by Tom Godwin
There was no life in any form to be seen; no animal or bush or blade of grass. There was only the barren floor of the chasm, made a harsh green shade by the two suns and writhing and undulating with heat waves like a nightmare sea, while above them the towering cliffs shimmered, too, and sometimes seemed to be leaning far out over their heads and already falling down upon them.
They found no more minerals of any kind and they came at last to the place where they had seen the smoke or vapor.
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There the walls of the chasm drew back to form a little valley a mile long by half a mile wide. The walls did not drop vertically to the floor there but sloped out at the base into a fantastic formation of natural roofs and arches that reached almost to the center of the valley from each side. Green things grew in the shade under the arches and sparkling waterfalls cascaded down over many of them. A small creek carried the water out of the valley, going out into the chasm a little way before the hot sands absorbed it.
They stood and watched for some time, but there was no movement in the valley other than the waving of the green plants as a breeze stirred them. Once the breeze shifted to bring them the fresh, sweet scent of growing things and urge them to come closer.
“A place like that doesn’t belong here,” Barber said in a low voice. “But it’s there. I wonder what else is there?”
“Shade and cool water,” Humbolt said. “And maybe things that don’t like strangers. Let’s go find out.”
They watched warily as they walked, their crossbows in their hands. At the closer range they saw that the roofs and arches were the outer remains of a system of natural caves that went back into the valley’s walls. The green vegetation grew wherever the roofs gave part-time shade, consisting mainly of a holly-leafed bush with purple flowers and a tall plant resembling corn.
Under some of the roofs the corn was mature, the orange-colored grains visible. Under others it was no more than half grown. He saw the reason and said to Barber:
“There are both warm and cold springs here. The plants watered by the warm springs would grow almost the year around; the ones watered by the cold springs only in the summer. And what we saw from the mountain top would have been vapor rising from the warm springs.”
They passed under arch after arch without seeing any life. When they came to the valley’s upper end and still had seen nothing it seemed evident that there was little danger of an encounter with any intelligent-and-hostile creatures. Apparently nothing at all lived in the little valley.
Humbolt stopped under a broad arch where the breeze was made cool and moist by the spray of water it had come through. Barber went on, to look under the adjoining arch. Caves led into the wall from both arches and as he stood there Humbolt saw something lying in the mouth of the nearest cave. It was a little mound of orange corn; lying in a neat pile as though whatever had left it there had intended to come back after it. He looked toward the other arch but Barber was somewhere out of sight. He doubted that whatever had left the corn could be much of a menace—dangerous animals were more apt to eat flesh than corn—but he went to the cave with his crossbow ready. He stopped at the mouth of the cave to let his eyes become accustomed to the darkness inside it. As he did so the things inside came out to meet him.
They emerged into full view; six little animals the size of squirrels, each of them a different color. They walked on short hind legs like miniature bears and the dark eyes in the bear-chipmunk faces were fixed on him with intense interest. They stopped five feet in front of him, there to stand in a neat row and continue the fascinated staring up at him. The yellow one in the center scratched absently at its stomach with a furry paw and he lowered the bow, feeling a little foolish at having bothered to raise it against animals so small and harmless.
Then he half brought it up again as the yellow one opened its mouth and said in a tone that held distinct anticipation:
“I think we’ll eat you for supper.”
He darted glances to right and left but there was nothing near him except the six little animals. The yellow one, having spoken, was staring silently at him with some curiosity on its furry face. He wondered if some miasma or some scent from the vegetation in the valley had warped his mind into sudden insanity and asked:
“You think you’ll do what?”
It opened its mouth again, to stutter, “I—I—” Then, with a note of alarm, “Hey … ”
It said no more and the next sound was that of Barber hurrying toward him and calling,
“Hey—Bill—where are you?”
“Here,” he answered, and he was already sure that he knew why the little animal had spoken to him.
Barber came up and saw the six chipmunk-bears. “Six of them!” he exclaimed. “There’s one in the next cave—the damned thing spoke to me!”
“I thought so,” he replied. “You told it we’d have it for supper and then it said, ‘You think you’ll do what?’ didn’t it?”
Barber’s face showed surprise. “How did you know that?”
“They’re telepathic between one another,” he said. “The yellow one there repeated what the one you spoke to heard you say and it repeated what the yellow one heard me say. It has to be telepathy between them.”
“Telepathy—” Barber stared at the six little animals, who stared back with their fascinated curiosity undiminished. “But why should they want to repeat aloud what they receive telepathically?”
“I don’t know. Maybe at some stage in their evolution only part of them were telepaths and the telepaths broadcasted danger warnings to the others that way. So far as that goes, why does a parrot repeat what it hears?”
There was a scurry of movement behind Barber and another of the little animals, a white one, hurried past them. It went to the yellow one and they stood close together as they stared up. Apparently they were mates …
“That’s the other one—those are the two that mocked us,” Barber said, and thereby gave them the name by which they would be known: mockers.
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The mockers were fresh meat—but they accepted the humans with such friendliness and trust that Barber lost all his desire to have one for supper or for any other time. They had a limited supply of dried meat and there would be plenty of orange corn. They would not go hungry.
They discovered that the mockers had living quarters in both the cool caves and the ones warmed by the hot springs. There was evidence that they hibernated during the winters in the warm caves.
There were no minerals in the mockers’ valley and they set out to continue their circuit of the chasm. They did not get far until the heat had become so great that the chasm’s tributaries began going dry. They turned back then, to wait in the little valley until the fall rains came.
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When the long summer was ended by the first rain they resumed their journey. They took a supply of the orange corn and two of the mockers; the yellow one and its mate. The other mockers watched them leave, standing silent and solemn in front of their caves as though they feared they might never see their two fellows or the humans again.
The two mockers were pleasant company, riding on their shoulders and chattering any nonsense that came to mind. And sometimes saying things that were not at all nonsense, making Humbolt wonder if mockers could partly read human minds and dimly understand the meaning of some of the things they said.
They found a place where saltpeter was very thinly and erratically distributed. They scraped off all the films of it that were visible and procured a small amount. They completed their circuit and reached the foot of the long, steep slope of the Craigs without finding anything more.
It was an awesome climb that lay before them; up a grade so steep and barred with so many low ledges that when their legs refused to carry them farther they crawled. The heat was still very serious and there would be no water until they came to the spring
beyond the mountain’s summit. A burning wind, born on the blazing floor of the chasm, following them up the mountain all day. Their leather canteens were almost dry when night came and they were no more than a third of the way to the top.
The mockers had become silent as the elevation increased and when they stopped for the night Humbolt saw that they would never live to cross the mountain. They were breathing fast, their hearts racing, as they tried to extract enough oxygen from the thin air. They drank a few drops of water but they would not touch the corn he offered them.
The white mocker died at midmorning the next day as they stopped for a rest. The yellow one crawled feebly to her side and died a few minutes later.
“So that’s that,” Humbolt said, looking down at them. “The only things on Ragnarok that ever trusted us and wanted to be our friends—and we killed them.”
They drank the last of their water and went on. They made dry camp that night and dreams of cold streams of water tormented their exhausted sleep. The next day was a hellish eternity in which they walked and fell and crawled and walked and fell again. Barber weakened steadily, his breathing growing to a rattling panting. He spoke once that afternoon, to try to smile with dry, swollen lips and say between his panting gasps, “It would be hell—to have to die—so thirsty like this.”
After that he fell with increasing frequency, each time slower and weaker in getting up again. Half a mile short of the summit he fell for the last time. He tried to get up, failed, and tried to crawl. He failed at that, too, and collapsed face down in the rocky soil. Humbolt went to him and said between his own labored intakes of breath, “Wait, Dan—I’ll go on—bring you back water.”
Barber raised himself with a great effort and looked up. “No use,” he said. “My heart—too much—”
He fell forward again and that time he was very still, his desperate panting no more.
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It seemed to Humbolt that it was half a lifetime later that he finally reached the spring and the cold, clear water. He drank, the most ecstatic pleasure he had ever experienced in his life. Then the pleasure drained away as he seemed to see Dan Barber trying to smile and seemed to hear him say, “It would be hell—to have to die—so thirsty like this.”
He rested for two days before he was in condition to continue on his way. He reached the plateau and saw that the woods goats had been migrating south for some time. On the second morning he climbed up a gentle roll in the plain and met three unicorns face to face. They charged at once, squealing with anticipation. Had he been equipped with an ordinary bow he would have been killed within seconds. But the automatic crossbow poured a rain of arrows into the faces of the unicorns that caused them to swing aside in pain and enraged astonishment. The moment they had swung enough to expose the area just behind their heads the arrows became fatal.
One unicorn escaped, three arrows bristling in its face. It watched him from a distance for a little while, squealing and shaking its head in baffled fury. Then it turned and disappeared over a swell in the plain, running like a deer.
He resumed his southward march, hurrying faster than before. The unicorn had headed north and that could be for but one purpose: to bring enough reinforcements to finish the job.
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He reached the caves at night. No one was up but George Ord, working late in his combination workshop-laboratory.
George looked up at the sound of his entrance and saw that he was alone. “So Dan didn’t make it?” he asked.
“The chasm got him,” he answered. And then, wearily, “The chasm—we found the damned thing.”
“The red stratum—”
“It was only iron stains.”
“I made a little pilot smelter while you were gone,” George said. “I was hoping the red stratum would be ore. The other prospecting parties—none of them found anything.”
“We’ll try again next spring,” he said. “We’ll find it somewhere, no matter how long it takes.”
“Our time may not be so long. The observations show the sun to be farther south than ever.”
“Then we’ll make double use of the time we do have. We’ll cut the hunting parties to the limit and send out more prospecting parties. We’re going to have a ship to meet the Gerns again.”
“Sometimes,” George said, his black eyes studying him thoughtfully, “I think that’s all you live for, Bill: for the day when you can kill Gerns.”
George said it as a statement of a fact, without censure, but Humbolt could not keep an edge of harshness out of his voice as he answered:
“For as long as I’m leader that’s all we’re all going to live for.”
He followed the game south that fall, taking with him Bob Craig and young Anders. Hundreds of miles south of the caves they came to the lowlands; a land of much water and vegetation and vast herds of unicorns and woods goats. It was an exceedingly dangerous country, due to the concentration of unicorns and prowlers, and only the automatic crossbows combined with never ceasing vigilance enabled them to survive.
There they saw the crawlers; hideous things that crawled on multiple legs like three-ton centipedes, their mouths set with six mandibles and dripping a stinking saliva. The bite of a crawler was poisonous, instantly paralyzing even to a unicorn, though not instantly killing them. The crawlers ate their victims at once, however, ripping the helpless and still living flesh from its bones.
Although the unicorns feared the crawlers, the prowlers hated them with a fanatical intensity and made use of their superior quickness to kill every crawler they found; ripping at the crawler until the crawler, in an insanity of rage, bit itself and died of its own poison. They had taken one of the powerful longbows with them, in addition to their crossbows, and they killed a crawler with it one day. As they did so a band of twenty prowlers came suddenly upon them.
Twenty prowlers, with the advantage of surprise at short range, could have slaughtered them. Instead, the prowlers continued on their way without as much as a challenging snarl.
“Now why,” Bob Craig wondered, “did they do that?”
“They saw we had just killed a crawler,” Humbolt said. “The crawlers are their enemies and I guess letting us live was their way of showing appreciation.”
Their further explorations of the lowlands revealed no minerals—nothing but alluvial material of unknown depth—and there was no reason to stay longer except that return to the caves was impossible until spring came. They built attack-proof shelters in the trees and settled down to wait out the winter.
They started north with the first wave of woods goats, nothing but lack of success to show for their months of time and effort.
When they were almost to the caves they came to the barren valley where the Gerns had herded the Rejects out of the cruisers and to the place where the stockade had been. It was a lonely place, the stockade walls fallen and scattered and the graves of Humbolt’s mother and all the others long since obliterated by the hooves of the unicorn legions. Bitter memories were reawakened, tinged by the years with nostalgia, and the stockade was far behind them before the dark mood left him.
The orange corn was planted that spring and the number of prospecting parties was doubled.
The corn sprouted, grew feebly, and died before maturity. The prospecting parties returned one by one, each to report no success. He decided, that fall, that time was too precious to waste—they would have to use the alternate plan he had spoken of.
He went to George Ord and asked him if it would be possible to build a hyperspace transmitter with the materials they had.
“It’s the one way we could have a chance to leave here without a ship of our own,” he said.
“By luring a Gern cruiser here and then taking it away from them.”
George shook his head. “A hyperspace transmitter might be built, given enough years of time. But it would be useless without power. It would take a generator of such size th
at we’d have to melt down every gun, knife, axe, every piece of steel and iron we have. And then we’d be five hundred pounds short. On top of that, we’d have to have at least three hundred pounds more of copper for additional wire.”
“I didn’t realize it would take such a large generator,” he said after a silence. “I was sure we could have a transmitter.”
“Get me the metal and we can,” George said. He sighed restlessly and there was almost hatred in his eyes as he looked at the inclosing walls of the cave. “You’re not the only one who would like to leave our prison. Get me eight hundred pounds of copper and iron and I’ll make the transmitter, some way.”
Eight hundred pounds of metal … On Ragnarok that was like asking for the sun. The years went by and each year there was the same determined effort, the same lack of success. And each year the suns were farther south, marking the coming of the end of any efforts other than the one to survive.
In the year thirty when fall came earlier than ever before, he was forced to admit to himself the bleak and bitter fact: he and the others were not of the generation that would escape from Ragnarok. They were Earth-born—they were not adapted to Ragnarok and could not scour a world of 1.5 gravity for metals that might not exist.
And vengeance was a luxury he could not have.
A question grew in his mind where there had been only his hatred for the Gerns before. What would become of the future generations on Ragnarok?
With the question a scene from his childhood kept coming back to him; a late summer evening in the first year on Ragnarok and Julia sitting beside him in the warm starlight …
“You’re my son, Billy,” she had said. “The first I ever had. Now, before so very long, maybe I’ll have another one.”