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CHAPTER 2

The Earphones Were Squawking: “Speak Up! Can you hear me? Can you—”

“Not hurt. Seams open, and there goes Sears’ thirty-six-hour test for air-borne bacteria. Down and safe, Ed.”

“Listen.” In relief, Ed Spearman was heavily didactic again. “You are three quarters of a mile inside the jungle. I will land near the woods. It will be dark in about an hour. Wait there until we—”

“One minute,” Paul said in sudden exhaustion. “We can find you, easier. Sears’ test is important. We’re already exposed to the air, but—”

“What? Can’t hear—damn it—” The voice dimmed and crackled.

“Stay sealed up!” Nothing. “Can you hear?” Nothing. “Oh, well, good,” said Paul, discarding the headset, adding foolishly: “I’m tired.”

Dorothy unfastened his straps; her kiss was warm and quick.

“Radio kaput, huh?” Wright flexed lean cautious legs. “Pity. I did want to tell Sears one I just remembered after eleven years, about poor lackadaisical Lou, who painted her torso bright blue, not for love, not for money, not because it looked funny, but simply for something to do.”

“You’re not hurt, Doc,” Dorothy said. “Not where it counts.”

“Can’t kill an anthropologist. Ask my student Paul Mason. Leather hides, pickled in a solution ten parts curiosity to one of statistics. Doctors are mighty viable too. Ask my student Dorothy Leeds.”

Paul’s forehead was wet. “Dark in an hour, he reminded me.”

“How close are we to the nearest of those parallel lines?”

“Three or four miles, Doc, at a loose guess.”

“Remember that great mess of ’em fifty or sixty miles south of here? Shows on Ed’s map. We must be—mm—seventy miles from the smallest of the two oceans—oh, let’s call it the Atlantic, huh? And the other one the East Atlantic? Anyway the ocean’s beyond that range of hills we saw on the way down.”

“I saw campfires in the meadow,” Dorothy said. “Things running.”

“I thought so too.… Paul, I wonder if Sears can do any testing of the air from the lifeboat? Some of the equipment couldn’t be transferred from Argo. And—how could they communicate with us? They’ll have to breathe it soon in any case.”

Paul checked a shuddering yawn. “I must have been thinking in terms ofArgo, which is—history.… You know, I believe the artificial gravity was stronger than we thought? I feel light, not heavy.”

“High oxygen?” Dorothy suggested. “Hot, too.”

“Eighty-plus. Crash suits can’t do us any more good.” They struggled out of them in the cramped space, down to faded jackets and shorts.

Wright brooded on it, pinching his throat. “Only advantage in the others’ staying sealed up a while is that if we get sick, they’ll get sick a bit later. Could be some advantage. Paul—think we should try to reach them this evening?”

“Three quarters of a mile, dark coming on—no. But so far as I’m concerned, Doc, you’re boss of this expedition. In the ship, Ed had to be—matter of engineering knowledge. No longer applies. I wanted to say that.”

Wright turned away. “Dorothy?”

She said warmly, “Yes. You.”

“I—oh, my dear, I don’t know that it’s—best.” Fretfully he added: “Shouldn’t need a leader. Only six of us—agreement—”

Dorothy held her voice to lightness: “I can even disagree with myself. Sears will want you to take over. Ann too, probably.”

His gray head sank in his hands. “As for that,” he said, “inside of me I’m apt to be a committee of fifteen.” Paul thought: But he’s not old! Fifty-two. When did he turn gray, and we never noticing it…?”For now,” Wright said, “let’s not be official about it, huh? What if my dreams for Lucifer are—not shared?”

“Dreams are never quite shared,” Dorothy said. “I want you to lead us.”

Wright whispered with difficulty, “I will try.”

Dorothy continued: “Ed may want things black and white. Not Ann, I think—she hates discussions, being obliged to make up her mind. You’re elected, soldier.… Can you open the door, Paul?”

It jammed in the spoiled frame after opening enough for a tight exit. Wright stared into evening. “Not the leader kind. Academic.” His white hands moved in doubtful protest. “Hate snap decisions—we’ll be forced to make a lot of them.”

Paul said, “They’re best made by one who hates making them.”

The lean face became gentle. “Taught you that myself, didn’t I, son…? Well—inventory. What’ve we got, right here?”

“Thirty days’ rations for three, packed eleven years ago. Two automatic rifles, one shotgun, three automatic pistols, three hundred rounds for each weapon. Should have transferred more from the ship, but—we didn’t. Three four-inch hunting knives, very good—”

“They at least won’t give out. With care.”

“Right. Two sealed cases of garden seeds—anybody’s guess about them. Six sets of overalls, shorts, and jackets. Three pairs of shoes apiece—the Federation allowed that you and Ann might grow a little, Dot—plasta soles and uppers, should last several years. Carpentry tools. Ed’s boat has the garden tools instead. Sears did pack his microscope, didn’t he?”

“Oh my, yes,” said Dorothy, in affectionate mimicry of the fat man’s turn of speech.

“Each crash suit has first-aid kit, radion flashlight (good for two years maybe), compass, field glasses, plus whatever else we had sense enough to stuff in. Set of technical manuals, mostly useless without the ship, but I think there’s one on woodcraft, primitive tools and weapons—survival stuff—”

“Oh, the books!” Wright clutched his hair, groaning. “The books—”

“Just that woodcraft—”

“No, no, no—the books on Argo! Everything—the library—I’ve only just understood that it’s gone. The whole flowering of human thought—man’s best, uncorrupted—Odyssey—Ann’s music, the art volumes you selected, Paul, and your own sketches and paintings—”

“No loss there—”

“Don’t talk like a damn fool! Shakespeare—Divina commedia—”

Dorothy twisted in the narrowness to put both arms around him. “Doc—quiet, dear—please—”

“I can remember pages of Huck Finn—a few pages!”

Dorothy was wiping his face with a loose comer of her jacket. “Doc—subside! Please now—make it stop hurting inside yourself. Oh, quiet.…”

After a time he said lifelessly, “Go on with the inventory, Paul.”

“Well—there’s a duplicate of that map Ed made yesterday from orbit photographs of this area, about a hundred miles square. We’re near the eastern edge of that square. There’s the other map he made of the whole globe. We didn’t duplicate that one. I guess that’s about it.”

“Knives,” Wright muttered. “Knives and a few tools.”

“The firearms may make a difference while they last.”

“Yes, perhaps. But thirty years from now—”

“Thirty years from now,” said Dorothy, still sheltering his head, “thirty years from now our children will be grown.”

“Oh.” Wright groped for her fingers. “You almost wanted it like this, didn’t you? I mean, to land and not return?”

“I don’t know, Doc. Maybe. I’m not sure I ever quite believed in the possibility of return. State Orphanage children like Ann and me, growing up in a tiny world within a big one, we weren’t quite human ever, were we? Not that the big world didn’t seep in plenty.” She smiled off at private shadows of memory. “We did learn things not in the directors’ curriculum. When they started grooming Ann and me for this—Youth Volunteers! Stuffing our little heads with the best they had—oh, it was fun too. By that time I think I had a fair idea of the big world. The Orphanage was pleasant, you know—clean, humanitarian, good teachers, all of them kind and more than a bit hurried. They did try so hard never to let me hear the word ‘nigger’! Ignorance is poor insulating material, don’t you think? And why, Doc, after all that’s been known and thought and argued for the last hundred years, couldn’t they select at least one Oriental for our little trip? Wouldn’t have had to come from Jenga’s empire—our own states in the Federation had plenty of ’em—scholars, technicians, anything you care to name.”

Wright had calmed. He said, “I argued for it and got told. They even said that the spaceport rights and privileges recently given to Jenga’s empire would allow the Asiatics to build their own ship—tacitly implying that humanity should stay in two camps world without end. Ach! You can shove the political mind just so far, then it stalls in its own dirt Even Jensen wasn’t able to budge them.”

“It’s history,” said Dorothy, and Paul wondered: How does she do it? Speaking hands and voice, enough to shove away the black sorrow even before it fairly had hold of him—and she’d try to do it for anyone, loved or not. She was the first (and only one) who said to me there are some things more important than love-and she herself would be bothered to explain that in words. “Well,” Dorothy reflected, “I believe the Orphanage slapped too much destiny of Man on the backs of our little necks—they’re just necks. Paul, why don’t you sleep awhile? You too, Doc. Let me keep watch. I’ll wake you both if anything stirs out there. Doze off, boys.”

Paul tried to, his mind restless in weary flesh. No permissible margin of error, said the twenty-first century. But Argo lay at the bottom of a lake because of an error. Not an error like the gross errors twenty-first century man still made in dealing with his own kind and still noisily disregarded, but an engineering error—something twenty-first-century man viewed with a horror once reserved, in not so ancient times, for moral evil. The cardinal sin was to drop a decimal. If, like Wright, or Paul himself, you were concerned with the agony and growing pains of human nature, disturbed by the paralytic sterility of state socialism and the worse paralysis of open tyranny, you kept your mouth shut—or even yielded, almost unknowingly, to the pressures that reduced ethical realities to a piddling checker game perverting the uses of semantics. They said, “There won’t be any war. If there is, look what we’ve got!” If you were like the majority of Earth’s three billion, you hoped to get by with as much as the traffic would bear and never stuck your neck out. They celebrated the turn of the third millennium with a jolly new song: “Snuggle up, Baby—Uncle pays the bill…” But for all that, you mustn’t use the wrong bolt.

Unreasonably quiet here. A jungle evening on Earth would have been riotous with bird and insect noises.… He slept.

It was dark when Wright’s finger prodded him. “A visitor.”

The darkness was rose-tinged, not with sunset. There were two moons, Paul remembered, one white and large and far away, one red and near. Should the red moon be shining now? He gazed through the half-open doorway, wondering why he was not afraid, seeing something pale and vast, washed in—yes, surely in reddish moon-light. A thing swaying on the pillars of its legs, perhaps listening, tasting the air for strangeness. And scattered through the night, sapphires on black velvet, were tiny dots of blue, moving, vanishing, reappearing. “Blue fireflies,” Dorothy whispered, “blue fireflies, that’s all they are.” He felt her controlled breathing, forced down a foolish laugh. We could have done without a white elephant.

Nine or ten feet tall at the shoulder, a tapir-like snout, black tusks bending more nearly downward than an elephant’s, from milk-white flesh. The ears were mobile, waving to study the night. There was an oval hump near the base of the neck. The beast had been facing them; it turned to pull down a branch, munch the leaves, casually drop the stalk. In silence it drifted away, pausing to meditate, grumbling juicily, but with no alarm.

Wright whispered, “The planet Lucifer did not ask for us.”

“Paul—I stepped out for a minute, while you were both asleep. Firm ground. A smell—flowers, I think—made me remember frangipani.”

“I’ll try it.”

“Oh, but not with that thing—”

“He didn’t seem to mind us. I’ll stay near the door.” He knew Dorothy would come with him. Feeling earth under legs that had nearly forgotten it, he turned to help her down; her dark eyes played diamond games with the moon-light.

It could have been a night anywhere in the Galaxy, up there beyond torn branches, stars, and red moon in a vagueness of cloud. Blue fireflies…

But there was a child wailing somewhere. Far-off and weak, a dim rise and fall of sound, grief and remoteness. A waterfall? Wind in upper branches? But they were still, and the sound carried the timbre of animal life. Dorothy murmured, “It’s been crying that way ever since moon-rise.” She came closely into his arms.

“I can read one thing inside of you—you’re not scared.”

“I’m not, Paul?”

“No.”

“But don’t ever leave me—Adam.”