Читать книгу Let there be Night - Robert F. Young - Страница 5

Which answers mankind’s problems better: a stern god or a tolerant one? And what do you do if you have the power to decide it either way?

Deep-space undertows are rare, but when you get caught in one you may as well say farewell to your family and your friends, because you’re never going to see any of them again. The deep-space undertow that grabbed my one-man projectile-torpedo boat during the 2324 space maneuvers off Procyon 16 must have dragged the craft halfway across the galaxy. At any rate, when I re-emerged in normal space I couldn’t spot so much as a single familiar constellation. For the record, my N.E.S.N. serial number is 44B-6507323, my rank is PT-boat pilot, second class, and my name is Benjamin Hill. Once upon a time I was a schoolteacher.

My undertow must have had a conscience of sorts, for it had permitted the PT-boat to surface near a star with a family of six planets. For lack of a better designation I dubbed the system “System X,” and homed in on it in hopes of finding an amenable world on which I could live out the remainder of my years. X-4 looked pretty good. It had an inclination of 2.3 degrees, which meant seasons, and a spectroanalysis revealed an earth-type atmosphere. There was a moon, too—a great big one that moved in an orbit similar to the one maintained by Old Earth’s moon. However, I wasn’t interested in moons, and after a cursory glance at this one I dropped the PT-boat down closer to the planet in order to get a better look at my potential home-to-be.

Seas covered about four-fifths of the surface, and there was only one habitable continent a small land-mass with four long promontories stretching out from its main body somewhat in the manner of arms and legs. The other continents if you want to call them that—were distributed in the arctic and the anarctic regions, and except for their northern and southern littorals were about as hospitable to warm-blooded life as a bunch of icebergs.

Well, one continent was better than none. I began orbiting in. Almost as though it had been waiting for me to come to my decision, the ion drive burned out.

Apparently my undertow had not had a conscience after all.

All that saved me were my retros and my drag chute. The retros enabled me to bring the PT-boat down on the habitable planet, albeit on a rugged mountainside, and the chute enabled me to bring the boat down gently enough to avert an accidental detonation of my payload of projectiles. Planetfall took place in the twilight belt, and when I stepped through the locks, the moon was just beginning to rise.

DID I say “moon”? I shouldn’t have, because even though the term is technically correct it wasn’t the word that came into my mind when the satellite rose above the horizon. “Man” was the word. Or maybe “god.” Thinking back now, it’s hard to tell.

“The man in the moon!’ is a familiar enough phenomenon to anyone who has ever visited Old Earth, and satellites with “faces” in them are no more unusual than comets with “tails.” If a person looks hard enough and long enough, he can find a face in anything. But this face wasn’t in the moon it was the moon. Or, more accurately, it was that hemisphere which had been hidden from me during my approach and which I have been too preoccupied to notice while orbiting in for a landing. The moon, in toto, was a “head.”

Unlike Old Earth’s famed satellite, this satellite was young; its face, however, was anything but. It was the face of an old, old man—a cantankerous old man who hated planets, who hated people, who hated light and laughter; who hated, in short, just about anything or anyone you could think of. The frown embodied in that countenance was so intense that it was almost tangible, and it pervaded the very moonlight in which I stood.

I re-entered the PT-boat and aligned and focused one of the telescopic projectile-sights. The “forehead” was a vast plateau. The “eyebrows” were forested littorals. The “eyes” were seas. The “nose” was a mountain range. The “lips” were a pair of barren ridges. The “bearded cheeks” were forested lowlands. The “chin” was a tundra. The “ears” were mesas, while the plateau that constituted the “forehead” extended up and back into a gleaming, “hairless” pate. The atmosphere softened the visage somewhat, but not nearly enough appreciably to affect its austerity.

A plateau, a pair of seas, a mountain range, two ridges, two mesas, a Paleozoic forest, and a tundra interesting topography, certainly, but nothing to get particularly excited about for all its realistic physiognomic pattern. Nothing for a member of sophisticated society to get particularly excited about, that is. But how about a member of a naive society? Specifically, how about the race of people that had built the primitive village I had glimpsed in the distance while coming down on the mountainside? What would be, or rather, what had been, its reaction to such a phenomenon?

It was a discomfiting question, the more so because I couldn’t answer it. Presently I gave up trying and went to bed. All through the night I lay half awake and half asleep, trying to put the life I once had known, and would never know again, behind me. In the morning I got together the few essentials I would need to see me to the village, pocketed a small ion pistol just in case, secured the PT-boat’s locks, and started down the mountainside. There are some people who do not need the presence of other people in order to live a rich and satisfying life. I am not one of them.

Like Zarathustra, I went down my mountain alone, meeting no one. In the forest below, however, I did not come upon an old man looking for roots. I came upon a girl bathing in a brook.

This is considerably simpler in the telling than it was in the actual doing. The half trek-half climb down that mountainside had taken me three days twenty-six hour ones and I had been in the forest the better part of the fourth.

The girl had long auburn hair that looked darker than it really was because it was wet. She had big, almost luminous, gray eyes, an attractive nose, and rather full lips. A dimple dotted the center of her chin. There had been some doubt in my mind whether the natives of X-4 would turn out to be human there are some recorded cases of planets of the genus Old Earth giving birth to nonhuman intelligences but as I watched the girl, the doubt was dispelled. If anything, she was more than human, physically at least, and glimpsing the flash of her long symmetrical legs and the white gleamings of her graceful arms and shoulders I felt like Adonis spying on Venus. If the analogy doesn’t quite come off, I alone am to blame, because while I failed to qualify as Adonis, the girl in the brook was on a par with Venus, and then some.

I made myself comfortable in the underbrush and waited till such time as she should come out of the water, dress, and start for home. At length I saw her climb dripping up on the bank and start drying herself with a coarse cotton towel, shivering all the while in the cold spring wind that wafted through the forest. The drying operation completed, she slipped into several cotton undergarments, after which she spread out a rug-like length of some indeterminate material, lay down, and rolled herself up in it in such a way that only her arms, shoulders, and head protruded from one end, and her legs, from the knees down, from the other. When she stood up she was about as sexy as an animated stovepipe, and you would have thought that no further affront to her feminine dignity was possible. It was, though. The gray dress she proceeded to get into covered her from her neck to her ankles and was stayed so that it formed an upright cone. The animated stovepipe had now become an animated tepee.

Finally, after slipping her feet into a pair of clodhopper shoes, she produced a comb from the voluminous interior of her dress and proceeded to comb her hair. It fell all the way to the small of her back, and how she managed to comb it straight back from her face and forehead and compress it into a bun no bigger than a billiard ball I’ll never understand, but comb and compress it she did, after which she donned a bonnet that matched her dress and that hid not only all of her hair but half of her face as well. Looking at her, I saw no vestige whatsoever of the girl I had seen bathing in the brook, but fortunately or unfortunately, as the case may be I have a good memory.

A path bordered the opposite bank of the brook, and presently she started along it in the direction of the village. I waited. till the trees hid her from view, then I forded the brook at a point where the waters ran relatively shallow, and detoured around her at a brisk dogtrot. Emerging on the path, I laid down on the ground and made like I had dropped in my tracks. It wasn’t a particularly difficult subterfuge to bring off, for my three days on the mountainside and my three-quarters of a day in the forest had taken just about all the starch out of me, and the brisk dogtrot had decimated the modicum there was left.

I kept one eye on the alert in case the sight of me lying helpless on the path failed to evoke the reaction I was gambling on and evoke a diametrically different one instead. I needn’t have worried: the minute she rounded a turn in the path and saw me, she became a veritable engine of concern and bore down upon me in a flurry of feminine tenderness. Kneeling beside me—no small accomplishment in that outfit she had on she felt my forehead. Next, she lay her head upon my chest and listened for my heartbeat. All this while I had been watching her with one slitted eye; now, I opened both eyes, raised my head, and looked full into her face. We were so close, our noses almost touched. “Pervitu es Uiren?” she asked, straightening abruptly.

I propped myself into a sitting position. Getting across the phony background I had decided upon i.e., that I had suffered a total loss of memory, had wandered away from my own village (if there was one, there had to be others), and become lost in the forest was no easy matter with nothing to work with except a series of improvised signs, but at length I managed, and was rewarded by a warm look of sympathetic understanding. Helping me to my feet, she pointed down the path in the direction of the village and indicated by means of several improvised signs of her own that I was to accompany her to her home, where I would be suitably cared for. She even proffered her shoulder for me to lean on. I didn’t avail myself of it, however, I may be an opportunist, but I draw the line when it comes to taking undue advantage of trusting females.

As we walked slowly along, she kept glancing curiously at my torn and begrimed space fatigues. I hoped they weren’t too radically different from the garments worn by the menfolk of her village, and apparently they weren’t, for after a while her interest waned and her glances petered out. The trail widened gradually into a rutted road. The ruts spelled wagons, and hoofmarks in between them spelled some manner of equine beast of burden. The brook purled along beside the road, and occasionally I glimpsed small game in the underbrush bordering the opposite bank. Some of the trees had some kind of letters carved in their trunks. There were birds everywhere, and the way was sweet with their evening songs. In several sheltered places, pale patches of snow lingered. Certainly, I reflected, it was rather early in the season for a girl to be bathing in a brook.

Shadow lengthened around us, and. I Could tell from the way my companion kept trying to step up our pace that she wanted to make it home before darkness fell. Noticing the increasing coolness of the air, I thought I knew why, but I didn’t really till darkness actually did fall. Then, when she knelt down in the middle of the road and bowed her head, I realized that she was afraid.

Afraid of that silly satellite rising into the sky.

I made haste to kneel down beside her. I couldn’t of course join her in the little prayer that she uttered—I learned afterward that it was a prayer beseeching forgiveness for being out after dark with a man to whom she was not betrothed but obviously my comportment left nothing to be desired for, several moments later when she got to her feet and looked down at me, I saw gratitude shining in her eyes.

I stood up beside her. Before we started on our way again, I stole a look at old mountain-nose. I had already figured out his habits that is to say, his orbital velocity and his trajectory and knew that during each twenty-six hour period he rose and set at the same time and consequently underwent no phases. The look he gave me back seemed even dirtier than the previous looks I had rated. Now that I came to think of it, there was something familiar about that somber frown of his. Somewhere or other I had encountered it before. Suddenly I remembered. I had seen it on the face of Michelangelo’s Yahweh in the Sistine Chapel.

The village began without preamble. It was situated near the shore of a small lake, and consisted of a cluster of perhaps three thousand buildings crisscrossed by avenues and side streets just wide enough for two medium sized wagons to pass comfortably. With the exception of a half dozen large, factory-like structures standing in a sizable clearing on the outskirts, the buildings were all alike, so a description of the one the girl led me to should suffice. The ground floor measured something like 35X35X12 feet and was constructed of heavy planking. Two square windows and a thick rectangular door distinguished the facade from the other three sides, and there was a small plot of ground separating it from the street. At first glance, the second floor seemed to be nothing more than a set of shingleless rafters rising steeply into a series of individual peaks; at second glance, however, the glass roofing material became visible, and you realized that you were confronted with a large second-story room, the walls and ceiling of which were one enormous skylight. Rising along the rear wall and protruding from the transparent peak was a stone chimney, and from its mouth issued a thin trail of smoke.

The girl opened the door and we went inside. Like the second floor, the ground floor consisted of but one room. It was commodious enough, however, and functioned as living room, dining room, and kitchen. The kitchen was located along the rear wall and featured a big stone hearth in which an anemic wood-fire was burning. Next to the hearth, a ladder climbed the wall to a trap door in the ceiling. The dining room was little more than a round wooden table, several wooden chairs, and a box-like affair that functioned as a sort of buffet and cupboard combined. The living room was about as cozy as a third-class spaceport waiting room. There was a long wooden bench, a wooden armchair, and a small wooden table. On the table burned the source of the room’s sole illumination a primitive oil lamp with a glass chimney. Attached to the table’s legs a few feet above the bare plank floor was a rack, and on this rack lay a thick book bound in black leather. No one needed to tell me what kind of a book it was, and no one needed to tell me who or rather, what its subject matter concerned.

In the kitchen stood a woman. She was wearing a camouflage-bonnet and a tepee dress, and she was engaged in stirring the contents of a large cast-iron kettle that was suspended over the anemic flames of the hearth-fire. In the living room sat a man. He was wearing skin-tight black trousers and a black frock coat that came all the way to his knees, and he was engaged in making entries in a large ledger that lay on his lap. Both the man and the woman looked up when the girl and I came in, and when the girl spoke several words to them they came hurrying over to my side. The man was tall and thin and bearded, and about twice my age (I was twenty-nine at the time). He looked as though he had lost his last friend. The woman was somewhat younger than he was, almost as thin, and she looked as though she too had lost her last friend. Glancing at the girl, I saw the melancholy in her eyes for the first time, and realized that she also looked as though she had lost her last friend. I began to wish that I had remained on my mountain.