by William Tenn
Obviously, then, as he began to face the Monster, a moment before it was in full range—that was the time to go into action.
Eric began paying careful attention to the duration of each spin, absorbing the rhythm with his mind. There was no fear in him now; instead there was the beginning of an exultation that almost burst from his lips in a song. If he were successful, he knew, it would be the end of him. Once the explosion occurred, once the Monster was killed, he, Eric, would fall—with or without the rope—an enormous distance to the floor. He would be dashed to pieces upon it. But the life of his captor would have been extinguished first. At last a man would have done what so many men had dreamed of for so long—
Hit back at the Monsters!
The members of his own expedition would see it, Roy, Walter the Weapon-Seeker, Arthur the Organizer, they would see it and cheer themselves hoarse. Hit back at the Monsters! Hit back at them, not as a nibbling annoyance, as a thief of food or artifacts, but as a full and deadly antagonist. Hit back at the Monsters—and with their own weapon!
He hoped the expedition could still see him. The Monster had passed the circular table used for dissection and testing and was going on. Where?
It didn't matter. Nor was it important if he were out of sight of his caged friends. Only one thing counted: get the rhythm of the spin right, make a throw at the exactly correct moment—and take a Monster with him into the sewers. What a trophy to exhibit before the ancestors!
Eric was positive he had the timing now. He allowed himself one more spin, however, and went through the whole process in his mind.
Here I spit. Here I throw. Here it hits, just as I begin to turn. Here the explosion. And here, as my back is toward him, the Monster begins to topple!
Yes, he had the rhythm. He started turning toward the Monster again and held the soft mass near his mouth, working up saliva. He began to see the creature out of the corner of one eye.
Now.
Slowly, carefully, he spat on the ball, turning it round and round in his hand. The arm went back and waited while a portion of his mind beat out the pulsations it had learned. Then, when the Monster was almost in front of him, he threw. He threw in a high arc, aiming for the creature's head, which quivered to and fro at the end of that impossibly long neck. It would hit. Holy Ancestors, he had thrown right!
But, as he began the turn away, Eric saw that something had gone wrong. The Monster had noticed the red ball. And its head had moved down to meet it, mouth opened avidly! The Monster was swallowing it! It was swallowing the weapon!
The last thing Eric saw on that turn was a ripple that went down the length of the great throat. And in the ugly purple eyes—unmistakable enjoyment.
Then the spin had turned his back to the Monster. He waited despairingly for the sound of an explosion—a cataclysm that would tear the immense creature apart from the inside. He didn't hear it. There was a sound at last behind him, not at all an explosion, but loud and odd nonetheless. Eric allowed himself to hope again. The rope from which he hung jerked back and forth.
He twisted his head and strained his eyes as the spin back began. Where was it?
There!
Yes, there it was. He could see the Monster again. And his whole body went limp with defeat.
Ripples continued to run down that long stretch of throat, smaller and smaller ripples as the effect, whatever it was, evidently began wearing off. Whenever a ripple came down to the point where the neck joined the body, there was a repetition of the loud, odd sound Eric had heard when his back was to the Monster. Now, facing it and seeing the entire creature, Eric could almost recognize the sound: not quite a sneeze, a little more than a cough, and more than reminiscent of a human moan of pleasure—with the same enjoyment-filled upbeat at the end.
Yes, the effect was definitely wearing off. The odd sounds came at longer and longer intervals; they were less and less loud. At the end of the curving neck, the triangular head probed about restlessly in great arcs, searching, with what seemed to be a delighted hunger, for more red balls. The Monster's eyes were alight with ecstasy.
Apparently, it did not in any way connect its tiny human captive with the pleasures it had experienced.
That was just as well, Eric decided, hanging from the green rope where it adhered to his back. There was enough of a humiliation involved in having the knowledge all to himself.
Eric the Monster-Toppler. Eric the Alien-Killer. That's how he had seen himself in those few fierce moments of anticipation.
"How about Eric the Monster-Tickler?" he asked himself bitterly. "That's a good name."
What had gone wrong with the weapon? Well, to begin with, he realized, it had probably not been a weapon in the first place. Walter the Weapon-Seeker had stolen it from the Monsters and found it could be used as one—against humans. You added your saliva, threw it against a man—and he exploded. But among the Monsters, it could have been something totally different. A food, a condiment of some sort. A drug, perhaps even an aphrodisiac. Or, conceivably, part of some complex game that they played. Mixed with human saliva, its properties had no doubt been altered. But not in the direction of any danger to the Monster. Eric's carefully mounted attack had given the alien no more discomfort than a concentrated, highly individualized orgy.
There was an important lesson here, something that attacked the foundations of Alien-Science with its belief that man could learn important and useful information from the Monsters. What was utterly inimical to humans could be salutary to the Monsters: it might be healthful, it might be merely pleasant, it might be both. And, logically, the proposition should be sometimes true in its reversed form. What nourished or stimulated humans might destroy Monsters—if such a thing could ever be isolated or discovered!
The thought suggested a line of approach to a weapon that men had dreamed of for countless downtrodden centuries—a true Monster-killer.
Eric began to get excited, to run through possibilities for research in his mind. But his captor's abrupt halt brought him back to where he was at the moment: he had no weapons at all except his good right arm and a couple of spears. And if he was going to do any fighting before he was torn to pieces, he'd better get ready.
They had arrived at the Monster's destination. The green rope to which he was attached was being lowered purposefully. He pulled at his back sling and, after a moment's thought, selected a light spear for his right hand and a heavy one for his left.
If he had a chance, if the creature's head came at all close, he would try a cast with the throwing spear. And he would use the heavy one to ward off the various dissecting ropes and implements. Not that he had much hope: the distances were too great for any decent aim, the power and strength which he faced were too far beyond his own.
But he was Eric the Eye, a warrior and a man.
He looked down. Odd, there was no flat white surface below him. Instead, there was—there was another cage! He was merely being transferred!
Eric sighed out his relief gustily. He was about to replace the spears, but just then the rope lowered him into the exact center of the cage and withdrew from his back. He looked about, examining the place.
The spears he held were what saved his life when the naked girl came at him.
PART III: COUNSELORS FOR THEIR WISDOM
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
As he had dropped into it, still hanging from the rope, the cage had appeared empty. Once on his feet and master of his own motions, he had begun to turn about leisurely. And then that swift, determined patter behind him, a little softer than it should sound when a warrior ran...
Eric whirled, a careful smile on his face, the beginnings of a peaceful greeting on his lips. And he found himself unable to speak.
Because there was a girl charging at him, a stark naked girl with a great mass of light brown hair that spiralled down in one direction to her shoulders and then in the other direction to her hips. And there was a spear in her hands, quite a heavy spear with the longest point Eric had
ever seen. The point was aimed at his belly. The girl was coming fast.
Pure reflex. Eric realized that he had parried the spear upward with one of his own spears.
The girl drew back a pace, set herself and lunged again. Again Eric knocked it away but barely: he felt it go past his throat by half a handsbreadth.
Again she came back, again he parried, again and again and again. He felt as if his mind were giving way—this was like a nightmare you had back in the burrows after a full meal and a big celebration. How could a woman be carrying a weapon? How could a woman be attacking a warrior in direct combat?
She was not going to give up. She was absolutely set on killing him, that was certain. Her eyes were narrowed intently and a red bit of her tongue projected thoughtfully from a corner of her mouth. She held the spear tightly, looked him over for a vulnerable, undefended area, then lunged once more. Eric, using his spear as a club, warded off the thrust.
How could he stop her? He couldn't counterattack—there was the danger of hurting or killing the girl. Alien-Science or Ancestor-Science, whatever you believed in, you always accepted as axiomatic that a nubile woman, a woman of child-bearing age, was untouchable with a deadly weapon, was automatically holy. A warrior who killed such a one ceased to be human: even if he were a chief, his tribe would declare him outlaw.
But she was liable to get through his guard sooner or later. And he couldn't try to take the spear away from her. He'd have to let go of his own spears in order to do that, and the moment he stopped parrying her thrusts she'd run him through.
Meanwhile, all he could do was protect himself. And she was so damned determined! They were both breathing heavily to the rhythm of weapon hitting against weapon. Eric jumped as the girl's long spearpoint missed his eyes infinitesimally.
"Almost got me that time," he muttered.
The girl stopped in the middle of a lunge. She teetered a moment, barely holding her balance, staring at him with widened eyes.
"What did you say?" she breathed. "You said something."
Eric stared back, wondering if she were insane. Should he take the chance now, while her mind was busy with some unexpected problem, should he drop his spears, leap at her and try to take her weapon away?
"Yes, I said something," he told her, watching the spear in her hands carefully. "So what?"
She lowered the spear and stepped back a few paces, strain going out of her face. "I mean you can talk. You have a language."
"Of course I have a language," Eric said irritably. "What the hell do you think I am—a Wild Man?"
The girl answered by flinging her spear aside and dropping to the floor of the cage. She lowered her head to her knees and rocked herself back and forth.
Eric walked away and retrieved the spear. He slung it, along with his own weapons. When he came back to the girl, she was sobbing. And, puzzled as he was, it was evident to him that the sobs were relief and not pain or sorrow.
He waited. Now that she was disarmed, he could afford to be patient. If she turned out to be crazy after all, he'd have to decide what to do with her. Sharing a cage with nobody but a murderous lunatic was a very disagreeable prospect. On the other hand, even a crazy woman was still sacrosanct...
She stopped crying finally and wiped her eyes with the back of one arm. Then she leaned back, locked her arms behind her head and grinned at him cheerfully. Eric felt more disturbed than ever. This was a real odd one.
"Do you know," she said, "that's exactly what I thought you were. A Wild Man."
Eric was astounded. "Me?"
"You. And I wasn't the only one who thought so."
He looked around the cage. There was nobody else in it. This girl was a lunatic beyond any doubt.
She had followed his glance. She chuckled and nodded. "No, I'm not referring to anyone in the cage. I'm referring to that fellow up there. He thought you were a Wild Man too."
Eric looked up along the line of her pointing thumb. The Monster who had brought him still stared down into the cage, the enormous purple eyes unwinking, the prehensile pink tentacles perfectly still. "Why? Why should he—it—think I'm a Wild Man? Why should you?"
A part of him was deeply outraged. To be mistaken for the mythic, terror-inspiring Wild Men—that was too much! You frightened naughty children with stories about hordes of semihuman, hairy creatures who had sunk below the level of language, below the level of weapon and artifact, who had lost, long auld lang synes ago, the universal burrow taboo against cannibalism. You hazed gangling young apprentice warriors with tales of vast, ravaging mobs that came out of nowhere and fought your spears with teeth and nails, mobs that fought not for victory, for territory or for women, but for the ripped-off arms and bloody, broken haunches of their antagonists. And when you asked an older warrior how could there really be such a thing as Wild Men, since nobody you knew had ever seen them, he told you that they were a plague peculiar to the back burrows. Wild Men, he would tell you as he himself had been told by the warriors under whom he had studied, Wild Men did not live in Monster territory and they did not live in the burrows. They lived in another place entirely, a place called the Outside. And when you asked him to explain or describe this Outside, he'd shrug and say, "Well, the Outside is a place where the Wild Men live." You'd go away, proud of your maturity for having at last realized that Wild Men were strictly horror-story stuff, as improbable as any of the other burrow legends of lurking creatures: the blood-sucking Draculas, the packs of vicious police dogs, the bug-eyed men from Mars, and, worst of all, the oil-seeking wildcats who drilled for all eternity from one burrow to another.
But Wild Men were not merely the stuff of legend; they were the material of curses and opprobrium. A severely retarded child might be called a Wild Man, as might a warrior who disobeyed his band leader or a woman who was expelled from the Female Society. When someone in the tribe perpetrated a particularly ugly crime and managed to escape to distant burrows before punishment, you said: "May the Wild Men get him. He belongs with them." A Wild Man was anyone who had failed the test of humankind.
But what right did this girl have to pass such a judgment on him? She couldn't possibly know that his own people had declared him outlaw. And she herself—look at her!—a woman in Monster territory where no woman had a legitimate reason to be—she was a fine one to go around insulting people.
"So that's the primary reason I thought you were a Wild Man," the girl was saying. "Because the big fellow did. He's already deposited two Wild Men in here with me. Luckily, he dropped them in one at a time. I was able to kill each of them the moment they landed, before they could collect their faculties and see how pink and edible I was."
"You mean—there really are such things as Wild Men?"
"Really are such things as Wild Men? You've never seen one? Sweet Aaron the Leader, where are you from?"
From Mankind, Eric started to say, with his old, stiff-backed pride. Then he remembered how it sounded to Strangers—he had learned a lot lately. "I'm from a front-burrow tribe," he said. "A rather small one. I don't think you've heard of us."
The girl nodded. "A front-burrow tribe—that would explain your unlaced hair. And anyone with hair hanging loose is somehow related to the Wild Men as far as the Monsters are concerned. They seem to know enough about me to suspect I'm female—one of the few fully human females they've ever caught, I guess—but because my hair hangs loose they keep hauling Wild Men in here for me to mate with. And it's gotten pretty hectic, let me tell you! The way I feel about myself, a mate for someone maybe, a dinner no. I'd been conditioned to expect nothing but Wild Men, and the moment I saw you with all that flopping hair, I said to myself, Rachel, here we go again. If I'd had any sense, I'd have paid some attention to the fact that you were carrying spears and knapsacks and all kinds of fully human equipment."
"Your name is Rachel? Mine's Eric, Eric the Eye."
She scrambled to her feet and held out a small hand warmly. "Hello, Eric. I'm Rachel Esthersdaughter, Rachel for short.
It's good to have someone to talk to. A front-burrower," she mused. "Naturally, you've never seen Wild Men. They practically never get to the front burrows—it's too far from the Outside for their comfort. But my people have to be battling them back to their wide open spaces all the time. The Monsters have apparently been picking up a lot of them, though, for experimental purposes; they must have traps all over the Outside. Hey, look."
Eric followed her gaze upwards. The Monster who had brought him was swinging ponderously around and moving off.
Rachel giggled. "Ah-h, how sweet. He feels he's made a match at last. He wants to leave the lovers alone. First time in a long while he hasn't had to remove a corpse from this cage immediately afterward."
Feeling awkward and embarrassed, Eric inquired: "What made him decide that everything is all right?"
"Well, first, the fact that I didn't kill you, of course. Then he sees us shaking hands. I don't think they know any more about us, really, than we know about them. They probably think the act of shaking hands is it. You know, Love's Old Sweet Song, one mad moment of passion, my soul shudders and my senses reel."
Eric felt his face turning red. He'd never come across any woman as direct and as casual as this; it was particularly disconcerting in combination with the unbound hair that denoted an unmarried state. He tried to change the subject. "You're from the Aaron People, Rachel, aren't you?"
She had started to walk away from him to a corner of the cage. Now she turned back. "How did you know? Front-burrowers rarely reach our base... Oh, I remember. I called on Sweet Aaron the Leader."