Complete Short Fiction, page 16
“Yes. That’s what its long neck is for. What about it?”
“Is that all it eats?”
“That and Jupiter grass!”
“Nothing else?” Thomas’ voice was sharp with question, his powerfully built face drawn tight with insistence. “Think, man!”
Ray Bartlett bridled. “Don’t take that tone to me. What’s the use of all this, anyway?”
“Sorry—about the tone, I mean. What does it drink?”
“It licks ice. They always stay near the rivers. During the brief melting periods each year, all the water from the forests runs into the rivers and freezes. The only other thing it eats or drinks is salt. Like Earth animals, they absolutely have to have salt, and it’s pretty rare.”
“Salt! That’s it!” Thomas’ voice was triumphant. “We’ll have to turn back. We passed a stretch of rock salt about a mile back. We’ll have to get some.”
“Go back! Are you crazy?”
Thomas stared at him, his eyes gray pools of steely glitter. “Listen, Bartlett, I said awhile ago that I didn’t think I could climb those cliffs. Well, don’t worry, I’ll climb them. And I’ll last through all today, and all tomorrow and the other twelve or fifteen or twenty days. I’ve put on about twenty-five pounds during the last ten years that I’ve been a cabinet minister. Well, dammit, my body’ll use that as food, and by Heaven, I’ll be alive and moving and going strong when you’re staggering like a drunken sailor. I’ll be alive when you’re dead and buried for a hundred miles. But if we expect to kill a grass eater and live decently, we’ve got to have salt. I saw some salt, and we can’t take a chance on passing it up. So back we go.”
They glared at each other with the wild, tempestuous anger of two men whose nerves are on ultimate edge. Then Bartlett drew a deep breath and said:
“I don’t know what your plan is, but it sounds crazy to me. Have you ever seen a grass eater? Well, it looks something like a giraffe, only it’s bigger, and faster on its feet.
Maybe you’ve got some idea of tempting it with salt, and then killing it with a knife. I tell you, you can’t get near it—But I’ll go back with you. It doesn’t matter, because we’re going to die, no matter what you think. What I’m hoping is that a gryb sees us. It’ll be quick that way.”
“There is something,” said Thomas, “pitiful and horrible about a young man who is determined to die.”
“You don’t think I want to die!” the young man flashed. “Why, I had everything to live for, until you came along with your miserable—”
His passionate voice died abruptly, but Thomas knew better than to let so much fierce feeling the unexplored.
“No doubt,” he ventured softly, “there is a girl you love—”
He saw by the wretched look on the young man’s face that he had struck home.
“Ah, well,” said Thomas, “she’ll probably marry someone else. There’s always a second man who desires to taste of the manifold delights and charms of a beautiful and intelligent girl.”
The young man said nothing; and Thomas realized his words had started a cruel train of thought in the other. He felt no compunction. It was absolutely imperative that Hay Bartlett develop a desire to live. In the crisis that seemed all too near now, his assistance might easily be the difference between life and death.
IT WAS odd, the fever of talk that came upon Thomas as they laboriously retraced their steps to the salt rock. It was as if his tongue, of all his body, had become intoxicated; and yet his words, though swift, were not incoherent, but reasoned and calculated to convince the younger man:
“Look at it this way. Your people, over a period of fifty years, have built five cities, with a total population of a million. You produce from your mines a hundred million tons of, steel, a thousand tons of platinum, and about a hundred million tons of other metals—about two hundred million tons altogether. Of course, that’s per year.
“Now, your engineers pointed out that estimates of Europa’s recoverable metals indicated that in a thousand years the supply will be exhausted. In other words, there are two hundred billion tons of metal on this little moon, equal to twenty years of the normal needs of Earth. The value of the entire thousand years’ supply, at an average of twenty dollars per ton, is four thousand billion dollars. I need hardly tell you that a war between Earth and Mars would cost ten times that much for each year that it lasted, not counting the hundred to two hundred million lives that would be destroyed in every conceivable horrible manner, the brutalizing of minds that would take place, the destruction of liberty that would ensue. Did the leaders of your community consider that in their deliberations?”
“I tell you,” Ray Bartlett contended stubbornly, “the Martians won’t fight, if you stand up to them and—”
“You keep repeating that like a parrot!” Thomas snapped. “The internal political situation on Mars has reached an explosive point. There are two groups on the planet—one ferociously hostile to Earth, the other—the government—believing in negotiation. We want that government to stay in power, but they haven’t a chance in the elections this year unless they can show material progress. Europa will be their answer—”
“Here’s your salt!” Bartlett interrupted him curtly.
The salt rock composed a narrow ledge that protruded like a long fence which ran along in a startlingly straight line and ended abruptly at a canyon’s edge, the fence rearing up, as if cringing back in frank dismay at finding itself teetering on the brink of an abyss.
Thomas picked up two pieces of salt rubble and slipped them into the capacious pockets of his plainsmanlike coat—and started back toward the dark wall of cliff nearly three miles away. He took up the thread of his argument where he had left off:
“And remember this, it’s not only Europa’s recoverable metals that will be used up in a thousand years, but also the metal resources of the entire Solar System. That’s why we must have an equitable distribution now, because we can’t afford to spend the last hundred of those thousand years fighting over metal with Mars. You see, in that thousand years we must reach the stars. We must develop speeds immeasurably greater than that of light—and in that last, urgent hundred years we must have their co-operation, not their enmity. Therefore they must not be dependent on us for anything; and we must not be under the continual mind-destroying temptation of being able to save ourselves for a few years longer if we sacrifice them.
Ray Bartlett said, rage nearly choking his voice: “I can see what you’re trying to do—pretending that you’re capable of thinking of the long-run welfare of the world. Well, forget it; you’re not God. People get to believe they are, you know; and that they tan so manipulate the strings of their puppet ideas and puppet men that everything will inevitably happen as they desire. But we’re not puppets, we human beings. In a thousand years, anything can happen.”
He finished roughly: “And now I tell you again to shut up! I don’t want to hear your arguments. You said before that the basis of our beliefs is different. You’re damned right it is. So shut up, damn you! I’m so hungry that I can hardly stand up.”
“Well,” Thomas asked wearily, “what is the basis of your opinions? I am willing to debate on your basis.”
The young man made no answer. They trudged along in silence.
THOMAS’ BODY ached in every muscle, and every nerve pulsed alarms to his brain. He clung with a desperate, stubborn strength to each bit of rock projecting from the cliff wall, horribly aware that a slip meant death. Once he looked down, and his brain reeled in black dismay from the fearful depths that fell away behind him.
Through blurred vision he saw the young man a few feet away, the tortured lines of his face a grim reminder of the hunger weakness that was corroding the very roots of their two precariously held lives.
“Hang on!” Thomas gasped. “It’s only a few more yards.”
They made it, and collapsed on the very edge of that terrific chasm of cliff, too weary to climb the gentle slope that remained before they could look over the country beyond, too exhausted to do anything but lie there, sucking the life-giving air into their lungs. At last Ray Bartlett gasped:
“What’s the use? If we had any sense we’d jump off this cliff and get it over with.”
“We can jump into a deep cave any time,” Thomas retorted. “Let’s get going.”
He rose shakily to his feet, took a few steps, then stiffened and Hung himself down with a hissing intake of his breath. His fingers grabbed the other’s leg and jerked him back brutally to a prone position:
“Down for your life. There’s a herd of grass caters half a mile away. And they mean life for us.”
Bartlett crawled up beside him, almost eagerly; and the two peered cautiously over the knob of rock out onto a grassy plain. The plain was somewhat below them. Thomas saw. To the left, a scant hundred yards away, like a wedge driven into the grassland, was the pointed edge of a forest. The grass beyond seemed almost like a projection of the forest growth. It, too, formed a wedge that petered out in bleak rock. At the far end of the grass was a herd of about half a hundred grass eaters.
“They’re working this way!” Thomas said. “And they’ll pass close to that wedge of trees.”
A faint fire of irony edged Bartlett’s voice as he said: “And what will you do—run out and put salt on their tails? I tell you, Thomas, we haven’t got a thing that—”
“Our first course,” said Thomas, unheeding, seeming to think out loud, “is to get into that thick belt of trees. We can do that by skirting along this cliff’s edge, and putting the trees between us and the animals. Then you can loan me your knife.”
“O.K.!” the young man agreed in a tired voice. “If you won’t listen, you’ll have to learn from experience. I tell you, you won’t get within a quarter of a mile of those things.”
“I don’t want to,” Thomas replied. “You see, Bartlett, if you had more confidence, in life, you’d realize that this problem of killing animals by cunning has been solved before. It’s absolutely amazing how similarly it has been solved on different worlds, and under widely differing conditions. One would almost suspect a common evolution, but actually it is only a parallel situation producing a parallel solution. Just watch me.”
“I’m willing,” said Ray Bartlett. “There’s almost any way I’d rather die than by starving. A meal of cooked grass eater is tough going, but it’ll be pure heaven. Don’t forget, though, that the bloodsucker grybs follow grass-eater herds, get as near as possible at night, then kill them in the morning when they’re frozen. Right now, with darkness near, a gryb must be out there somewhere, hiding, sneaking nearer. Pretty soon he’ll smell us, and then he’ll—”
“We’ll come to the gryb when he domes for us!” said Thomas calmly. “I’m sorry I never visited this moon in my younger days; these problems would all have been settled long ago. In the meantime, the forest is our goal.”
THOMAS OUTWARD calmness was but a mask for his inner excitement. His body literally shook with hunger and desire as they reached the safety of the forest. His fingers were trembling violently as he took Bartlett’s knife and began to dig at the base of a great, bare, brown tree.
“It’s the root, isn’t it,” he asked unsteadily, “that’s so tough and springy that it’s almost like fine tempered steel, and won’t break even if it’s bent into a circle? They call it eurood on Earth, and it’s used in industry.”
“Uh-huh!” Bartlett agreed. “What are you going to do—make a bow? I suppose you could use a couple of grass blades in place of catgut. The grass is pretty strong and makes good rope.”
“No,” said Thomas. “I’m not making a bow and arrow. Mind you, I can shoot a pretty mean arrow. But I’m remembering what you said about not being able to get within a quarter of a mile of the beasts.”
He jerked out a root, which was about an inch in thickness, cut off a generous two-foot length, and began to sharpen, first one end, then the other.
It was hard going, harder than he had expected, because the knife skidded along the surface as if it was so much metal. Finally it obtained a cutting hold. “Makes a good edge and point,” he commented. “And now, give me a hand in bending this double, while I tie some grass blades around to keep it that way.”
“O-oh!” said Bartlett wonderingly. “I see-e-e! Say, that is clever. It’ll make a mouthful about six inches in diameter. The grass-eater that gets it will gobble it up in one gulp to prevent any of the others getting the salt you’re going to smear on it. His digestive juices will dissolve the grass string, the points will spring apart and tear the wall of his stomach, producing an internal hemorrhage.”
“It’s a method,” said Thomas, “used by the primitives of Venus to kill the elusive Paamer deer; the Martian plainsman kills the water gopher with it, and, last but not least, our own Eskimo back on Earth uses it on wolves. Naturally, they all use different kinds of bait, but the principle is the same.”
He made his way cautiously to the edge of the forest. From the shelter of a tree he flung the little piece of bent wood with all his strength. It landed in the grass a hundred and fifty feet away.
“We’d better make some more!” Thomas said. “We can’t depend on one being found.”
THE EATING was good; the cooked meat tough but tasty; and it was good, too, to feel the flow of strength into his body. Thomas sighed at last and stood up, glanced at the sinking Sun, an orange-sized ball of flame in the western sky.
“We’ll have to carry sixty Earth pounds of meat apiece; that’s four pounds a day for the next fifteen days. Eating meat alone is dangerous; we may go insane, though it really requires about a month for that. We’ve got to carry the meat because we can’t waste any more time killing grass eaters.”
Thomas began to cut into the meaty part of the animal, which lay stretched out on the tough grass; and in a few minutes had tied together two light bundles. By braiding grass together, he made himself a pack sack and lifted the long shank of meat until it was strapped to his back. There was a little adjustment necessary to keep the weight from pressing his electrically heated clothes too tightly against him; when he looked up finally, he saw that the young man was looking at him peculiarly.
“You realize, of course,” Bartlett said, “that you’re quite insane now. It’s true that, with these heated suits, we may be able to live through the cold of tonight, provided we find a deep cave. But don’t think for a second that, once a gryb gets on our trail, we’ll be able to throw it a piece of sharpened wood and expect it to have an internal hemorrhage.”
“Why not?” Thomas asked; and his voice was sharp.
“Because it’s the toughest creature ever spawned by a crazy evolution, the main reason I imagine why no intelligent form of life evolved on Europa. Its claws are literally diamond hard; its teeth can twist metals out of shape; its stomach wall can scarcely be cut with a knife, let alone a crudely pointed wood.”
His voice took on a harsh note of exasperation: “I’m glad we’ve had this meal; starving wasn’t my idea of a pleasant death. I want the quick death that the gryb will give us. But for Heaven’s sake, get it out of your head that we shall live through this. I tell you, the monster will follow us into any cave, cleverly enlarge it wherever he has difficulty; and he’ll get us because eventually we’ll reach a dead end. They’re not normal caves, you know, but meteor holes, the result of a cosmic cataclysm millions of years ago, and they’re all twisted out of shape by the movement of the planet’s crust. As for tonight, we’d better get busy and find a deep cave with plenty of twists in it, and perhaps a place where we can block the air currents from coming in. The winds will be arriving about a half an hour before the sun goes down, and our electric heaters won’t be worth anything against those freezing blasts. It might pay us to gather some of the dead wood lying around, so we can build a fire at the really cold part of the night.”
Getting the wood into the cave was simple enough. They gathered great armfuls of it, and tossed it down to where it formed a cluttering pile at the first twist in the tunnel. Then, having gathered all the loose wood in the vicinity, they lowered themselves down to the first level, Thomas first in a gingerly fashion; the young man—Thomas noticed—with a snap and spring. A smile crinkled the lips of the older man. The spirit of youth, he reflected, would not be suppressed.
They were just finishing throwing the wood down to the next level when suddenly a shadow darkened the cave mouth. Thomas glanced up with a terrible start and had a fleeting glimpse of great fanged jaws and glowing eyes that glared from a hideous head; a thick red tongue licked out in unholy desire, and a spray of saliva rained down upon their transparent metal helmets and leatherlike clothes. And then Bay Bartlett’s leather-covered hands bit like sharp stones into Thomas’ arm; he felt himself dragged over the edge.
They landed unhurt among the loose pile of branches below; and scrambled frantically to throw it farther down. A great mad clawing and horrible bass mewing above them whipped them to desperate speed. They made it, as that enormous head peered down from the second level, visible only by the phosphorescent glow of its eyes, like two burning coals a foot and a half apart.
There was a terrific scrambling sound behind the two men as they pushed wildly down to the next level; a rock bounced down, narrowly missing them as it clattered past; and then, abruptly, silence and continuing darkness.
“What’s happened?” Thomas asked in bewilderment.
There was bitterness in Ray Bartlett’s voice as he replied: “It’s wedged itself in, because it’s realized it can’t get us in the few minutes left before it freezes for the night; and, of course, now we won’t be able to get out past it, with that great body squeezed against the rock sides.
“It’s really a very clever animal in its way. It never chases grass eaters, but just follows them. It has discovered that it wakes up a few minutes before they do; naturally, it thinks we, too, will freeze, and that it will wake up before we will. In any event, it knows we can’t get out. And we can’t. We’re finished.”
