by William Tenn
"Sure. You saw it. Remember the guy that Walter said was from the Aaron People, the one who died the day after we arrived? They took him out with his skirt wrapped around his face just the way we had placed it. That's the way they dumped him into the black hole—that's the way they do it with everyone who dies in the cage."
"The Monsters do seem to have a thing about death," Rachel mused aloud. "Or at least death as it has to do with human beings. Their interest in us is strictly in vivo, as the ancestors would say. But what difference does that make to you, Eric? Once we're dead—"
"Once we're dead, we have a good chance to stay alive," he told her. "And I'm not being funny. Roy, do you want to escape with us?"
After one startled stare, the Runner bobbed his head emphatically. "Do I! Any plan you have, no matter how dangerous it is, count me in. The way I see it, there's no real future here for an ambitious young man."
"The plan I have is very dangerous. An awful lot of things can go wrong, but it's absolutely the only way out of the cage that I can see. All right, let's get started."
Under his instructions, they went into action. He drove them both the way he'd been driving himself, doggedly, unremittingly. And the work went fast.
But once Rachel looked up and asked anxiously: "Aren't you taking a lot for granted, Eric? You have inference piled on inference. We don't know that much for certain about the construction of Monster houses."
"If I'm wrong, we'll be killed. And if we stay here?"
Rachel put her head down, sighed, and went back to her task.
Another time, it was Roy who exploded. He was learning and growing, too—and becoming less deferent. "Look, Eric, you have no reason to believe these things work. Even Rachel—who's from the Aaron People—even she says she's never heard of these things before."
"Yes, she has. She knows them under another name—the Archimedes principle. And I told you, I've experimented with them. I've experimented with them over and over again. They'll work."
When they were almost finished with the construction, they began timing the approach of the Monster who fed them every day. Eric's plan was complicated enough: if the strains upon them were not to be too great, they had to initiate their operation shortly before a feeding time. And it was necessary for them to store food and drinking water. Who knew when they would come close to these essentials again?
Rachel looked at her torn and shredded cloak, the equipment from its pockets scattered about the floor of the cage like so much litter. "The only thing," she said in a low, miserable voice, "that I find really painful, darling, is your destroying my protoplasm neutralizer. The work, the research, that went into that gadget! And it was the whole point of my being sent into Monster territory. To go back to my people without it, after all this—"
"If we get back to your people," Eric told her calmly, working away at a folded section of the rodlike device, "the most important thing you can tell them is that the neutralizer works. Once they know that, they can build others like it. Meanwhile, we have nothing else we can turn into a really strong hook. And without a strong hook—even if everything else works right—we don't have a chance."
The Runner came across the cage and stood beside him. "I've been thinking, Eric. You'd better tie the hook to my hands. I'm at least as strong as you. But you're smarter: I think you'll do better with the opening. I promise to hang on with all my might."
Eric finished twisting the rod of the protoplasm neutralizer into a serviceable hook. Then he sat back and thought. He nodded. "All right, Roy," he said. "That's the way we'll do it. But don't let go!" He put the uncurved end of the hook into Roy's hands: the Runner gripped it firmly. Then Eric tied the device to Roy's hands, running more straps from it around his arms, back across his shoulders. The hook had become almost a part of Roy's body.
Now they tied themselves and their equipment to the remains of the cloak. The two men adjusted their forehead glow lamps for the last time. Eric put Rachel between himself and the Runner, lashing her first to Roy's waist and then to his. "Hang on to Roy's shoulders," he advised her, "just in case the straps go. I'll be hanging on to yours."
When he was through, they were three people who formed a bound-together unit, at the furthest end of which was Roy the Runner holding a long hook that was tied to his hands as an extra precaution. They heard the Monster approaching with the food, and they lay down clumsily.
"Here we go, everybody," Eric told them. "Play dead!"
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
There was no shower of food into the cage. Instead, there was a long, almost unbearable pause in which they sensed the startled Monster was examining them.
They had agreed to keep their eyes tightly closed—as well as their limbs stiffly extended—until they were out of the cage and well on their way. For all they knew, Monster vision might be acute enough to detect their pupils moving. It also might be able to detect respiration, but here they had to take their chances. "Either we try to hold our breath as long as possible," Eric had pointed out, "and run the risk of a large, noisy gasp just when it's watching us most carefully, or we breathe as softly and as gently as we can. Tell yourself that you're asleep. Try to relax and hope we get away with it."
But it was hard. Moment after dangerous moment, it was hard to lie there perfectly still and not open your eyes for just one fast look at what was happening directly over your head.
At last there was a sensation of movement in the cage: the coldness of the green rope twined about their bodies, fusing itself to their flesh. A jerk, and they rose upward as a unit, their equipment knocking and slapping against them. Now real self-control was necessary; the experience of leaving a solid floor was terrifying enough, but panic began to screech and gibber behind eyes that could not see because they were squeezed shut.
The worst moment of all came when the Monster held them high in the air for a prolonged scrutiny. The ugly stink of alien breath grew overpoweringly strong—apparently the creature's head was very close to them. They had to appear limp and yet maintain control of their diaphragms. Eric hung on to a last inhalation, keeping his chest absolutely motionless. He hoped the others had done the same.
What was being felt by that enormous hulk of flesh? Disappointment over a promising experiment that had gone wrong so abruptly? Was the feeling at all similar to the one which humans knew? And would the disappointment be sharp enough to cause a change in the routine all three of them had observed the Monsters go through on such occasions?
"The Monsters do seem to have a thing about death," Rachel had said. They did: once a human captive appeared lifeless, they were interested only in disposing of him. A vital part of Eric's plan was based on this attitude; suppose curiosity about the causes of death and the changes inside a human body—suppose curiosity became dominant in the creature's mind. Eric fought hard to control a shudder. He failed. Beside him, in the circle of his arms, his mate's warm body shuddered in response.
Apparently having reached a decision, the Monster lowered them a little and set off.
Eric felt he could now venture a careful squint. He opened his eyes slightly, keeping his body, legs and arms as stiff as ever. Visibility was poor—not only were they spinning about at the end of the green rope, but the great bladders tied to each of his shoulders rolled from side to side and intermittently got in front of his face.
It was a long while before he could see for certain that they were being brought to the huge white table surface upon which dissections took place. So far so good. In the middle of the white surface was the dark hole at which his entire scheme had been directed. Would they be torn apart investigatively on the surface, or would they be dropped, casually and immediately, into the disposal hole, as they had hoped and planned they would? At this moment, after weeks of meditation on Monster behavior by himself and after days of reviewing the project with Roy and Rachel, it suddenly seemed too much to expect. He had been an idiot—they would never get away with it! How could he, Eric, have anticipated t
he thought processes of a Monster!
For that matter, how could the Monster fail to notice the odd equipment with which they were festooned, so unlike that of any other human captives it had ever seen? How could it fail to wonder at the three of them being tied so closely together? Better to untie themselves right now and be prepared to run in different directions as soon as they were deposited on the table top—one of them might survive, might escape. Bound together they'd be completely helpless!
Eric grappled with himself and managed to return to sanity. He must remember that the Monsters ignored all human artifacts. He had seen that proven out dozens of times, and Rachel, from her vaster knowledge, had assured him that no exception to the rule had ever been observed. The Monsters seemed to see no relationship between the equipment men carried about and the possibility of intelligence. It was not just that human artifacts and Monster artifacts were so utterly and essentially different. Men were no more than pests as far as the Monsters were concerned, scuttling, unthinking pests peculiar to this planet, pests who nibbled at Monster food and damaged Monster belongings. The things that men wore on their bodies or conveyed from place to place were the accumulations of vermin, the debris, the litter, of creatures rather low on the evolutionary scale. The Monsters apparently saw no connection between the men who bred inside their walls and the once-proud owners of the planet they had brushed aside centuries ago.
Nor was Monster ignorance on this subject at all remarkable, Eric thought bitterly. When you thought of the cultural abyss between the space-wanderers, the poets and philosophers that Rachel had described in her history lessons—and the blinking, fearful things among whom he had been reared...
No, the plan might work or it might not, but bolting to another one at this point would be bloody suicide. They would find out soon enough.
As he grew relatively calm again, Eric heard the harsh breathing of his companions and realized that pretty much the same thoughts had been going through their minds: they too had been thinking of cutting themselves loose from each other and preparing to make a run for it once they got to the white table surface. He was recalled to his responsibilities as commander.
"Easy, Rachel. Take it slow, take it slow, Roy," he whispered lightly. "Everything's working out fine—couldn't be better. Get ready to go into action."
He didn't dare turn to look at their faces, but the tone of his voice seemed to help. Short, convulsive breaths grew softer, gentler. And he remembered where the words had come from. These were the identical reassurances which his uncle, Thomas the Trap-Smasher, used to chant to the members of his band as they came face to face with battle-danger. Perhaps all military commanders, throughout human history, had used the very same words.
And now they were directly over the great expanse of white table. Eric felt his stomach shift and cower inside him. What was the Monster going to do with them? Was it going to—
The Monster did exactly as he had figured it would. It lowered the green rope to the dark circle of the disposal hole—and released them. If they were dead, they were garbage.
They plummeted down, holding tightly to each other. The hole seemed to widen enormously as they fell toward it.
Just as they dropped beneath its surface, there was a blast of sound. Roy the Runner had screamed. It was not a scream of pain. It was a scream of pure despair, of horror, of overwhelming misery. And, in a flash of sympathetic horror, Eric understood it.
Despite all their preparation and all their discussion, the same mad thought had been pulling against its strap in the back of his own mind, and he had fought hard to keep it from breaking loose. They were going down, if his calculations had been correct, they were going down into the sewers of Monster territory. Only dead people went into the sewers. They were going down to where the dead people were.
What avail were hours or even days of rational, intelligent talk about the use of Monster plumbing as an escape route—what avail was conscious decision against the dread that had lain buried in one's subconscious since childhood, since one had seen the first corpse ceremoniously sewered? The moist, rotting legions of the dead inhabited the sewers, and the dead were vicious, the dead were nasty. They would allow no one to return who made the same grim journey that they had made.
That was what Roy had remembered at the last moment. Not the sewers as a possible line to freedom which the adult Roy was eager to investigate; but the sewers as a cemetery of time itself from which the child in Roy still shrank back in ultimate loathing. And he had lost control of himself. He had screamed.
It almost cost them everything, that scream.
The green rope whipped down into the hole after them. Craning his neck upward, at the rapidly receding whiteness in which the Monster's pink tentacles were framed, Eric saw the rope come to the end of its length a little more than a man's height above their heads. He saw it grow thin and dwindle in size, still twitching for their flesh, as they continued to fall.
Something hit them a tremendous wallop. It was as if they had smashed into the floor after a drop from a cage high up in Monster territory.
The water, Eric realized, a few moments after impact, as he struggled back to awareness. They had hit the water.
Instinctively, he had held his breath and tightened his grip even further on Rachel. And the straps that lashed them together were holding! Beyond the woman, he could feel her hugging Roy as they plunged down, down, down through the cold wetness. At least they were still together.
This much of his plan had worked. Now it was up to the bladders he had designed. A pair were tied to each of them at shoulder height. They were made of the waterproof material of Rachel's cloak, filled with air that had been blown into them and sealed with an adhesive the Aaron People had developed for mending garments.
"But Eric," Rachel had demurred. "It's never been tested in those conditions—under so much water and pressure for such a long time."
"Then we'll test it," he had told her. "We'll find out how good an adhesive it really is. Our lives will depend on it."
Their lives depended on additional factors as well. On their falling far enough to enter the main sewer pipe, for example. Otherwise, their bladders would take over and pull them back to the surface of the water in the disposal hole, where they would be helpless. The Monster could then pick them out at its pleasure.
They were still falling through the water, but they were falling more and more slowly. When could they breathe again? Down they went and down, and still there was nothing but water all around them. Eric began a slow slide away from consciousness. He dug his fingers deeper into Rachel's arms. His chest was exploding...
Suddenly, the quality of the water changed—and so did their direction. They shot off to one side in the midst of an incredible turbulence, going round and round each other, first this way, then that, up, down, up—and, at last, they stayed up.
They were in the sewer pipes, and they had surfaced.
The bladders kept their heads on top of the swiftly running current. Eric groaned air into his lungs; he heard Rachel and Roy doing the same. Oh, breathing was good, so good! The fetid air of Monster sewage was really delicious.
"It worked!" Rachel gasped after a while. "Darling, it worked!"
He forbore to tell her that it had only worked up to now. The third part of his plan was coming up. If that didn't work out right, everything they had achieved would be useless. Where did the Monster sewers empty? Rachel had suggested the ocean or a sewage disposal plant. He'd rather not find out.
"Are you all right, Roy?" Eric called, being careful to lift his chin so that none of the water got into his mouth.
"I'm fine," the Runner yelled back over the booming roar of the current. "And I've got the hook ready. You tell me when."
They were skimming down a pipe whose diameter, Eric estimated, must be about one-half the height of an average burrow. The curving top of the pipe was only a short distance above their heads—a little less than an arm's length.
; A difficult command decision was involved here. The only way they could get out was through a pipe joint. Assuming they could open one from the bottom—and though Roy and Rachel had agreed with him that it was possible, they'd both looked as dubious as he felt—the selection of the joint upon which they'd make their attempt had to be a matter of fairly careful timing. It would be useless to try to open one that lay within the boundaries of Monster territory: there would be nothing but hard, immovable flooring above it. Once the pipe had entered the walls and begun running through them, it would be surrounded by the insulating material which human beings knew as the burrows. There, any given pipe joint might well be used for garbage disposal and burial of the dead by a tribe living in its neighborhood—and the tribe would have cut an opening in the burrows floor immediately above the joint.
Uncovering a pipe joint from the bottom would be an incredibly difficult and exhausting piece of work; if, at the end, they found a solid floor above them, they would have to enter the water again very tired and very discouraged. Logically, they should therefore make their attempt later rather than earlier. They should wait until they were certain beyond any doubt that they were back inside the walls.
On the other hand, the water was viciously cold, and being burrows creatures, long removed from the Outside, they were not at all used to cold. Furthermore, they kept passing the mouths of tributary pipes which belched more filth—and more water—into the main channel along which they were hurtling. This had two results: it kept raising the level of the water they were in closer and closer to the curving pipe top overhead—and it kept increasing the speed of the current. The first was frightening enough, but the increased speed might shortly make it impossible for Roy to catch on to a pipe joint with the hook that was tied about his hands and arms. And if Roy failed, they'd never get out.
No, Eric decided, he'd better take the very next pipe joint they passed. The result would be a matter of luck—and he had come to feel he could trust his luck. It was certainly much better than his father's: he had managed to get out of Monster territory, alive and with his mate.