by Chad Oliver
He took out his pocket comb. He showed it to the animal. He demonstrated its use, running it through his hair several times. He held it out.
The animal took it. He stared at it with his great yellow eyes, turning it over and over in his hands. He reached up with the comb and pulled it through the hair on the back of his neck. He examined it again, found a bug in it, and popped the bug into his mouth.
The animal said nothing more. He seemed to be waiting for something. The other animals on the branches were likewise silent and expectant.
Alston did not know what to do. The animal had given him something, and he had made a return gift. He had anticipated some sign of approval, some lessening of tension. But there was no reaction at all that he could see.
If only those faces had some expression, if only he could get a clue—
As abruptly as he had come, the male pulled back and rejoined the others on the branches. He took his comb with him.
Alston felt that he had failed in some obscure way. It was damnably frustrating. The animals had saved his life, and pure altruism was probably as rare on Pollux Five as it was anywhere else. They had made overtures, and he had responded as well as he could. He had made no obvious mistakes. And yet, somehow, he had flunked a test. What did they want?
The animals continued to sit on the branches, looking at him. They were so many silent shadows in the trees. They were neither friendly nor threatening. They were just there.
Alston settled himself more comfortably in the nest. He was worn out, physically and emotionally. It was hard to think.
He would just have to wait for daylight. He was where he wanted to be, after all. He could search the sky for a plane, fire off a flare if he saw one.
He really had no choice.
He closed his eyes. He could feel the slight swaying of the tree, hear the faint rustle of the leaves …
Unbidden, the old lullaby crept into his mind:
“Rock-a-bye baby, in the tree top.
When the wind blows the cradle will rock.
When the bough breaks the cradle will fall—”
Incredibly, he slept.
Alston woke up with the first light of the sun.
He sat up and looked around. He had a sudden attack of vertigo and had to close his eyes. It was definitely a long way down. He could not see the forest floor, but he could see more than enough.
He waited a moment and opened his eyes again. The animals had vanished as though they had been creatures out of a dream. The limbs of the trees were utterly deserted. He heard a woodpecker drumming away below him, saw a squirrel poke his head out of a hole. That was all.
He looked more closely. He surveyed the trees one by one. He saw some nests that were like his own. He thought he could see something in the nests, but he could not be sure. Had the animals all sacked out? Had they gone away somewhere?
He looked up. He did not have a completely unobstructed view of the sky, but he could see patches of blue. He could certainly hear a plane if one came close, and the foliage was open enough so that he could launch a flare.
Unhappily, there was no plane.
He was hungry and his mouth was dry. His dizziness, he realized, had not been caused entirely by his glance downstairs. He was a long way from starvation but he did need food.
He stood up in the nest, bracing himself against the tree. If he could find some of those fruits—
His mouth dropped open in surprise.
His breakfast was waiting for him. It had been neatly placed on a small limb just above his nest. There were two of the orange-like fruits and three things that looked vaguely like green bananas. There were four pink-shelled eggs. There was a dead frog and a tidy pile of squashed bugs. There was even a container of water. He picked the container up and looked at it. It was made out of a single large leaf that had been cupped in a square frame of twigs. The twigs had been tied together with threads of fiber. The knots were good and tight.
Alston swallowed some of the water. It had a flat, sweet taste to it. He ate the fruits. The banana things were tough and burned his throat but he got them down. He lost one egg before he figured out how to crack the shells against his teeth so that the yolk wouldn’t get away from him. He decided against the dead frog and the bugs. He wasn’t that hungry yet.
He felt better. Some of the cobwebs left his brain.
He stared across at the nests. The animals were probably in them unless they had gone away. In either case, he was certain that they would return. He viewed the prospect with mixed emotions. They had saved his neck, yes. They had not harmed him. They had fed him. They might be his only hope if the plane did not come. And yet, there was something about them, something strange …
“Alston! Hey, Alston!”
The hail from below startled him so that he almost fell. The voice was faint and seemed to come up from his right. The nest must be in a different tree—
“Hey!” he yelled. His voice sounded explosively loud. He looked nervously at the nests but nothing stirred. “Are you okay?”
“Fine!” Tony’s voice, he thought. “What in the hell are you doing?”
Alston smiled a little. How could he possibly tell them, hollering like this? He was too far away for effective communication. He shouted down that he could see the sky and was watching for the plane. He told them not to go out in the open again.
“Just hang on!” he hollered. “Be down later!”
Alston’s throat hurt. He hadn’t yelled like that since he was a kid. He looked again at the sky. It was as empty as though it had been freshly created.
He checked the nests. There was no sign of movement.
There was absolutely nothing that he could do. He had to stay up high to watch for the rescue plane. It was clear that the searchers did not know exactly where they were, or they would have come by now. If they were hunting at random, he might get only one chance to signal them. He couldn’t afford to gamble.
He was afraid to climb higher. There was no point in lateral movement, even if he could manage it. He wasn’t even sure that he could climb down the tree again without help.
He settled back into his nest and waited. It was an interminable day. There was a rainstorm that lasted about half an hour, but apart from that he was quite comfortable. He watched the brightly colored birds darting among the lower branches, but as entertainers they left something to be desired.
He was bored and he knew the feeling well. Alston had been in tight spots before. Adventures were thrilling only when they happened to other people. When you were smack in the middle of one, it was different. You were scared. You made mistakes. You got tired. You caught unromantic colds. You either had too much to do or nothing at all. What you wanted was out.
It was late afternoon before he saw the animals again. As he had suspected, they were in the nests. They woke up slowly, stretching and yawning like little old men. They completely ignored Alston. Some of the females began to nurse their children. Most of the others moved off to feed. They did not brachiate, he noticed. They walked easily along the limbs, four-handed rather than four-footed, hooking with their tails for additional support.
Alston stood up in the nest. Nothing happened. He waved his hands. Still nothing.
He started to climb out of the nest.
Instantly, there was a great flurry of activity. The animals converged on him with a quickness that was disconcerting. In a matter of seconds he was completely ringed.
Alston began to sweat. The daylight was no help at all. There was simply no way to tell what the animals were thinking. The faces seemed alert but nothing more. The expressions—if that was the term for them—were unreadable. The animals made no gestures of any sort. They just sat there, strange little creatures, not a one of them over four feet tall. Their great yellow eyes were unblinking. They stank, and that was about all they did.
Alston took a deep breath. He had to try something.
“Look,” he said, keeping his voice soft. He broke o
ff a small twig and placed it on a branch above him. He pointed to the twig and then to himself. “This is me,” he said. He grabbed some leaves and put them on the same branch. He pointed to the leaves and then at the animals. “This is you.” He broke off two twigs and placed them below the branch on the edge of the nest. He pointed to the twigs and then down toward Tony and Rog, invisible in the depths of the forest. “These are my friends.” He took the twig representing himself and the leaves. He lifted them slowly down to the two twigs on the nest, picked up the two twigs, and carried the whole pile back to the upper branch. “Do you understand?”
The animals did not nod. They did not shake their heads. They said nothing. And yet, a current seemed to pass among them. They stirred, some decision was taken—
Eight of the males detached themselves from the rest. They moved in close. One of them—it could have been the old boy who had taken the comb, although he didn’t have it now—reached out and gripped his shoulder. “Tekki-luka?” he said.
Alston sighed. “That’s it,” he said. “Tekki-luka.”
The males started down, with two of them waiting for Alston.
Whatever they were, the animals were far from stupid.
Alston left the nest and started his descent.
He thought: How in the name of heaven am I going to explain this to Rog and Tony?
The mechanical problems of hoisting the men to the upper levels of the rain forest were trivial compared to the task of convincing Roger Pennock and Anthony Morales that this was a wise course of action. In the end, however, they accepted Alston’s assurances and entrusted themselves to the animals. They were not happy about it but—as Alston pointed out—they were caught between a rock and a hard place. They were unwilling to venture for long into the open grasslands where the big cats waited. They could not possibly make it back to home plate by wandering through the endless forests—there was a lot of thick jungle country they would have to hack their way through, and it would take them forever. They could not continue to exist for long by hanging on for dear life to the lower branches of the trees. They could only go up, and if the plane did not come—
The plane did not come.
The long weeks dragged by with agonizing slowness, and the skies of Pollux Five remained emphatically empty. The plane did not come, and it became glaringly obvious that it was not going to come. The searchers had missed them somehow, and that was that.
The three men had one chance to get home.
They could get home if the animals that surrounded them in the trees would take them there.
The animals were not hostile. They were not friendly either—the concept seemed to be meaningless to them—but they were willing to help for whatever reasons of their own. They were intelligent, sometimes alarmingly so. It was possible to communicate with them to some degree.
The three men had food to eat, water to drink. They were perfectly safe as long as they stayed in their nests. They had no superhuman monsters to fight. The planet was a virtual twin of Earth.
Problem: How do you learn to fly if you don’t happen to be a bird?
Problem: If men of good will often have trouble in understanding one another, how do you go about understanding a creature that is only human-by-definition—when that definition happens to leave out a key point or two?
Tony Morales scrambled back to his nest and squinted into the early morning sun. He was bearded and red-eyed, and his clothes were in rags. He threw his soiled map into the nest with disgust.
“How did it go?” Alston asked. The nests of the three men were within a few feet of each other. The creatures had insisted on constructing separate nests, one for each man. It was easier to build the smaller nests, of course, but that did not seem to be the whole story. The animals always slept in individual nests, and they never entered any nest except their own. The pattern was a rigid one, and the only variation involved infants who slept with their mothers. Taboo, custom, law—whatever it was, it was important.
Tony sighed. He looked close to exhaustion. “It didn’t go at all. I had maybe an hour of daylight before they all passed out. Naturally, they were all so tired by then that they couldn’t concentrate. Did you ever try to explain a map to someone who never saw a map before—and do it in the dark? It’s hopeless.”
“A complete bust?” Alston tried to keep the despair out of his voice.
Tony yawned. “Oh, they know the general direction we want to go. They’re smart, you know that. They even know where home plate is—I still can’t figure out whether they’ve been there themselves or have just heard about it from the grapevine. But I can’t work out an exact route with them. They know the way—there’s a regular network of trails through these damned trees—but we can’t follow them on their trails. We’re like a bunch of seven-footers trying to follow a pygmy through the bush. We can’t move in the trees. If we go down, we have to avoid dense jungle country, and we have to stay clear of the grasslands. We’re no good at night, and they can’t operate in the daytime. I’m telling you, we may spend the rest of our lives sitting in these stupid nests.”
“Try to grab some sleep, Tony. You’ve had a rough night. Rog and I will keep watch.”
“Watch for what? Haven’t you heard that the brothers Wright were nothing but a myth?” Tony curled up in his nest, clutching his maps. He was asleep in seconds, but it was a restless sleep; his body was as taut as a string on a bow.
Alston was tired himself; they all were. It would have been tough enough to adapt to daylight sleeping under the best of circumstances, and here the problem was compounded. They had to maintain a lookout during the day in case a plane should appear, and they had to work with the animals at night or not at all. Something within them could not adjust to the swaying of the trees, the sounds of birds and frogs and rustling leaves, the reversal of the sleeping cycle. Roger—back in the days when he had still been thinking clearly—had said something about biorhythms. Any life-form tended to become set in its ways, intricately adjusted over the millennia to the subtle pulses of its normal environment—the shift of the seasons, the variations in pressures, the alternations between day and night. He had mentioned an old experiment with fiddler crabs. You could take the crabs from their beaches and put them in tanks in a lab. When the tide came in on their original beach, the crabs would rise in the tanks, still responding to the ancient rhythm. Man was not a fiddler crab, and he was an adaptable animal. But he had a body, a body he hardly understood, a body that responded to biochemical reactions that were set before his birth.
None of them slept well, and all of them had dreams of falling.
Tired or not, Alston knew that he had to try to talk to Rog. The biologist was in bad shape. He was pale and haggard, and his skin seemed to hang loosely on his bones, as though it had been designed for a different skeleton. Roger was so withdrawn that it was an effort to keep him going.
“Rog, I need your help.”
The biologist stared vacantly at the trunk of the tree.
“When we get out of this mess, there’s going to be a really colossal flap at UNECA. We’re going to need your report as a biologist. You’ve got to think about that, Rog”
Roger shook his head. “I’m afraid,” he said softly. “Can’t you understand that? We’ll never get out of here. I’m afraid to go down. I’m afraid of them. I’m sick; I can’t think. I don’t know what to do.”
Alston ignored the man’s pessimism. He understood it all too well, but it did no good to keep talking about it. “Are you absolutely sure they don’t have a name for themselves? I can’t figure that one out.”
Roger made no reply.
“Funny thing. They have names for other animals, don’t they?”
The biologist stirred. He surely knew that Alston had the same answers he had, but the training of a lifetime pulled him into the discussion. “There is that one word,” he said. His voice was so weak that Alston had to strain to hear it. “You know—kerg.”
“It isn�
�t a name, is it?”
“Well, no. Not really. I don’t think so. It’s more like a plural pronoun. It means we or us or something like that. They have names for other things—those big cats are letoo, for instance—but they don’t think of themselves quite that way. They just are. They don’t even have personal names—they recognize each other by smells, I think—but they do have a kinship system of some sort. They don’t seem to use language in the same way that we do; I mean, they don’t use it in the same situations. They don’t do anything the way we do. Hell, what difference does it make?”
“It makes a lot of difference. We’ve got to understand them. We’ll never get out of here unless we do. If you ever want to get home—”
“Home.” Roger’s voice was a whisper now. His eyes were bright and feverish. “If I want to get home …”
The biologist moved and moved fast. He had been inactive for so long that he caught Alston off guard. Roger scrambled out of his nest and started along a branch. He was bent almost double, gripping the wood with his hands and feet, moving like the tree creatures he had watched. Small whimpering noises came from his throat.
“Roger! Roger, come back!”
Alston looked on in horror, too stunned to move. Roger was following one of the tree trails, going where he had seen the animals go. The branch bent under his weight. He reached up, caught a limb, tried to pull himself to the next branch—it looked so easy when the animals did it—
He fell.
His mouth opened to scream but no scream came. He hit too quickly, his fall broken by a limb less than ten feet below him. He lay quite still, his body draped over the branch. He had been fantastically lucky, but he could never make it back to the nest under his own power. If, indeed, he tried to come back …
Alston didn’t wait to consider a plan of action. He left his nest and climbed down to the lower branch, clinging desperately to the vine. He crawled out along the limb toward Roger. The limb was a stout one, but it bent under the combined weight of the two men. He seized Roger’s belt and hung on. He didn’t look down.