by Chad Oliver
He neither advanced nor gave ground.
He never saw an Earthman before, Sanders thought. He hasn’t learned to be afraid.
“Get the fish,” Sanders said.
Ralph hauled up the golden fish and handed it to Sanders. “Let me go first,” Sanders said. “He won’t worry so much about just one of us.”
He took the fish and held it in his hand where the man could see it. He walked toward him, slowly.
The man stood his ground.
Sanders got close enough to touch him. He noticed that his eyes were brown. He held out the fish with his right hand. With his left hand he pointed first to the fish and then to the man. He smiled.
The man took the fish, sniffed it, and broke its neck with one quick jerk. He put the fish in a pouch he carried around his waist. He smiled back, showing white even teeth, He put his spear down on the ice and pushed back his hood. He took a bone comb out of his straight black hair and handed it to Sanders.
Sanders took it. He pointed to himself. “Sanders,” he said slowly. “Sanders.”
The man caught on instantly. “Narn,” he said, pointing to himself. His voice, picked up by Sanders’ suit phones, was high and musical. He said nothing else,
Sanders led him over to Ralph. He introduced them and the man repeated Ralph’s name. Then he repeated Sanders’ name and pointed to Sanders. He smiled, happily.
The three men stood on the ice, completely stumped by the frustrating wall of language.
He has a language, Sanders thought. Certainly he doesn’t live alone, because he is a man. His people must hunt and fish and gather what plants there are here. No agriculture, no cities, no nothing. This land won’t support but a handful. How many? Fifty? Sixty? A hundred? They never had much of a chance on this world. What happens to them now? What happens to them now—after they’ve met the men from Earth?
There was no wind, there was only cold.
Desolation was all around them.
The man in the black skins looked at the shining copter curiously.
“Narn,” he said again, and pointed.
Sanders turned to Ralph. “Guess he wonders what it is,” he said.
Ralph pointed to himself, and then to the copter. He pointed into the dark sky and moved his finger in an arc to the ground.
Instantly, Narn grew agitated. He tried to talk, rapidly, and then abandoned the attempt. He pointed at the copter, and then into the air. His eyes were bright and excited.
“He thinks we came from the sky in the copter,” Ralph said.
“Didn’t we?”
Narn pointed again at the copter and tugged Sanders’ arm. “He wants to see it up close, Ralph.”
“Okay by me.”
Narn hurried across the ice, easily, without effort. Sanders and Ralph couldn’t keep up with him. When they reached the copter, Narn was already patting its sides and trying to lift it off the ground.
“Boy,” Sanders said, shivering in the cold, “we don’t awe this guy any.”
“Does he really want to go up?”
Narn settled that question. He pointed insistently up into the clear air. He grinned from ear to ear.
“Roll all the windows down,” Sanders said. “We’ll keep our suits on.”
He helped the man into the copter and strapped him in a seat. Narn was not happy about the strap, but seemed to trust them. He looked around eagerly.
Ralph took the copter up five hundred feet and then loafed along over the rocks and the ice and the wet green mosses. Narn stared from the copter to the ground and back again. He did not try to speak. He watched Ralph intently. The look in his eyes was almost religious in its intensity.
Sanders stayed at his side.
They had been in the air ten minutes when Narn spoke.
“San-ders.”
Sanders turned and smiled.
Narn pointed at himself, and then at the copter controls.
“This,” Ralph said slowly, “is about where I get out.”
“San-ders.”
“My God,” Ralph said. “He can’t fly this thing.”
Sanders leaned forward. “How do you know he can’t!”
“He’s never even seen a copter before.”
“San-ders. San-ders.”
Sanders looked at Narn and wondered. “He’s about the last of his kind, Ralph,” he said finally. “He’s lived on a world that’s tough beyond belief, lived there maybe for millions of years. He’s used what there was, gone as far as he could in a hopeless ecological situation. He’s survived.”
“Sure, sure. I’m all for him. Adaptability. High intelligence. But no man can go from a spear-thrower to a copter in ten minutes.”
“He’s a different kind of man, Ralph.”
Ralph shrugged. “It’s your life. You get up here with him.”
Sanders unbuckled the strap that held Narn to his seat. He led him to the controls of the hovering copter, squeezing past the white-faced Ralph Charteris. Narn sat down, cautiously. Sanders stood just behind him.
The man seemed absurdly small in the pilot’s seat. He looked at Sanders. Sanders nodded, smiled, and crossed his fingers.
Very slowly, duplicating the motions he had seen Ralph make, the man moved the wheel and strained to reach the floor pedal. The copter lurched and lost altitude. Sanders started to reach for the controls, but Narn did not panic. Carefully, exactly, he compensated for the fall.
The copter straightened.
Sanders stumbled back and sat down.
“Well, I’ll be damned,” Ralph said.
The man piloted the ship for fifteen minutes, across violet fields of ice, flying steadily through the air. An icy wind blew through the ship, but Sanders hardly noticed it. He was completely stunned.
Narn, too, had found an artifact.
He took the ship back to almost exactly the position it had held when he had taken over the controls. He was tense and there was sweat on his face. It was terribly hot for him in the copter, even with all the windows open.
He let Sanders land the copter.
Narn hurried to get outside and sat down on the ice, resting.
After a few minutes, he got up and embraced each of the men in turn.
“Narn,” he said proudly. “Narn.”
The man in the black skins pointed across the ice and beckoned.
“He wants us to go with him,” Sanders said.
Ralph was still trying to get his thoughts straightened out. “I don’t know,” he said. “One of us will have to stay with the ship.”
Sanders nodded. “I want to go, Ralph. I’ll take the pocket radio and throw out a beam so you can track me. Will you give me twenty-four hours, and then come and get me?”
Ralph hesitated. “Okay, Sandy,” he said finally. “You watch yourself. These boys are nothing to fool around with.”
Sanders smiled at Narn. “We’ll get along,” he said.
They shook hands, and Sanders set off with Narn across the violet ice.
The bitter cold ate into him, turning his bones to ice.
They went a long, long way, across the cold and the rocks and the silences. Sanders felt his age, and it was hard for him to keep up. He damned his own inability to talk.
He had never seen such loneliness.
Here, Sanders thought, here before me is the ultimate in isolated cultures. Here is a culture that has had to figure it all out for itself, with no help from anywhere. Here is a man who flew a copter the first time he saw one. Here is a simple man that some would call a savage. What might he become—now? How far might we go, together?
It took them three hours. Sanders was sore and his feet were numb with cold before they came to a valley of ice and rocks. The excitement of what he saw revived him a little.
The valley was pocked with caves: black holes against the faded light of the faraway sun.
They picked their way up a smoothly inclined path and paused before a cave entrance. Sanders couldn’t see a thing, but Narn took him b
y the arm and led him inside.
Some twenty paces beyond the outside hole they came to what could only be called a door. Narn pressed three places on it very carefully and it swung open. A soft green glow spilled through the opening and in its gentle light, Sanders could see that the door was beautifully made of hides stretched over a bone frame.
They walked through semi-darkness now, their footsteps hollow in the vault of the rocks. Gradually, the greenish light shifted to a warm yellow. Sanders noticed that the source of the illumination was hidden in the cave roof over their heads: glowing rocks that seemed to be built into the cave itself. He guessed that the rocks were of natural origin, but their cunning arrangement betrayed the revising hand of man. He knew little enough about indirect lighting, but this was as efficient a system as he had ever seen.
They stepped down into a large, well-lighted room. A tiny fire—hardly large enough to toast a marshmallow comfortably—flickered in the center, and around it sat a woman and a child. Smaller caves branched from the cavern and lost themselves in the rocks.
Sanders saw something that took his breath away.
The child was holding a toy cart in his arms.
The cart had wheels on it.
God, he thought. A Stone Age culture lost in the ice, and a toy cart with wheels. It had to be a toy, of course—they have no domesticated animals to pull a real cart. Narn’s people are so few, so isolated. All his inventions had to come from a handful of people, without help from outside. There was a brain in that skull….
He noticed a light sled, with bone runners, standing against a wall. After the wheeled cart, it came as something of an anticlimax—though it was certainly more useful in the polar ice and snow.
“San-ders,” Narn said.
The woman took her child’s hand and moved back, shyly. She stood by a basin of crystal-clear water, her eyes on the stranger. She said nothing.
Sanders stood still, uncertain what to do. He felt as though he had stepped backward in time a million years, back through an enchanted cave, that wound through ageless rock, back through history to an age when man was only a whisper in the wind….
He felt his palms sweating inside his airsuit.
Narn shook his head.
“Don’t afraid,” the man in the black, sewn skins said carefully. “Don’t afraid, San-ders.”
He’s learning our language already! What have we found?
A hand touched his arm.
He started, surprised back to reality. Narn’s boy was smiling gravely, pulling at his sleeve.
Sanders walked slowly to the center of the room, and sat down before the tiny fire. He saw that the fire was really a kind of lamp—a stone dish of fat with a wick in it. Narn’s woman took her place opposite him. There was only friendliness in her eyes.
Somehow, something passed between them. A little of the loneliness that Sanders had always had with him melted and was gone.
The lamp-fire threw steady shadows on the cave walls.
Narn sat down by his side.
Sanders was suddenly very aware of his exhaustion, but he couldn’t relax. His body ached with cold and fatigue, and his mind was so saturated with emotion that he felt a certain blankness. He was vaguely hungry, but he could not eat in his suit. He was tired, with dark circles under his eyes, but he was not sleepy.
He felt curiously at home.
He sat there, smiling, and he was glad that words were not necessary.
Finally, he stretched out by the tiny fire, looked at Narn, and closed his eyes.
Sleep was a long time in coming, and when it came it was nothing to write home about. Solid rock is not the ultimate in mattresses, and he was keyed up to a point where he could not relax. He dozed fitfully, and his own spasmodic snores woke him up twice. His stiff, aching body did the trick the third time, and after that he knew that he had all the sleep he was going to get.
He lay still, trying to keep his thoughts from bouncing back and forth between scrambled eggs and Gargantuan steaks. He listened to the silence.
“San-ders?”
He looked up. Narn was squatting by his side.
“I’m awake,” Sanders said, not knowing whether or not he would be understood. “You have insomnia too?”
Narn frowned at the last question, evidently storing it away for future reference. He pointed to one of the caves that branched out from the central cavern. “Come?”
Sanders got up. His body was one large ache.
Narn led him across the floor of the room, and into a dark hole. The passage was narrow and poorly lighted at first, but it gradually broadened as they walked. Sanders felt a little better. He guessed that Narn was going to show him something—another family, perhaps, or even an underground river.
The cave opened up, abruptly, into a high cavern perhaps fifty yards in diameter. The light was astonishing—soft greens and yellows and pinks, washing down from glowing rocks set into the very roof of the chamber.
Narn stopped, and pointed.
Sanders suddenly forgot his pains and his weariness. He held his breath so long that the blood pounded in his forehead before he remembered to breathe again.
He said nothing, for what he saw was beyond words.
The walls were alive. A man smiled down on him, and he could see his white even teeth and the glint of humor in his brown eyes. A landscape of violet ice lost itself in frozen immensities. A golden fish twisted in dark water, rising to a lure. A yellow storm boiled across a bleak desert, and cold stars were serene and splendid in the heavy velvet of an arctic night.
It was beyond reality, beyond his wildest dreams.
Paintings, yes—but you had to remind yourself of that. Their colors were vividly real, and enhanced by a masterly use of the light from the glowing rocks.
The perspective was perfect, the style naturalistic.
That wasn’t all.
There were neat, geometrical marks in bands under the paintings. Writing, beyond a doubt, covering panel after panel—and there were more caverns beyond.
Written history, on the walls of a cave—going back how many hundreds of thousands of years?
There were other marks that looked suspiciously like mathematics, a series of triangles that almost had to be geometry.
Sanders sat down, right in the middle of the cavern. He was stunned, and more than that.
The toy cart had been enough of a jolt, even after Narn had flown the copter.
After all, toy carts had been found in Mexico archeologically, and the main differences were in the relative sizes of the two populations, and in their respective degrees of isolation.
This was a different kettle of fish.
This was almost a miracle.
There was an excellent naturalistic cave art in the Upper Paleolithic of Europe, but it was a far cry from the paintings in this cave. And the Cro-Magnons were millennia away from writing, to say nothing of mathematics.
Sanders sat there, lost in the rush of his own thoughts.
Even on Earth, you had to be careful when you reconstructed a culture solely from what survived of their technology. The maze of the Australian kinship systems could never be forgotten; the Maya invented the concept of zero with a Neolithic economy. And here were a people blocked technologically by a hopeless environment, forced to channel their culture along other lines….
A new kind of people.
“You like?” asked Narn.
He watched Sanders with pleasure sparkling in his eyes.
“I like,” Sanders said fervently. “More?”
Narn smiled, and led the way into another cavern lost in the rock beneath the ice.
Sanders almost forgot about Ralph Charteris and the copter. When he and Narn walked back through the central cavern and out into the valley, they had only a few minutes to spare.
They stood in the long valley with the sky almost black above them. Sanders almost forgot about Ralph Charteris and the copter. When he and Narn walked back through the central caver
n and out into the valley, they had only a few minutes to spare.
They stood in the long valley with the sky almost black above them. The cold was bitter and very still. A thin blue mist of ice crystals was motionless against the snow.
A cold, hard world.
Sanders looked into Narn’s eyes, and saw there a wordless hope.
Sanders knew that hope.
When the copter came, a dot against the black sky, they both knew that one chapter had ended and that a new one had begun.
It was their copter now.
Side by side, they waited for it to land.
Far above them, shining through the pale disc of the sun, the stars burned in an ocean of loneliness.
ANY MORE AT HOME LIKE YOU?
The ship came down through the great night, across a waterless sea where the only islands were stars and the warm winds never blew.
It glowed into a high, cold yellow when it brushed into the atmosphere above the Earth. It lost speed, floating down toward the distant shore that marked the end of its voyage. It whistled in close, feeling the tug of the world below.
At first, only darkness.
Then lights.
A new kind of darkness.
The ship angled up again, trying to rise, but it was too late. It crashed gently and undramatically into a hillside and was still.
Journey’s end.
The ship’s only occupant, cushioned by automatic safety devices, was shaken but unhurt. He spoke rapidly in a strange language into a microphone. He wiped his forehead with a handkerchief and climbed out of his broken ship, his hands trembling. A damp and chilly night closed in around him.
If he could get away before he was seen it would simplify matters greatly. He looked around. He seemed to be about a quarter of the way down a brush-covered hill. There were lights on the black ridge above him, and a string of lights marking a canyon road below him. There was a house on the hill, not fifty yards away. He would have to hurry….
No. Too late for that now.
A flashlight moved toward him along the path, picking him out. He had been seen. His hand moved toward his pocket, nervously.
A voice, “What happened? Are you all right?”