Here Comes Civilization: The Complete Science Fiction of William Tenn Volume II

by William Tenn

  The ivory-colored animals had rigged up a primitive ballista just a few feet from the end of the tunnel and were pegging ax-heads into the cave at fairly respectable velocities. The missiles were easy to side-step, but Donelli's head was getting heavy and he lost his footing once or twice. As fast as his supersonic would sweep them away from the ballista, they would crowd back again with stubborn determination. A slow, evil fire built itself in Donelli's chest and spread nibbling fingers along his throat.

  He looked over his shoulder. No more darts were coming in at the rapt group near the cave mouth. Evidently the avians were possessed of more love for one of their number than the burrowers. He had just started to turn his head when a heavy object struck the back of his helmet. He dimly perceived he was falling. It seemed to him that the burrower which he had captured leaped over him and rejoined its fellows, and that Susie flew out to a clustered bunch of avians and that they all buzzed and hummed like idiots.

  What a waste of time, he thought as the fire began to consume his brain. Helena let them go.

  It seemed to him that Helena and Dr. Blaine were hurrying to his side through a shimmering mist of yellow agony. It also seemed to him that one of the chest-high balls split up along a pink vein and something came out.

  But he was sure of nothing but the painful, choking darkness into which his body twisted, nothing but the agony in his chest...

  He woke with a spaceman's certain knowledge of riding a smooth jet. His body felt deliciously light. He tried to sit up, but he was too weak to do more than turn his head. Two men had their backs to him. After a while he identified them as Dr. Archibald Blaine and Dr. Douglas Ibn Yussuf. Dr. Yussuf was out of his cast and was arguing in an animated fashion with Blaine over a white ax-head imprisoned in a plastic block.

  "Why, I'm in Dr. Yussuf's bunk," Donelli muttered stupidly.

  "Welcome back," Helena told him, moving into range of his watery eyes. "You've been pretty far away for a long, long time."

  "Away?"

  "You ate enough hydrofluoric acid to etch a glass factory out of existence. I made my biological education turn handsprings to save that belligerent life of yours. We used up almost every drug on the ship, and Dr. Yussuf's organic deconverter-and-respirator, which he built and used on you, is going to make him the first physical chemist to win a Solarian Prize in medicine."

  "When—when did we take off?"

  "Days ago. We should be near a traffic lane now, not to mention the galactic patrol. Our tanks are stuffed with contra-uranium, our second jet is operating in a clumsy sort of way, and our converter is functioning as cheerily as any atomic converter ever did. After the help we gave them with their own lives, the population of Maximilian II was so busy bringing us Q that we ran out of inerted lead containers. From considering us the personifications of death, they've come to the point where they believe humans go around destroying death, or at least its fear. And it's Jake Donelli who did that."

  "I did, did I?" Donelli was being very cautious.

  "Didn't you? That business about the threshold of life and death being the caves was what I heard you develop with my own ears. It was the only clue I needed. The caves related not only to the sacredness of birth, but—more important to the primitive mind—to the awful terror of death. A threshold, you called it. And so it was, not only between life and death, but between the burrowers and the avians. Once I had that, and with a little scientific guessing, it was simple to figure out why the eggs were laid in apparent reverse order—those of the burrowers near the front, and those of the avians at the rear—and why they had never met each other."

  The spaceman thought that over and then nodded slowly.

  "Simple," Donelli murmured. "Yes, that might be the word. This little shred of scientific guessing you did, just what did it amount to?"

  "Why, that the avians and the burrowers were different forms of the same creature in different stages of the life-process. The winged creatures mate just as their powers start to decline. Before the young hatch, the parents seek out a cave and die there. The young, those white worms, use the parental bodies as food until they have grown claws and can travel down to the tunnels where they become adolescent burrowers.

  "The burrowers, after all, are nothing but larvae—despite the timbering of their shafts and their mining techniques, which Drs. Blaine and Yussuf consider spectacular. They can be considered sexless. After several years, the burrower will return to the cave. In the belief of its fellows it dies there, since it returns no more. It spins a cocoon—that's what those large green balls were—and remains a chrysalis until the winged form is fully developed. It then flies out of the cave and into the open air, where it is accepted by the so-called avians as their junior. It evidently retains no memory of its pre-chrysalis existence.

  "Thus you have two civilizations unaware of each other, each different and each proceeding from the same organism. So far as the organism was concerned in either stage, it went to the cave only to die, and, from the cave, in some mysterious fashion, its own kind came forth. Therefore, a taboo is built up on both sides of the threshold, a taboo of the most thoroughgoing and binding nature, the mere thought of whose violation results in psychosis. The taboo, of course, has held their development in check for centuries, perhaps for millennia. Interesting?"

  "Yeah!"

  "The clue was what was important, Jake. Once I had it, I could relate their life-cycle to the Goma of Venus, the Lepidoptera of Earth, the Sislinsinsi of Altair VI. And the clincher was that one of the winged forms hatched out of a cocoon just after I'd finished explaining what was, up to that moment, only my hypothesis."

  "How did they take it?"

  "Startled at first. But it explained something they were very curious about and swept away an immense weight of ugly fear. Of course, they still die in the caves, to all intents and purposes. But they can see their lives as a perfect reproductive circle with the caves as a locus. And what a reciprocity they can work out—they are working out!"

  "Reciprocity?" Donelli had almost moved to a sitting position.

  Helena wiped his face with a soft cloth. "Don't you see? The burrowers were injuring the avian gardens by nibbling at the roots. They will now use only the roots of old, strong plants which the surface creatures will designate and set aside for them. They will also aid avian horticulture by making certain the roots have plenty of nourishing space in which to grow. In return, the avians will bring them surface plants which are not available to tunnel creatures, while the burrowers provide the surface with the products of their mines and labors underground. To say nothing of the intelligent rearing they can now give their young, though at a distance. And when the fluorescent light system that Dr. Ibn Yussuf worked out for them becomes universal, the avians may travel freely in the tunnels and guide the burrowers to the surface. The instinctual and haphazard may shortly be supplanted by a rich science."

  "No wonder they broke their backs getting Q. And after working that out for them, all you did was repair the ship, fix me up, take off and set a course for the nearest traffic lane?"

  She shrugged her shoulders. "Dr. Blaine helped quite a bit with the take-off. This time, he remembered the buttons! By the way, as far as the record is concerned, he and I maneuvered the ship off the ground under your direct supervision."

  "Oh, so?"

  "Just so. Right, Dr. Blaine?"

  The archaeologist looked up impatiently. "Of course. Of course! There has not been one moment, since the disaster aboard the Ionian Pinafore, when I have not been under Mr. Donelli's orders."

  There was a pause in which Dr. Blaine muttered to Dr. Yussuf over the ax-head.

  "How old are you, Helena?" Donelli asked.

  "Oh—old enough."

  "But too clever, eh? Too educated for me?"

  She cocked her head and smiled at him out of a secret corner of her face. "Maybe. We'll see what happens after we get back to the regular traffic lanes. After we're rescued. After you get your third mate's t
icket. Here—what are you laughing at?"

  He rumbled the amusement out of his throat. "Oh, I was just thinking how we earned our Q. By teaching a bunch of caterpillars that butterflies bring babies!"

  HALLOCK'S MADNESS

  "A most singular case," mumbled Dr. Pertinnet, walking a dignified hop-scotch among the checkered tiles of the sanitarium waiting room. "Can't be unique, of course—nothing's ever unique: must have been someone like Hallock in medical history. Just never recorded."

  Ransom Morrow sighed good-naturedly and heaved himself over to the little doctor. He reached down and plucked at a white sleeve.

  "Hey, Doc, remember me? I've been recorded. Not in the Psychiatrist's Weekly Monitor, but in your appointment book. Nila said you wanted some help. And now that I managed to get on the subject of Nila, how is she and where is she? My expedition's trotting off to Uganda in a week, and I want to do my Christmas shopping early."

  Dr. Pertinnet blinked at him until recognition widened his weak scholarly eyes. "Ransom, my boy! Glad to see you. Miss Budd is taking care of the patient. Hallock—you know, Hallock the explorer. She said you once worshipped him; her idea to call you."

  "Hallock? Wells W. Hallock?" Morrow whistled a slow bar of recollection. "The greatest of them all. Before Peary, before Johnson, before Livingston. And for sheer dogged searching, before even old Ponce de Leon. Mom used to tear his books out of my hands; I had to read them at night under a blanket with a flashlight. He got me interested in broken cities and forgotten temples. Why, if it weren't for Hallock—"

  He broke off and stared down at the old man. "What's the matter with him? And what can I do?"

  "Trauma! Nothing definite, nothing we can name, but it is quite obviously driving him psychotic. And unlike most cases of this sort, he realizes it and wants help desperately. But he seems to feel that our help is worse than nothing at all; he keeps saying that psychiatry will complete the tragedy that curiosity began. He's resisted all our efforts so violently that we've been forced to resort to—well, to the straitjacket."

  Ransom Morrow shook his head. Wells W. Hallock in a straitjacket! Huge, fearless Hallock, who had shot his way out of the underground temple in northern India where the original, primitive Thuggee was practiced, who penetrated to the vampire cult of Lengluana and took flashbulb photographs! Hallock, who had laughed at superstition and dream-fancies and roared his way into the inaccessible, twilit corners of the world!

  An attendant was handing a white envelope and a sheet of beworded paper to Dr. Pertinnet. "That's the complete report, Doctor," he said. "We checked the original analysis as you requested, but the results were the same. No injurious substances—definitely Phoenix dactylifera, however. And we still haven't found the cat."

  "Then find her. Find her!" The attendant backed out in a flurry of sirs and buts. "Valuable experimental animal like that—allowing it to escape and run around as if—"

  "You still haven't told me how I can help."

  The doctor stuffed the envelope and paper into a pocket of his gown. "Of course. Fact is, I don't know myself. Miss Budd mentioned your name to Hallock, told him it was his influence that started you exploring. Now, he insists on seeing you. Says only you can help him, understand him. Pretty usual fixation under the circumstances, except that he never heard of you before. Miss Budd suggested that we call you in any case. He might make a useful slip, if you can win his confidence. I don't see any harm in it, just so you don't get him overexcited."

  They walked down a long, silent, antiseptic corridor. Dr. Pertinnet paused before a smooth door.

  "Understand," he placed a friendly hand on Ransom's shoulder, "understand, we can't have any affectionate hijinks between you and Miss Budd in that room. This case is difficult enough, what with Dr. Risbummer—my predecessor in the case—suddenly taking it in his head to disappear without leaving a trace of his notes. And now the cat. We just can't have any more tomfoolery. Straight scientific investigation."

  "Gotcha, Doc," the young man grinned. "I'll save my research on Nila for this evening. Meanwhile, lead on. I'm agape and agog but not aglow."

  They entered a large, airy room that shrieked of hospital austerity. A screen, a night table, a small chair, and a large bed were its only furniture. Nila Budd, trim, blonde, and hygienically beautiful in her starched white uniform, sat on the chair doling spoonfuls out of a china bowl to a weather-beaten face.

  She paused as they came in, and smiled briefly at Ransom. Then she dropped the spoon into the bowl and set it on the table near a tiny chest made of incredibly yellowed ivory. She walked up to them while the man lying on the bed watched her curiously out of great, deep-sunk eyes. He seemed strangely free, as if the buttoned sheets which restrained his immense body were somehow not significant, somehow didn't matter...

  "I did as you suggested with the sedative, Doctor," she whispered. "He's been fairly docile all day, no trouble at all. Hello, Ran."

  "Hi." He attempted a brief embrace, but she evaded him and walked over to where the doctor stood looking down at Hallock.

  "I've brought you an old admirer," the doctor was saying. "This is Ransom Morrow. Your books inspired him to become an explorer. He's leaving for Uganda next week in search of—of—"

  "Of a paleolithic Hamitic civilization around Lake Albert," Ransom finished, walking over to the bed. "I'm honored to meet you, sir."

  Wells W. Hallock raised his head and stared at the younger man. His hair, cut long and free in the style affected by men of the old West, was no longer the shiny black of a thousand pictures; it was white, thin, and straggled. But his eyes were proud.

  "And it's an honor to meet you, Mr. Morrow," he said at last, in a voice so hoarse that Ransom had to bend over the bed to catch the carefully shaped syllables. "I've heard of your work in North Africa and Ethiopia. But Dr. Pertinnet is very wrong when he says my books made you an explorer. It was curiosity that did it—divine, satanic curiosity—like the curiosity which brought me to this. Your curiosity, Mr. Morrow—it can save me, do you hear, it can save me! Only we must have weapons—an elephant rifle, machine guns, machetes, hand grenades—"

  "Hallock!" The psychiatrist cut in on the sharply rising voice. "If you go on this way, I'll have to ask Mr. Morrow to leave. Now lie back and relax. That's right, rela-a-ax."

  The explorer dropped his head to the pillow. "You had the Fruit analyzed, didn't you?" he asked suddenly.

  Dr. Pertinnet was flustered. "Y-yes. We did. Surprisingly enough, it contains nothing that might be termed a drug." He set the envelope down on the ivory chest and unfolded the sheet of paper given him by the orderly. "Of course, it's difficult to be certain in its present dried condition, but it appears to be nothing more than a variety of Phoenix dactylifera. In other words, a date. Common, ordinary fruit of the date palm."

  "Common, ordinary—"

  The man on the bed tilted his chin at the ceiling and laughed soundlessly. "You call the Fruit a common, ordinary date! What would you call the Gates of Hell, Doctor—doors or railings? Would you look at them and say, 'Why, here's a fence that needs whitewashing?'" He coughed for a moment and continued his feverish whispering. "And what happened when you gave a bit to the cat? Have you found the cat yet?"

  "Why, no. How did you know we gave a piece to a cat?" the doctor asked him suddenly. "Has she been in here? We've searched the hospital—Nurse, have you seen the cat?"

  "No, Doctor," Hallock broke in before Nila could answer, "the nurse hasn't seen the cat. But I have. She's a badly frightened little pussy by now—if she isn't dead. You gave her a pretty large piece, you know. She won't be able to get back. And she hasn't seen any of the larger things yet, just the two-headed snake and the portions of the giant centipede and—"

  The doctor leaned over and gripped the explorer's shoulder through the thick sheets. "Where is the cat, Hallock?" he asked in a soothing voice. "Where did you see her last?"

  "Here," the man on the bed whispered. "Here. In my head. In my horrible brain.
Where I go when you make me fall asleep. Where I meet Dr. Risbummer, cowering and gibbering to himself. Only he isn't Dr. Risbummer any more, but a poor, mad, crippled thing who clings to me for protection, who begs me not to have nightmares because he's tired of running, because he's afraid he'll fall and get caught sometime."

  "Hopeless!" Dr. Pertinnet straightened. "Most unfortunate about Dr. Risbummer's disappearance. Not only don't we have his diagnosis available, but the whole affair has strengthened Hallock's hallucinations. Given them substance, as it were." He moved toward the door. "If we could only find Risbummer!"

  "You can, damn it, you can!" Hallock strained against the sheets. "Give him a chance. Just don't stick any more of those needles into me, don't put me to sleep any more."

  "I told you there would be no further hypodermics, unless you made them necessary. The sedative for tonight has already been administered; Miss Budd mixed it with the broth she fed you."

  Ransom, licking his dry lips, decided he would never forget the look of furious horror that distended Hallock's eyes.

  "You fool! You crazy, crazy, crazy fools!" He writhed on the solid bed as if he wanted to dissolve through it. "I begged—"

  "Now, then, Mr. Hallock," Nila told him, "you do need sleep."

  "Sleep!" The massive head dropped back to the pillow. "Oh, go away. Go away."

  "Miss Budd," the doctor called as he pushed the door open. "I'd like to see you for a moment."

  "Right with you, Doctor." She touched Morrow's arm before slipping after him. "I go off duty in an hour, Ran; hang around and say nice stuff to my patient."

  Hallock watched the nurse leave. "Like her a lot?" he whispered.

  "Yeah."

  "She's a nice girl. And a good nurse. But she doesn't take to the idea of your wandering off to Uganda and similar points unknown?"

  "That's right, sir. Calls it adolescence in longer pants." Morrow dropped to the chair. He was still finding difficulty in associating this heroic wreck with the Wells W. Hallock he had read about—crisp, cynical, fearless...