by William Tenn
Eric gave him a friendly slap on the shoulder. "Don't tell me. Show me. I'll leave it completely in your hands." He had seen his uncle, Thomas the Trap-Smasher, talk to his men in precisely this way—and he knew it worked.
It worked. Arthur began detailing a group of men to act as guards around any future water supply and another group to practice as a canteen brigade. Eric called Walter the Weapon-Seeker to his side.
"I want you to requisition all spare leather straps that the men are carrying. Braid them into experimental ropes. Try it different ways, two strands, three strands, whatever occurs to you. Let's see how strong a rope we can get."
The Weapon-Seeker shook his head. "Don't expect it to work. We can't do much braiding with the short lengths the men are liable to come up with. I've been turning it over in my mind, and that wounded Stranger was right. The kind of straps we have—they're fine for holding hair in place or even a knapsack, but if you tie them into any kind of length and expect them to support real weight, say three or four men, they'll just snap."
"Try it anyhow," Eric urged. "And use as many men as you can. If they're busy enough, they won't have the time to get scared." He paused. "How come you called the wounded man a Stranger? Isn't that a front-burrow term?"
"Sure. But we back-burrowers use it too. For people like him." Walter gestured with his thumb. "I've seen that kind of skirt before, with pockets all over. You know who wears those skirts? The Aaron People."
Intrigued, Eric stared in the direction that Walter was indicating. The Aaron People again. The legendary people from which his grandmother had come. The people who had refused to join in the Alien-Science revolution, but who also, it seemed, had not particularly opposed it. The man did not look so very different. He was responding to Roy's ministrations feebly, but—except for his clothes—he might just as well have been any one of the men in the expedition who had been wounded.
"Why wouldn't he identify himself? Why keep it a secret?"
"That's the Aaron People for you. They're goddam snobs. They think they're better than the rest of us and that we shouldn't have any idea of what they're up to. They're always like that, the bastards."
Eric was amused to note again that a back-burrower like Walter was as uncertain intellectually relative to the Aaron People as a warrior of Mankind might be when confronted with the superior material culture of almost any Stranger at all.
But he himself was a warrior of Mankind—and most of the expedition was probably aware of it. How long would they follow a front-burrower?
"Get on with those ropes," he said. "We may need them. I'm planning on a mass escape."
"Seriously?" There was a momentary flash of hope in Walter's eyes. "How?"
"I'm not too sure, just yet. I'm still working on it. Something we used to do back in my home tribe."
The Weapon-Seeker went off to organize groups of men for rope research. He must have passed on what Eric had said to him: from time to time, a group would whisper excitedly when its young leader walked by.
Eric had seen them sitting around glumly the night before: he knew that men without hope are worse than useless. And he—or somebody else—might come up with a usable idea at any time. The men should be on their toes and ready to move when that happened.
But there was no sense in lying to himself about his primary reason for starting the rumor. He needed it to reinforce his position. Men had to be given reason for believing in their leader—especially when the leader came from a background most of them despised.
He had reached the quiet, flat conviction that he was the best chief they could have, under the circumstances. It was not simply that he'd been the first to recover last night and had taken over because somebody had to. No. He'd seen more than enough of back-burrow methods on expedition: their poor march discipline, their disorganized reactions to the unexpected, their interminable talk when a quick decision was necessary. He was willing to admit now that almost any Stranger knew more facts and could make more things than he, was a better man when it came to large-scale burrow politics or the intricate details of religious discussion—but it took a warrior of Mankind, trained from childhood in the dangerous front burrows, to point the way to survival amid the constantly recurring catastrophes of Monster territory. And he was a warrior of Mankind, the son of one famous band leader and the nephew of another, a proven Eye in his own right. He was the best chief this bunch could have.
Meanwhile, they must be kept occupied and hopeful until a good plan for escape materialized. If a good plan for escape materialized.
A Monster's neck writhed out of the harsh white illumination in the direction of their cage. Pink tentacles held a jerking green rope above them for a moment, while the wet purple eyes looked here and there as if making a choice. Then the rope came down near an upward-staring man and fused itself to his back, ripples of darkness pulsating along the part of it that touched him.
When the rope was pulled up, there was a single, startled yelp from the man who went with it. After that, he relaxed and stared curiously about, awaiting developments while he was being carried off. He was evidently not nearly as frightened of this strange method of locomotion as he'd been the day before, the first time he'd experienced it.
Eric strode over to the wounded man whom Roy was tending. "What's going to happen to him?"
Jonathan Danielson had grown worse. His entire body was blotchy and discolored. He gestured toward a corner of the cage with dull, uncaring eyes. "You can see from there. Take a look," he said weakly.
Most of the men followed Eric to the corner. From that point, with a view pretty much unobstructed by rods or other cages, they could see a flat, white surface supported by rods coming up from the floor all around its circumference. At such an enormous distance, it looked rather small, but when the Monster had deposited the captured man on it—carefully fastening down his spread arms and legs with great clips attached to the surface—Eric realized that the entire population of his own tribe, Mankind, could be accommodated there with plenty of room to move about.
At first it was hard to see clearly just what the Monster was doing. A collection of green ropes was assembled near the fastened man. Some of the ropes were short and thick and curled, others were thin and seemed fairly rigid. The Monster would pick up a rope, poke it at the man or touch him with it, then put the rope down and select another one.
The man's body seemed to strain against the fastenings more and more violently. They all leaned forward squinting their eyes. Suddenly, Eric understood what was happening. A long, low groan heaved itself from his chest and tore out of his mouth.
"It's pulling his skin off!" someone behind him said in horrified disbelief.
"It's tearing him to pieces. Look, it's ripping his arms and legs apart!"
"Those bastards! Those bastards! What do they want to do a thing like that for?"
Now, long red lines were radiating from the man's broken body in every direction on the circular white surface. He must have been screeching from the moment the Monster bent to its work, but this far away they could hear nothing.
And still the Monster went on calmly and studiously, this rope, that rope, poking, prodding, slicing, tearing.
All around Eric, the members of the expedition were turning away. Some were throwing up, others were cursing monotonously and hopelessly to themselves. One man kept asking himself in a dazed, pleading voice: "What do they want to do a thing like that for? What do they want to do a thing like that for?"
But Eric forced himself to watch. He was an Eye, and an Eye must see all there is to see. He was also responsible for his men—and anything he could learn about the Monsters might help them.
He saw what was left of the man's body grow still and quiet in its puddle of blood. The Monster's neck bent to one side, came back with a transparent tube. Its pink tentacles unfastened the corpse. Then they held the tube directly over the body. A stream of water shot out, washing the dead man and all the blood that had poured out of him
into the center of the white surface, where there was a dark round hole. He disappeared into the hole. The Monster played the stream of water over its collection of green ropes, apparently cleansing them. It put the tube down and walked away from the circular surface, now all white and clean again.
Head bent, his stomach rolling hideously inside him, Eric stumbled back to where Jonathan Danielson lay all alone. The Stranger answered his question before he put it:
"Dissection. They want to find out if you people are like the other humans they've taken apart. I think they dissect one man in every group they capture." He moved his head restlessly back and forth and drew a deep breath. "When they placed me up here, there was another man from my party still alive. Saul Davidson. They kept Saul down there and dissected him."
"And the rest of us," Eric said slowly, "are to be used up in other experiments."
"From what I've seen happening in the cages below—yes." Jonathan Danielson's lips curved in a gray, humorless smile. "Remember my saying that if a rope broke and you fell to the floor of the Monster burrow, it would not be a bad way to die?"
"Those green ropes, the ones the Monsters use—do you know how they work?"
"The basic principle is protoplasm affiliation. The Monsters have been doing a lot with protoplasm affiliation lately. That's why my band was sent out here."
"What kind of affiliation?"
"Protoplasm affiliation," the injured man repeated. "Ever see one of those doorways they set up in walls? They open and close like a curtain; if they're so much as touched, they stop moving."
Eric nodded, remembering the fissure that had suddenly appeared, and which he and Roy had been able miraculously to hold open long enough for Walter the Weapon-Seeker to run back through.
"The doorways reverse the principle. Protoplasm rejection."
"I think I understand you, but what's this word you keep using—this protoplasm?"
Jonathan Danielson swore softly. "Sweet Aaron the Leader!" he said. "I've been carrying on a conversation with a savage who's never even heard of protoplasm!" He turned his face away, sighing hopelessly.
Feeling as inadequate and inferior as when he had first met Arthur the Organizer in the huge piece of Monster furniture, Eric stared down and shifted his weight from one foot to the other.
"Are you from the Aaron People?" he asked at last in an uncertain voice.
No answer.
"My grandmother was from the Aaron People—so they tell me. Deborah the Dream-Singer. Have you heard of her?"
"Oh, go away, go away," Jonathan Danielson murmured. "I'm dying, and I have a right to die with a few civilized thoughts in my head."
Eric tried to bring himself to ask another question and found he couldn't. He wandered away disconsolately, feeling less like a leader than the youngest initiate ever assigned to a war band.
Someone was trying to attract his attention. Walter the Weapon-Seeker. The chunky man was waving a rope made up of many short straps knotted together and then braided. "We're ready to test the first one. Want to watch?"
"Yes. I guess so. Listen, Walter," Eric said with great casualness. "You have all kinds of specialists here from the back-burrow tribes. Do you know anybody who's done work in protoplasm?"
"In what?"
"Protoplasm. Protoplasm affiliation or rejection. I don't care which. You know what protoplasm is, don't you?"
"I do not. I never heard of the stuff."
"Well, then, don't bother," Eric told him, feeling immensely better. "I'll take care of it. Let's try the rope."
They set a man at either end of the rope and had him pull against the other. It held. But when the men let the rope go slack and abruptly jerked it taut, it broke in the center.
"So much for the first experiment," Walter said. He placed the palms of his hands together and bowed his head over them. "Oh, well," he said in a low voice, "back to the drawing boards." He looked up shyly at Eric. "I hope you don't mind my using a little Ancestor-Science. That's one of the oldest invocations known to my people."
"Use anything, from any faith. We've had far too much religious narrowness and fanaticism."
The next morning, after they were fed and watered, a Monster appeared again with a searching green rope. But this time, the man selected was removed only after a good deal of uproar. The occupants of the cage stampeded in a tightly packed, roaring mass from one end of it to the other. Eric, fighting for the self-control necessary in a leader, tried to stand aside, but the hysterical mob picked him up and absorbed him in one of its headlong swoops across the cage.
Through it all, the Monster was quite patient, its tentacles twirling the length of green just above the cage until the man it was after was temporarily separated from his fellows. It evidently knew exactly which human being it wanted. Down came the rope, touching the man on the shoulder and pulling him up again. A few of his friends tried to hold on to his legs, but they were forced to let go when they were drawn as high as the upper lip of the wall. Some other men angrily and helplessly threw spears, but these bounced off the Monster's skin. Then they stood weeping in the corner and watched him being carried to the flat white surface.
At least he died quickly. This was no prolonged dissection, but a brief though quite nasty moment of agony in an experimental trap. Again, Eric observed to the end, memorizing the features of the trap for possible use some time in the future.
Again, bloody fragments were washed down a round hole in the middle.
"Hit back at the Monsters," a man near him was praying. "I don't care how. All I ask is one day to know that I've hit back at them."
Eric agreed. The truth in these ancient chants! Alien-Science or Ancestor-Science—whichever would work—anything to hit back—anything!
The stampede had resulted in a casualty. Roy the Runner showed Eric where Jonathan Danielson lay, life trampled out of him by scores of feet. "I saw him try to roll out of the way. He was too weak, poor guy."
They examined the dead man's possessions. Most of the articles in the pockets of his skirt were unfamiliar except for an odd, short spear which someone recognized and called a clasp knife. It looked useful, a bigger version of the shaving tool used by warriors, and Eric appropriated it. Arthur the Organizer removed Jonathan's skirt and spread it over his face.
"If he's one of the Aaron People," Arthur explained, "that's the way he should be sewered. They always cover the faces of their dead."
Sewering was a problem, however, despite the stern injunction of the burrows that it be done immediately. They couldn't get him down the tiny hole in the corner. But they couldn't leave a rotting corpse among them.
Just as Eric had arranged to get the body up the cage wall and have it dropped down the other side, Monster watchfulness and observation took the problem out of his domain. A green rope fell from above and coiled about the body, lifting it into the air with the skirt still held carefully against the face, exactly as Arthur had disposed it.
Did the Monsters understand and respect human religious observances, Eric wondered? No, they probably just took men's bodies as they found them. He saw the corpse carried to the circular dissecting surface and dropped with an unceremonious splash into its central black hole.
Then, astonishingly, the Monster came back to the cage, lowered the green rope once more—and plucked Eric out.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
It all happened so fast, so utterly without warning, that Eric had no time to think of running across the cage or struggling to evade capture. One startled yelp escaped him as he rose high into the air and saw the upturned faces of his companions recede into indistinguishable white dots.
And then he was moving through vastness, dangling from the end of the Monster's rope. There was a cold streak making a diagonal across his back where the rope had welded itself to his flesh. But worse was the cold dampness in his mind, the liquid terror that was congealing into the certainty of imminent and very painful death.
Dissection? No, according to Jonatha
n Danielson, the Monsters were satisfied with a single sample from each group. More likely another trap to be tried out, something as ugly as the one he'd just seen chew up a man.
...a laboratory where they test all kinds of homicides: sprays, traps, poisoned lures, everything...
Which of these was he to experience? In what Monster test was he to scream out the last tortured shreds of life?
In one respect he was fortunate. He knew roughly what to expect. He would be no docile laboratory animal—that at least. He would fight, as long as he could, in any way that he could. His hand moved to the back sling for a spear, then stopped.
No. Don't waste a spear until there was a chance of a good cast. Wait until he was set down and was close to a vital organ, an eye, say, or a mouth open enough to expose the inside of the throat. A badly thrown spear now would only alert the Monster to his murderous determination. Not that he had too much hope in human weapons: he'd already seen spears bounce harmlessly off that thick gray hide.
What he needed now was one of the unusual implements of warfare that a man like Walter the Weapon-Seeker might come up with. That soft red stuff the chunky man had given him on their first meeting—it had blown the head off Stephen the Strong-Armed—
He still had some of that left! His first Theft—Eric had intended to keep evidence of it until his dying day. But, from the appearance of things, that day had moved into the immediate present.
A weapon Walter had stolen from the Monsters, to be used now against them!
He reached behind him, felt around in the knapsack until he located the stuff. How much should he tear off? A very little bit had done for Stephen quite spectacularly. But the Monster: look at the size of the creature! Better use it all—and make it count.
As he spun from the rope's end, facing first one way, then another, in the soaring white space, Eric weighed the irregular red ball in his right hand and waited for an opportunity. It was going to be complicated: he had to spit on the stuff before he threw it, and, once it was moistened, he had to get rid of it immediately. That meant he had to figure his opening exactly right—if the spin were turning him away from the Monster once he'd spat on the red ball, he'd have to get rid of it anyway; he'd have to throw his only real weapon away into emptiness and waste it.