this far out? Have the sheep eaten everything closer to home?”

  “No, I’m hunting, not herding.” John Doolittle pushed through the undergrowth into clear view. “But where have you been? It’s been weeks since you went out, and since we stopped looking for you.”

  “You looked for me? That’s bad. Still, I guess it didn’t make any difference, or I’d have known it sooner.”

  “What do you mean? I don’t understand what you’re talking about. And what did you mean about it’s being good to hear ‘proper talk’? What other kind of talk is there? Let’s hear the story.”

  “It’s a long one, and I’ll have to tell everyone as quickly as possible anyway. Come along home; there’s no point telling it twice.” He headed toward the valley they both called “home” without waiting to hear any answer. John “trailed” his spears and followed. Even without Nick’s implication of trouble ahead, he would not willingly have missed the report. Fresh as he was, thpugh, he had difficulty keeping up with the returned explorer; Nick seemed to be in a hurry.

  They met two more of the group on the way, Alice and Tom, who were herding. At Nick’s urgent but hasty words they followed toward the village as fast as their charge would permit.

  Five more of the group were actually in the village, and Fagin was at his usual station in the center of the ring of houses. Nick called the teacher by name as he came hi sight.

  “Fagin! We’re in trouble! What do we have for weapons that you haven’t shown us yet?”

  As usual, there was a pause of a couple of seconds before an answer came back.

  “Why, it’s Nick. We had about given you up. What’s all of this about weapons? Do you expect to have to fight someone?”

  “I’m afraid so.”

  “Who?”

  “Well, they seem to be people just like us; but they don’t keep animals, and they don’t use fire, and they use different words for things than we do.”

  “Where did you run into these people, and why should we have to fight them?”

  “It’s a long story, I’m afraid. It will be better if I start at the beginning, I suppose; but we shouldn’t waste any more time than we can help.”

  “I agree; a complete report will make the most sense to all of us. Go ahead.” Nick settled his weight back on his standing legs and obeyed.

  “I started south as we decided and went slowly, mapping as I went. Nothing much had changed seriously out to the edge of the region we usually cover in farming and grazing; after that, of course, it was hard to tell whether anything had changed at all recently, or in what way.

  “The best landmark I saw by the end of the first day was a mountain, of quite regular conical shape and much h
igher than any I had ever seen before. I was tempted to climb it, but decided that detail mapping could be accomplished better later on; after all, my trip was to find new areas, not evaluate them.

  “I passed to the east of the mountain shortly after sunrise the second day. The wind was remarkably strong in that region and seemed always to blow toward the mountain; I called it Storm Hill on the map. Judging by tile wind, there ought to be a lot of night-growing plants there; any exploration should be planned to get off the hill before dark.

  “As far as travel goes, everything was about as usual. I killed enough in self-defense to keep me in food, but none of the animals were at all unusual that day.

  “The third morning, though, with the mountain out of sight, I got involved with something that lived in a hole in the ground and reached out an arm to catch things going by. It caught me around the legs, and it didn’t seem to mind my spears very much. I don’t think I’d have gotten away if I hadn’t had help.”

  “Help?” The startled question came without the pause characteristic of the teacher’s remarks; it was Jim who asked it. “How could you have gotten help? None of us was down that way.”

  “So it wasn’t one of us—at least, not exactly. He looked just like us, and used spears like ours; but when we finally managed to kill the thing in the hole and tried to talk to each other, his words were all different; in fact, it was quite a while before I realized that he was talking. He used the same sort of noises we do for words, but mixed them with a lot of others that we never learned from you.

  “After a while I realized that the noises must be talk, and then I wondered why I hadn’t thought of such a thing before—after all, if this person wasn’t brought up by you, he’d have had to think up his own words for things, and it would be silly to expect them to be the same as ours. I decided to go with him and learn more; after all, this seemed a lot more important than just mapping. If I could learn his talk, he might know a lot more than we could find in months of exploring.

  “He didn’t seem to mind my trailing along, and as we went I began to catch on to some of his words. It wasn’t easy, because he put them together in very strange ways; it wasn’t just a matter of learning the noise he used for each object. We hunted together, though, and all the time we were learning to talk together. We didn’t travel in a straight line, but I kept pretty good track of our path and can put his village on the map when I get the chance.”

  “Village?” It was Jim once more who interrupted; Fagin had said nothing.

  “That’s the only word I know for it. It wasn’t at all like ours; it was a place at the foot of a steep cliff, and there were holes all over the face of the stone. Some of them were very small, like the solution holes you can see in any rock; others were very much larger, and there were people living in them. The one I was with was one of them.

  “They were very surprised to see me, and tried to ask me a lot of questions; but I couldn’t understand them well enough to give any answers. The one I had traveled with talked to them, and I suppose told how he had met me; but they stayed interested, and a lot of them were always watching me, whatever I did.

  “It was getting fairly late in the afternoon when we got to the cliff, and I was starting to wonder about camping for the night. I didn’t realize just at first that these people lived in the holes in the rock, and when I finally caught on I wasn’t very happy about it. There are even more quakes down that way than around here, I noticed, and that cliff seemed an awfully unhealthy neighborhood. When the sun was almost down, I decided to leave them and camp a little way out on a hilltop I’d found, and then I discovered that they didn’t want me to go. They were actually prepared to get rough in order to keep me around. I had learned a few more of their words by that time, though, and I finally convinced them that I wasn’t trying to get away completely, and just wanted to spend the night by myself. There was a surprising amount of firewood around, and I was able to collect enough for the night without much trouble—in fact, some of the little ones helped me, when they saw what I wanted.”

  “Little ones? Weren’t they all the same size?” Dorothy asked.

  “No. That was one of the funny things I haven’t had time to mention. Some of them weren’t more than a foot and a half high, and some of them were nearly twice as tall as we are—nine feet or more. They ah” had the same shape as ours, though. I never found out the reason for that. One of the biggest ones seemed to be telling the others what to do most of the tune, and I found that the little ones were usually the easiest to get along with.

  “But that’s getting off the story. When I built my fires a lot of them watched, but couldn’t seem to make anything of it; when I lighted them, there was the biggest crowd of astonished people you ever saw. They didn’t know anything about fire; that’s why there was so much firewood near the cliff, I guess.

  “Of course, it had started to rain by the time I lighted up, and it was funny to watch them; they seemed terribly afraid of being outside their holes in the rain, and still didn’t want to miss watching the fires. They kept dithering back and forth, but gradually disappeared into their holes. After a while they were all gone, even though some of them stayed long enough to see what the fires did to the rain.

  “I didn’t see any more of them for the rest of the night. The water didn’t get too deep along the face of the cliff, and they were out in the morning as soon as it had dried up.

  “I could make a long story out of the rest of the time, but that will have to wait. I learned to talk to them pretty well—the way they put their words together makes a lot of sense once you catch on to it—and got to know them pretty well. The main thing is that they were interested in whatever things I knew that they didn’t, like fire and keeping herds of animals and raising plants for food; and they wanted to know how I’d learned all these things. I told them about you, Fagin; and maybe that was a mistake. A few days ago their teacher, or leader, or whatever you can call him, came to me and said that he wanted me to come back here and bring you down to the cliff so you could teach all the things you know to his people.

  “Now, that seemed all right to me. I judged that the more people you knew who could help in the things you want us to do, the better everything will be.” He paused, to give Fagin a chance to answer.

  “That’s true enough,” the voice from the robot agreed after the usual interval. “What went wrong?”

  “My answer wasn’t worded just right, it seems. I interpreted the proposition as a request, and answered that I would gladly come back home and ask you whether you would come to help the cave people. The leader—his name means Swift, in their words; all their names mean something—became angry indeed. Apparently he expects people to do as he says without any question or hesitation. I had noticed that but had been a little slow in applying my knowledge, I fear. Anyway, I didn’t see how he could expect you to obey his orders.

  “Unfortunately, he does; and he decided from my answer that you and the other people of our village would probably refuse. When that happens, his first thought is the use of force; and from the moment I made my answer he began to plan an attack on our village, to carry you away with him whether you wanted to go or not.

  “He ordered me to tell hini how to find our village, and when I refused he became angry again. The body of a dead goat that someone had brought in for food was lying nearby, and he picked it up and began to do terrible things to it with his knives. After a while he spoke to me again.

  “You see what my knives are doing,” he said. “If the goat were alive, it would not be killed by them; but it would not be happy. The same shall be done to you with the start of the new day, unless you guide my fighters to your village and its Teacher. It is too close to darkness now for you to escape; you have the night to think over what I have said. We start toward your village in the morning—or you will wish we had.” He made two of his biggest fighters stay with me until the rain started. Even after all the time I’d been there no one ever stayed out of t
he caves after rainfall, so they left me alone when I lighted my fires.

  “It took me a long time to decide what to do. If they killed me, they’d still find you sooner or later and you wouldn’t be warned in time; if I went with them it might have been all right, but I didn’t like some of the things Swift had been saying. He seemed to feel things would be better if there were none of your own people left around after he captured you. That seemed to mean that no matter what I did I was going to be killed, but if I kept quiet I might be the only one. That was when I thought of traveling at night; I was just as likely to be killed, but at least I’d die in my sleep—and there was a little chance of getting away with it. After all, a lot of animals that don’t have caves or fire and don’t wake up as early as some of the meat-eaters still manage to live.

  “Then I got another idea; I thought of carrying fire with me. After all, we often carry a stick with one end burning for short distances when we’re lighting the night fires; why couldn’t I carry a supply of long sticks, and keep one burning all the time? Maybe the fire wouldn’t be big enough to be a real protection, but it was worth trying. Anyway, what could I lose?

  “I picked out as many of the longest sticks around as I could carry, piled them up, and waited until two of my three fires were drowned by raindrops. Then I picked up my sticks, lighted the end of one of them at the remaining fire, and started off as fast as I could.