Chapter II: Part 2

Paul's hunting knife was out; there was time only for recognition. The gray and white being was everything human caught in a coil. Paul forced himself through a barrier of fear, hearing Wright yell, "Don't shoot, Ed! Put that away." There was no shot. Paul knew he was between Spearman and the confusion of combat; someone was blundering behind him. A black reptilian tail stretched into bushes, grasping something for anchorage. Paul slashed at that. The mass of heaving life rolled on the ground as the giant lost his footing, serpent teeth still buried in his forearm. Green eyes were pleading in a universal language.

Wright was clutching a black neck, with no strength to move it, and Paul stabbed at scaled hide behind a triangular head, but the skin was like metal. The forelimbs were degenerate vestiges, the hind legs cruelly functional. At last the steel penetrated; Paul twisted it, probing for a brain. The giant had ceased struggling; the furred face was close. Paul could feel the difficult breath, sense a rigid waiting.... The teeth let go. The giant leaped free, returning at once with a stone the size of Paul's chest, to fling it down on the slow-dying body, repeating the action till his enemy was a smear of black and red.

Now in returning quiet a furred man eight feet tall watched them openly. Wright said, "Ed, put away that gun. This man is a friend."

"Man!" Spearman holstered his automatic, ready for a draw. "Your daydreams will kill us all yet."

"Smile, all of you--maybe his mouth does the same thing." Wright stepped to the trembling monster, hands open. Ann was sobbing in reaction, smothering the sound. Wright pointed at himself. "Man." He touched the gray fur. "Man...."

The giant drew back, not with violence. Paul felt Dorothy's small fingers shivering on his arm. The giant sucked his wound and spat, turning his head away from Wright to do it. "Man--man...." Wright's hand, small and pale as an oyster shell, spread beside the huge palm, six fingers, long four-jointed thumb. "Paul--your first-aid kit. I want just the gauze."

Spearman said, "Are you crazy?"

"It's a chance," Sears Oliphant said in a level, careful voice. "Doc knows what he's doing. Ed, you should know you can't stop him."

Wright was pointing to Paul's bandaged shoulder and to the giant's wound. The high furred forehead puckered in obvious effort. Dorothy was choking on a word or two: "Doc--must you--"

"He knows we're friends. He's been watching a long time. He saw Paul get hurt and then bandaged." The giant's trembling was only a spasmodic shuddering. "Man--man...." Wright snipped off gauze. "And he knows that thing is a weapon, Ed. Will you put it away?"

"He could break you in two. You know that, don't you?"

"But he won't. Give protoplasm a chance." Now Wright was winding gauze lightly, firmly, hiding the already clotting blood, and the giant made no move of rejection. "Man--man."

"Man." The giant murmured it cautiously, prolonging the vowel; he touched his chest. "_Essa kana._" A finger ran exploringly over the gauze.

"Essa kana--man," said Wright, and swayed on his feet.

The giant pointed at the bloody mess on the ground and rumbled: "_Kawan_." He shuddered, and his arm swept in a loose gesture that appeared to indicate the curving quarter mile where lake and jungle met each other in a black-water marsh. Then he was staring out, muttering, at the wings in the meadow, and presently he touched Paul's bandage with fantastic lightness. "_Omasha_," he said, pointing at the flying beasts. He indicated the rifle wobbling in Sears' arm and held up two fingers. "Omasha."

"Yes, we killed two omasha. Sears-man. Paul-man. Wright-man."

The giant rumpled his chest fur. "Mijok."

"Mijok-man.... Mijok, why didn't I have you in Anthropology IA fifteen years ago? We'd've cleaned up the joint." Mijok knew laughter; his booming in response to Wright's tone and smile could mean nothing else. But Wright staggered and was breathing hard. Dorothy whispered, "Paul--"

It could not be pushed aside any more--the pain separate from the smart of his shoulder, tightness in the eyeballs, chill, nausea. "The air--"

Wright's knees buckled. Sears had dropped the rifle and was helping him to the lifeboat, Paul watching the action in a daze of stupidity. Wright's eyes had gone empty.... Paul was uncertain how he himself came to be sitting on the ground. Dorothy's face was somewhere; he touched it. Her brown cheek was fire-hot, and she was trying to speak. "Paul--take care of you--always--"

The face of Mijok was there too--red vapor turning black.

5

Paul Mason stared into blue calm: airy motion of branches against the sky, a mystery remembered from long ago, in a place called New Hampshire. Those years were not dead: secretly the mind had brought them here. _What a small journey! Less than five light-years: on a star map you could hardly represent it with the shortest of lines...._ He was without pain, and cool. Time? Why, that amiable thud of a heart in a firm, familiar body (his own, surely?), that was indicating time. The boy in New Hampshire, after sprawling on his lazy back and discovering the miracle of sky--hadn't he tried to paint it, even then? Messed about with his uncle's palette, creating a daub that had--oh, something, a little something. _Very well. Once upon a time there was a painter named Paul Mason_.... Dorothy....

"You're back--oh, darling! No, Paul, don't sit up fast or your head'll hurt. Mine did." Now she was curling into the hollow of his arm, laughing and weeping. "You're back...."

A thin old man sat cross-legged on gray moss. Paul asked him, "How long?"

Christopher Wright smiled, twisting and teasing the skin of his gaunt throat, gray with a thick beard stubble. "A day and a night, the nurse says. You know--the nurse? You were kissing her a moment ago. It's early morning again, Paul. She was never quite unconscious, she claims. I recovered an hour ago. No ill effects. It knocked out the others at nightfall--predictable. They were exposed to Lucifer's air thirteen hours later than we were." Paul saw them now, lying on beds of the gray--moss? And where he and Dorothy clung to each other was the same pleasant stuff--dry, spongy, with an odor like clover hay. "Beds by courtesy of Mijok." Wright nodded toward the gray giant, who had also brought moss for himself and now sprawled belly down, breathing silently, the bulge between his shoulder blades lightly rising and falling. Mijok's face was on his arm, turned away toward the purple shadow of forest.

Dorothy whispered, "He watched over us all night."

"So you were conscious all the time? Tell me."

Dorothy kept her voice low. Paul noticed the towering slimness of the lifeboat beyond the barrier of branches, reversed--Ed Spearman's work, he supposed. It pointed toward the west. Turned so, the jet would blast toward the lake, harming nothing. Its shadow held away the heat of the sun, a gleaming artifact of twenty-first century man, the one alien thing in this wilderness morning. The sickness, Dorothy said, had taken her with a sudden paralysis: she could see, hear, be aware of boiling fever, but could not move. Then even the sense of heat left her--she was only observing eyes, ears, and a brain. She had had a fantasy that she was dead, no longer breathing. "But I breathed." Her small brown face crinkled with a laughter rich in more than amusement. "It's a habit I don't mean to abandon."

"Neurotoxin," said Wright, "and a damn funny one. Back on Earth, when I believed myself to be a doctor, I never heard of anything like it."

The condition had lasted all day, she said; at nightfall her sense of touch had gradually returned. She could move her hands, later her feet and head. At length she had sat up, briefly blinded by pain in the forehead, then she had given way to an overwhelming need for sleep. "I got a glimpse of you, Paul, and tumbled off into a set of dreams that were--not so bad, not so bad. I woke before sunrise. Different. Don't ask me how. Never felt healthier. Not even weak, as you should be after a fever. But Doc--what if the illness--"

Wright looked away from the terror that had crossed her face. "If you go on feeling all right, we can assume nothing's wrong with the baby. Don't borrow trouble, sugarpuss--we've got enough."

"Maybe," Paul suggested, "the illness was just--oh, some of our Earth metabolism getting burned out of us. A stiff acclimation course." Wright grunted, pinching his long nose. Paul said, "Wish it had burned out the yen for a cigarette that I've had for eleven years."

Sears Oliphant, the only other with some medical knowledge, had taken charge immediately after their collapse. "He is--scared, Paul," Dorothy murmured. "Of Lucifer, I mean. I could feel it when I was just a pair of eyes and ears. More physical shrinking in him than in the rest of us, and he's fighting it back with all he's got. He's a very big man, Paul...." Sears looked peaceful enough now, in the dark sleep of the sickness, his moon face bristling with black beard growth but relaxed and bland. On another couch of moss, Spearman was more restless, powerful arms twitching as if he needed to fight the disaster even in sleep. Ann Bryan was deeply flushed and moaned a little now and then. "Ed was all right too. Considerate. Took all Sears' orders without any fuss or question; I don't think he's much scared. He feels he can bull his way through anything, and maybe he's right." Dorothy's helpless eyes had also seen Mijok bringing moss in great armfuls. This, she thought, had helped Ed Spearman to accept the giant as a man and perhaps as a friend. She remembered Mijok raising Paul and herself in one careful swing of his arms to set them down beside each other on the moss. Later she had watched him turning the lifeboat under direction of Spearman's blunt gestures. Its length was thirty-four feet, its weight over three tons Earth gravity--more here. One gray-white arm had lifted the tail and swung the boat on its landing gear as a man might push a light automobile. "I wasn't afraid. After dark, when I knew the sickness had got the others, I still wasn't afraid. Believe me? I could see Mijok moving around. Once I heard him growl--I think he was driving something off. And then while the red moon was coming up, he sat by us--his eyes are red in the dark, Paul, not green. He smells musky at close range, but clean. I wasn't afraid. Now and then he'd look us over and smile with his funny black lips and touch the furry back of his finger to our foreheads.... I could see the blue fireflies, Paul. Someday you'll make up stories about them for the baby.... I heard that crying again--much nearer than when we heard it that first night by the other lifeboat. Like a group of children crying, if you can imagine that synchronized, almost musical. Mijok growled and fretted when it began, but it came no nearer. It had stopped when I woke."

"Some of Earth's critters sounded human--panthers, owls, frogs--"

"Ye-es. Just possibly something like tree frogs...."

Wright said, "Mijok brought us raw meat this morning before he went to sleep, something like a deer haunch. The fire bothers him--he evidently didn't go near it last night after the others collapsed."

"Ed tried to show him about fire," Dorothy said. "I remember. Mijok was scared, and Sears told Ed to let it wait."

"Meat was good too." Wright smirked. "We got the fire going, and Mijok did try some cooked and liked it. You and Dorothy can have some tomorrow if I don't turn purple."

"Not guinea-pig," said Dorothy. "Just pig."

"Hungry?" Wright tossed Paul a ration package.

"Gah!" But he opened it. "Learned any more of Mijok's words?"

"No. He won't have many. Nouns, simple descriptives. Must have some continuing association with his own breed, or he'd have no words at all. A hunter--with only nature's weapons, I think. That haunch was torn, not cut--some hoofed animal smaller than a pony, fresh-killed and well bled. He must have got it while Dorothy slept. It may have strayed into the camp during the night. I think Mijok lives in the woods, maybe not even a shelter or a permanent mate. Anthropology IA." said Wright, and bowed in mimic apology to the sleeping giant. "Those pygmies will be something else again--Neolithic. Wish I understood that bulge between the shoulder blades. All the creatures we've seen have it--even that damn black reptile, I believe, though things were too mixed up to be sure."

Mijok woke--all at once, like a cat. He stretched, extending his arms twelve feet from wrist to wrist. He smiled down at Paul. He studied the helpless ones, peering longest at Ann Bryan; the black-haired girl was breathing harshly, fidgeting. Now and then her eyes flickered open and perhaps they saw. Softly as smoke Mijok stepped into the shadow of the trees and listened. Wright remarked, "Speaking of that reptile, we should set up a monument to it. Nothing luckier could have happened than that chance to lend Mijok a hand." His gray eyes fixed on Paul, lids lowered in a speculative smile. "I'm not the only one who remembers, Paul, that you were the first to go to his help. He hasn't forgotten.... Dot, you're sure Ed understood that we have a friend there?"

"He seemed to, Doc. I watched them. They got along--practically buddies."

Paul saw the bandage was still on Mijok's arm, earth-stained and with fragments of gray moss, but not disarranged; the bandage on his own shoulder had been removed. The flying beast's attack had left only a heavy scratch, which looked clean; there was no pain, only an itching. The meadow was empty of brown wings. The dead fish were gone from the lake. Perhaps other scavengers had been busy in the thirteen-hour night. The water was an innocent blue, a luminous stillness under the sun.

Mijok stole out into the grass, gazing westward along the line where meadow met jungle. Returning, he squatted by Wright and muttered, "_Migan_." He spread a hand three feet above the ground; two fingers drooped and indicated the motion of walking legs. Paul suggested: "Pygmies?"

"Could be." Mijok stared eloquently at Wright's rifle then crouched at the barrier of branches, complaining in his throat. Taking up his own rifle, Paul joined him. Dorothy hurried to the lifeboat and came back with field glasses for him and Wright and herself. In spite of the great planet's heavy pull, her body moved with even more light easiness than it had shown in the unreal years of _Argo_. With the glasses, vague motion a quarter mile away in the meadow leaped shockingly into precision.

The pygmies were not approaching but heading out from the edge of the forest, a group of nine, barely taller than the grass, bald red heads and shoulders in single file. The rearmost had a burden: seven others carried bows, with quivers on the right hip. "Left-handed," Paul observed aloud. The leader was the tallest--a woman, with a long spear. All were sending anxious glances at the sky and toward the human shelter; their motions suggested a fear so deep it must be pain, yet something drew them out there in spite of it. The pygmy with the burden, a rolled-up hide, was also a woman. The leader was bald as the others, slender, muscular, her head round, with prominent forehead and thin nose, tattooed cheeks. The bowmen had only simple loincloths, and belts for their arrow quivers. The women's knee-length grass skirts were like the Melanesian, but the leader's was dyed a brilliant blue. Her two little pairs of breasts were youthfully firm and pointed. Dorothy murmured, "American civilization would have gone mad about those people."

"What a girl!" Wright sighed. "I mean Dorothy--the Dope."

"Even a dope can be jealous. Do you s'pose Mrs. Mijok has--Oh! Oh, poor darling! Not funny after all, gentlemen----"

The pygmy leader had turned full face, as the nine paused at trampled grass. She wore a necklace of shell. These had no glitter, but their yellow and blue made handsome splashes against the red of her skin. Reason told Paul that she could see at most only dazzling spots where sunlight might be touching the glasses he had thrust through wilted leaves. It made no difference: she was staring directly into him, making her grief a part of his life. A still-faced grief, too profound for any tears, if she knew of tears. The green cat eyes lowered; she stabbed her spear into the ground and lifted her arms, a giving, yielding motion. Her lips moved--in prayer, surely, since all but one of the men were bowed, performing ritual gestures toward whatever lay on the ground. The one who did not bow never ceased to watch the sky. The prayer was brief. The woman's left hand dropped meaningly, the hide was unrolled, and its bearer raised what the grass had hidden--no more than a skull and a few bones, a broken spear, a muddy scrap that might have been a grass skirt. The hide was folded gently over these; the group went on.

"Dorothy--those things you saw running when we were circling down--I missed 'em," Wright said. "Poor eyesight, and seems to me the air was still misty from _Argo's_ crash in the lake. They were going south, away from here? And they could have been--people like these?"

"Yes. Hundreds or thousands of them. I suppose the crash of _Argo_ must have seemed like the heavens falling. The lifeboats too."

"I think we interrupted a war."

"These would be survivors? Live in this part of the jungle maybe? Looking for what's left after those--those flying beasts--"

"It makes sense," Wright said. "They're more afraid of the sky than of our setup over here. Maybe we're gods who came down to help them. If we did help them. Look: they've found another.... Yes, now the prayer.... Wish Mijok wasn't so afraid of them. Inevitable. To them I suppose he's an ugly wild animal. Different species, similar enough to be shocked at the similarity. 'Tain't good."

"Do we try for a foot in both camps?"

"Paul, I think I'll take a rain check on answering that.... Ach--if I could go out there now--communicate--"

"No!" Dorothy gasped. "Not while the others are still sick."

"You're right of course." Wright fretted at his beard stubble. "I get sillier all the time. As Ed would tell me if he were up and around. It's the high oxygen...."

There were brown splashes in the sky. The pygmies saw the peril first and darted for the woods--an orderly flight however--the woman with the hide in front, the blue-skirted woman next, then the bowmen. Three of the latter turned bravely and shot arrows that glittered and whined. The brown beasts wheeled and flapped angrily upward, though the buzzing arrows dropped far short of them. The pygmies gained the trees; the omasha scouted the edge of the woods, squawking, three of them drifting toward the lifeboat, weaving heads surveying the ground. Paul gave way to unfamiliar savage enjoyment. "Do we, Doc?"

"Yes," said Wright, and took aim himself.

All three were brought down, at a cost of four irreplaceable rifle bullets and two shots from Dorothy's automatic. Mijok bellowed with satisfaction but recoiled as Wright dragged a dirty brown carcass into the clearing. "A dissection is in order." Mijok grumbled and fidgeted. "Don't fret, Mijok." Wright pegged down the wings of the dead animal with sharp sticks and drew an incision on the leathery belly with his hunting knife. "Good head shot, Paul--this one's yours. We'll do a brain job from one of the others, but I think we'll let that wait for Sears--oh my, yes...! Doesn't weigh over thirty pounds. Hollow bones like a bird's, very likely. Hope they'll keep."

"You hope," Dorothy sniffed. "What do you do when I turn housewife and instruct you to get that awful mess the hell off my nice clean floor?"

"Dope! And you my best and only medical student." He worked at the cutting dubiously, inexpertly. "Conventional mammalian setup, more or less. Small lungs, big stomach. Hah--two pairs of kidneys?" He spread the viscera out on the wing. "Short intestine, also like a bird. And she was preparing a blessed event multiplied by--count 'em--six."

"Too many," said Paul. "Altogether too industrious."

"What I really want to know--Oh...?" With the lungs removed, it could be seen that the hump on the back was caused by a great enlargement of four thoracic vertebrae, which swelled into the chest cavity as well as outward. Wright cut away spinal cartilage. "Damn, I _wish_ Sears was doing this. Well, it's neural tissue, nothing else--a big swelling of the spinal cord." He sliced at the ugly head, but the hermorrhage from a .30-caliber bullet confused the picture. "The brain looks too simple. Could that lump in the cord be the hind brain? I hereby leave the theories to Sears. But, son, you might slit the stomach and see what the old lady had for breakfast."

Paul's clumsy cut on the slippery stomach bag made it plain what the omasha had eaten--among other things, an almost complete seven-fingered hand. Dorothy choked and walked away, saying, "I am going to be--"

"Cheer up." Paul held her forehead. "Never mind the clean floor--"

"Go away. I mean stay very close. Sorry to be so physiological. Me a medic student! Even blood bothers me."

"Never mind, sugar--"

"Sugar yourself, and wash your paws. We smell."

Mijok was muttering in alarm. Wright had abandoned the dissection and gone out in the meadow, cautious but swift, to the spot where yesterday they had found the pygmy soldiers. He took up a small skull and arm bone, pathetically clean--perhaps there were insect scavengers that followed after the omasha--and the discarded bow. But instead of bringing back these relics, Wright held them high over his head, facing westward. Tall and gray in the heavy sun, he stepped twenty paces further toward the region where the pygmies had entered the jungle; then he set the bones down in the grass and strode back to the shelter, fingers twitching, lips moving in his old habit of talking half to himself, half to the world. "The omasha," he said, "cracked the enlarged vertebrae--favorite morsel maybe."

Mijok moaned, blinking and sighing. He stared long at the silent grace of the lifeboat, then at Christopher Wright. He too was talking to himself. Abruptly, something gave way in him. He was kneeling before Wright, bending forward, taking Wright's hands and pressing them against the gray-white fur of his face and his closed eyes. "Oh, now," Wright said, "now, friend--"

Paul remarked, "You're elected."

"I will not be a god."

6

Mijok released the hands of his deity and sat back on his haunches, foggy-eyed. Wright stroked the great furry head, troubled and amazed. "It won't do," Wright said. "We'll have no gods on this planet. Unless human nature can make itself a little godlike. And no final Armageddon--for that's within too, and always was. Well, he'll learn language fast. As he does, the first thing he must discover is that we're all one flesh." But Mijok was gazing up in adoration at the sound of the voice, trembling, not in fear, smiling when he saw Wright smile. "I believe he never had a god before--hadn't reached the stage of personalizing the forces of nature. They're just forces, and himself a bundle of perception, not even realizing that he's more knowing and sensitive than other animals. Not arrogant yet, not sophisticated enough to be cruel, or mean, or even ambitious...."

Dorothy pushed her fists into her cheeks, brown eyes upturned to study the old man: a way she had, carrying Paul back eleven years to the day he had come aboard the ship and seen her for the first time and loved the woman who was, even then, manifest in the leggy, awkward child. "Doc, why did you do that, out there in the meadow?"

"Why, Dorothy, we must make contact with those pygmies too. They are--advanced. It'll be more difficult. They'll have traditions--maybe some very ancient ones. But we must make contact."

"Mijok hates them though. If they come here--"

Wright grinned. "Temporary advantage of being little tin deities. I think Mijok will do whatever we indicate--until we're able to teach him independence."

Paul said, "Don't think for a minute I'm not with you. But Doc, with the others helpless we're only three--"

"Four."

"Yes, four. There's our own survival to think of. It's a big planet. Seems to me you're taking it on all at once."

Wright slouched, loose-limbed, at the barrier, where he could watch the meadow, and Mijok stayed close to him. "I think we must, Paul. If we start right perhaps we can go on right. A mistake at this point could go on burning for a thousand years.... Why do you think he broke out into worship when he did? Our superior achievements--lifeboat, guns, the rescue from that reptile? The fact that I wasn't afraid of a poor pygmy's bones? All that, sure, but something else. Ed would say I was daydreaming--but I think Mijok's heart knows what his brain can't yet interpret. Sears would agree, I think--his own heart's bigger than Lucifer. Mijok hasn't the least conscious idea why I invited those pygmies to come and get their dead. Down deeper, in the part of him that made him bring the moss and the meat and take care of us, I think he knows very well."

"You're proposing," Dorothy said, "to take a chance on love?"

Wright was tranquil, watching the meadow. "Whenever men put their chips on the other thing they always lost, didn't they? Repeatedly, for twenty or thirty thousand years? Did they ever create anything good except in a milieu of co-operation, friendship, forbearance? One of the oldest of commonplaces--the teachers all knew it. Lao-tse--Buddha--or stated negatively: 'He who lives by the sword....' And so on. Good is not the mere absence of evil, but the most positive of human forces. The instruments of good are charity, patience, courage, effort and self-knowledge, each unavailing without the others; remember that. And that's all the basic ethics I know. The rest is detail, solution of immediate problems as they arise. Even on Earth the good tended to win out in the long run: at least it did until the mechanical toys got out of hand. Then there was a century of living under a question mark. There was also the Collectivist Party. Yes, as a prime example of a part of my own philosophy totally perverted, I give you the Collectivist Party." Wright was talking to himself again, the bitterness of Earth's history goading him into soft-spoken monotone, drawling and dark, on a planet nearly five light-years distant from the ancient confusions. "The Collectivist Party, which turns 'co-operation' into the same sort of word fetish that 'democracy' was less than a hundred years ago--co-operation _without_ charity, without patience, without courage and always, always, without self-knowledge."

Dorothy still watched him with sober upturned eyes. "Ed told me once his father was a pilot in the Collectivist Army during the Civil War."

"I know." Wright smiled at her in bashful half apology. "Some of the old wounds still bleed too, I guess. I generally manage to keep my political mouth shut when he's listening, if I can. Not that Ed could be accused of still fighting the war that ended before he was born.... Relax: I think they're coming."

Paul joined Wright and the giant at the barrier, but Dorothy stayed a moment with the sick, feeling their wrists, murmuring something close to Ann's ear, although the girl could not respond. "Past the fever stage, I believe," she said. "They're all breathing well. No chance they'll be out of it before night, I suppose...."

The pygmies were still some distance away, slipping along the edge of the woods in plain sight. There were only three--the two women and one bowman; perhaps the others were paralleling their course inside the forest--perhaps a hundred others were. Wright whispered, "Have we anything that would make a respectable gift?"

Mijok was rumbling in misery and fright. Dorothy came over holding a locket. "This--you remember, Doc--a matron at the Orphanage gave it to me. I used to imagine it could be a portrait of my mother--"

"But my dear--"

The brown girl shook her head. "This ship-metal wedding ring Paul hammered out for me--that's the only Earth jewelry I want to keep. This face that might be like my mother's--Oh, Doc, I'm getting to be a big girl now. Besides, Lucifer will have plenty of pretties for us later on. And Doc--let me do this, will you? They've got a woman leading 'em, so--wouldn't she be less afraid of another woman? I'll uncover, so she--" Dorothy shrugged out of her jacket. "Please, Doc? I'm scared, but--"

Wright glanced helplessly at Paul. "We--"

Dorothy said quickly, "_My_ decision." Holding the locket up for the sun to gleam on it, she walked into the meadow and waited in the brightness. Paul's hand sweated on the rifle stock. He saw Wright patting Mijok's arm, heard his restraining murmur: "Quiet, Mijok--keep your shirt on, Mijok, old man--man...." Mijok searched the face of his god with a mute desperation and remained as he was.

The pygmy woman halted fifty feet away in still-faced musing. As Paul had seen through the binoculars, she was elaborately tattooed and young. The pause was long. Dorothy stepped nearer to the place where Wright had left the bones, displaying the locket, her open left hand waving down at her body to demonstrate that she carried no weapons. For the first time Paul realized she had left her holster belt behind.

The blue-skirted woman shrilled a word; her two followers fell back. She thrust the blunt end of her spear in the ground and came forward steadily until she was only a few feet from the woman of the twenty-first century; mask-faced, she met Dorothy's smile with a long scrutiny. Now and then the green eyes shifted to study the clearing, the lifeboat, the quiet shapes of Paul and Wright. And Mijok. Perhaps she stared longest at Mijok, but by some heavy discipline her face refused to tell of anything but dignity and caution.

She spoke at last. It was complex, in a tone like the piping of a tree frog. There were pauses, studied inflections, no gestures: her seven-fingered hands hung limp against the blue grass skirt. The closing words seemed to have a note of questioning and of sternness; she waited.

Dorothy's contralto was startlingly deep in contrast: "Darling, I would like to know where you picked up that perfectly adorable wrap-around, only I don't think it would suit me. I'm, to put it frankly, a shade too hippy for such. In case you're wondering, I'm a female sample of man"--she touched herself and pointed to the pygmy lady--"man--"

"Oh!" Wright whispered. "Good girl, good--"

"--and it does seem to me us girls ought to stick together, because"--she held out the locket--"well, just because. And anyway look: I have only ten toes, fastened on to the ends of my feet, and if I had more, Heaven knows (just count 'em and _see_ how each grows!) I'd have trouble in keeping them neat. Pome. There now, sweetie pie, please take it, huh?" And she opened the locket--Paul remembering in lessening panic how much the unknown portrait did resemble her--and held it face out to the woman of Lucifer. A tiny palm came up dubiously; Dorothy placed the locket in it. "It won't bite, baby." The pygmy woman turned it about, puzzling at the hinge. Dorothy stooped to demonstrate the mechanism a few times. "I'm Dorothy, by the way, more widely known as the Dope, which is a title of uncommon distinction among my people, achieved only after long study of the art of saying the right thing at the wrong time, burning the bacon, and preserving at all times an air of sweet and addled dignity--Dorothy...." She indicated herself plainly and pointed, with questioning eyebrows.

The tree-frog voice, with no sternness, but a hint of friendliness: "Tor-o-thee...?" She imitated Dorothy's motions. "Abro Pakriaa--"

"Pakriaa."

"Abro Pakriaa." There was sternness again in that correction.

"Abro Pakriaa...."

Wright muttered, "Royalty, I believe. Don't dare do any coaching. Trust Dot's instinct. Ah, here we go--"

The pygmy woman had taken off her shell necklace. She crushed the dainty blue and yellow against her upper right breast; she set it for a moment on her shining hairless skull, and then offered it. Wright sighed, shaken, "It _had_ to work--exchange of gifts--a universal--"

When Dorothy dropped on one knee to take it, the mask relaxed for the first time in a wintry smile. Over the proud bald head went the chain of the locket, and Abro Pakriaa watched Dorothy put the necklace on--fortunately it was long, even drooping a little below Dorothy's throat. A flutter of red hands seemed to mean that Dorothy was to stand back; another motion brought forward the woman who carried the hide, her face a chip of red stone. The hide was unrolled, and the bones placed on it. There was more intricate speech, with touching of the locket and graceful, apparently kindly waving of thin arms. Dorothy responded: "Four score and seven years ago...." She went on to the end without mirth or hesitation, fondling the shell necklace, giving the words the power of music that belongs to them even apart from knowledge of their meaning. When she was silent, Abro Pakriaa motioned the woman with the hide to go and held up her two hands clasped together, the Chinese salutation. She waited till Dorothy had done the same and strode away, recovering her spear without a backward look, vanishing under the trees.

Dorothy collapsed in the shadow of the barrier. Tentatively she groaned: "How'm I doing?"

Wright snarled; "Suppose you know that damn bowman had an arrow trained on you the whole time?"

She glanced at him, lips quivering. "I was kind of aware of it."

"Can I," said Paul, "touch the hand that touched the hand--"

"Oh no. I ain' gonna 'sociate with no common scum no mo'."

Mijok stared in wonder at their sudden paroxysms of hysterical laughter. He rumbled in doubt. Then the contagion caught him. Whatever his own interpretation might be, he was bellowing, hammering his chest, rolling over on the moss and scattering handfuls of it while he roared.

He did not sober until he saw Wright drawing pictures on the earth--three stylized but obvious human figures, one small, one medium-sized, one large. Only the middle one had five fingers. Wright gouged a circle around all three. He said, "C'm'on, Mijok--language lesson."

7

The trail was obvious only to the pygmies, through a border region of meadow and forest that was full of dappled light, a warm hurry of life feeding, struggling, wandering. Aware of his own power and readiness, able now to enjoy the shifting scents and noises of this new trail, Paul watched Ann's quick slenderness and the swing of Spearman's solid shoulders. They, and Sears Oliphant, had emerged unharmed from the illness. During a week unmeasurably long in retrospect, all six of the party had found the ease and sureness of physical acclimation. Their bodies rejoiced in the hot clean air of day and the moist moderate nights; the only rebel was the Earth-born brain--grudging, frightened, trailing, making endless reservations and timid of shadows. In Sears Oliphant it was an almost open battle between a brave and curious mind and flesh that could not hide its wincing from pain and danger. His "Oh my, yes" had a tremor which angered himself and oppressed his natural garrulity.

When Ann Bryan had drifted out of the sleep of illness, Ed Spearman was petting her hands, sponging her forehead. Paul had seen something happen in Ann at that moment, like an innocent putting forth of leaves when winter is not surely gone. Ann had never taken a lover. On the ship, not so much unawakened as unwilling, she had rejected all that; Spearman, making no secret of wanting her, had not been insistent. Nor had he seemed outwardly much distressed, but (at a time when Earth-harbored youth of his nature would have been in their liveliest and most demanding prime) he had buried himself in _Argo's_ technical library to the point of red-eyed exhaustion, a desperation of unceasing study in the technologies that Captain Jensen would have helped him explore if Jensen had lived. Ann had read other matters after the violin strings were gone, read and daydreamed. If she'd wept (and Paul thought she had) she had done it alone, in that pocket of a room sacred to herself. To the others, she was a passionately silent adolescent turning into a tiredly silent woman, who made too much point of doing her own work and asking for nothing.

Yes, Ann was different now. The thin beauty of her face, vivid white under heavy black hair, was still too quiet, but with a troubled radiance. During this long week she had talked much with Dorothy--talk superficially inconsequential, but Paul assumed it had a meaning below words, as if Ann had only just realized, probably without envy, that the brown girl was a thousand years older in heart and mind.

Beyond Ann and Spearman were the six bowmen of the escort, bodies bright with a sour-smelling oil, grouped around Abro Pakriaa at a deferential distance. The princess wore Dorothy's locket. "Abro," Paul had learned, was best translated as "princess" or "queen." A flame-red flower behind her ear caught sunlight from the early afternoon. Five others were following Paul--women, with skirts of every tint but Pakriaa's blue, taller than the men, carrying spears with blades of a white stone resembling quartz. The men were unvaryingly soft, rounded in contour, lacking the women's tough-sinewed vigor. It was plain, merely from the manner of Abro Pakriaa and her spear bearers, that among this people to be a woman was to be a leader and soldier, no doubt a hunter and head of the household by virtue of size and strength. In muscular power, a male pygmy was to a female as the weakest of Earth's women was to the toughest male athlete. These of the bodyguard were soldiers of a sort: the bows were small, the arrows only big darts. The bowmen never spoke except meekly in response to some patronizing word of the princess. Pakriaa's height topped forty inches; none of the bowmen was quite three feet tall. Paul's fingers itched for brush and palette. They were available in the lifeboat. The fact that he had not even unpacked them he blamed on a preoccupation with the daily work needed for mere survival, but there was a deeper reason: perhaps a fear of finding his moderate ability vanished if he should once try to hint with oil at the welling profusion of color and line that was Lucifer. Now he found himself trying to measure the quality of Pakriaa's rich copper against the softness of leaves that were burnt umber, malachite green, saffron, purple, and he thought: _I must be recovering. Wake up, ego, and look around._

Spearman was carrying rifle and automatic; Paul had preferred to leave his rifle behind; Ann, hating firearms, had only her knife.

Abro Pakriaa had entered the camp at noon, her fourth visit in the week. Her gloomy majesty unchanging, she had indicated that she wished them to come to her village. But Dorothy had turned her ankle the evening before and it still pained her. Wright, no doubt hungering more than any of the others for a sight of Pakriaa's way of living, had fretted and bumbled and elected to remain with Dorothy and Sears, urging Paul needlessly to remember his anthropology. Sears, sweating out a microsection of a water insect from Lake Argo, had flapped a fat hand and boomed: "You be sure 'n' telephone, damn it, if you're staying for dinner, hey?"

Remaining uneasily close to Wright, as he did whenever the pygmies appeared, Mijok had said carefully, "Telephone?"

"Word without meaning," said Wright gently, patting the huge arm. "Noise word for fun."

The attitude of Pakriaa's people to Mijok suggested the studious ignoring of an indecency. They would not harm the ugly animal, their manner said, so long as he was the property of the important sky people....

Life was generously abundant in this thinner forest. Things buzzed and flew; Paul noticed a few webs cunningly extended before burrows in the humus. Ann's ocean-gray eyes glanced back, brave and uncertain. "Those girls are too quiet. Paul, how much _do_ they know of our language?"

"Not much." He moved up to walk on her other side. "Doc and I have made only those two efforts to swap languages. A lot of that time had to be wasted on theirs, a dead end for us."

Spearman grunted, "Why? They've got a civilization, as Doc says."

"Our voices are wrong. Pitch effects meaning for them. You've noticed there's no pitch difference between their male and female voices. Their language is tied to one section of the scale; a full octave of it is above the range of even Ann's voice. They can shape our words though, if they're willing. Basic English may appeal to the princess when she condescends to take it seriously."

"They could have picked up more than we suspect. They could have been eavesdropping outside the camp."

"No, Ed. Mijok would have known and told us."

"Yeah--Fido. Can hardly speak freely in front of him now."

"Don't think anything you wouldn't want him to hear."

"Paul, I swear, sometimes you're worse than Doc." But Spearman wanted to cancel the ill temper of the remark, and added: "You know, I thought _I_ knew something about Basic English--we all had drill enough in it. Beats me, the things Doc can do with it--the man's a wizard."

Paul was silent with unappeased annoyance. It was true: Mijok appeared to be a natural student too, already far beyond Basic English in a week of keen listening. "Nan," Paul said, "how did you like Mijok's humming when you were singing for us yesterday evening?"

"Good." She flashed him an almost cheerful smile. But when Ann spoke of her singing--and in the singing itself--there was, in spite of her, an aching wordless reminder of the violin gone silent. Her voice was sweet but without strength or resonance, and she took no ardent pleasure in using it. Her love was the violin--covered as well as might be in the comparative safety of the lifeboat, waiting for a distant day. If the day ever came (Sears had already dissected out, dried, and oiled some long leg-tendon fibers of a deerlike animal in a humble experiment aimed chiefly at Ann's morale)--if the day came, there would still be no piano, no answering of other strings, no splendid cry of brass. Crude wood winds, perhaps, sometime.... "Yes, he was good," said Ann, smiling. "Organ point in the tonic, and right in our own scale. Once he even upped to the dominant. Instinct, huh? Sounded good, Paul, even with you trying to fill in the middle."

"Hell, I didn't think you heard me," Spearman snorted.

"You kind of stood out," she said, "because Mijok was much better on pitch, my good man. It did sound hollow without something to fill in. He was on A-flat below the bass clef and no fooling.... _Why_ haven't we seen other giants?"

"We got something on that this morning. I guess it was while you were in swimming. Each giant male has an inviolate hunting territory, and they don't trespass. Definite breeding season: the month before the rains. That was five or maybe six red-moon changes ago. Mijok wasn't too clear on the count--doesn't like mathematics much better than I do. The women go where they please, in small groups, with the children who still need care, but I gather the males are expected to stay in their own private grounds until the Red-Moon-before-the-Rains."

Spearman wondered: "Will the pygmies have a season too?"

"Doubt it. Probably like us--except that women are the bosses. The clothes suggest a continuing sex consciousness."

The pygmy leaders halted. A murmuring explained itself as the music of a stream. Paul consulted his memory of the map made from orbit photographs and of his one solo exploration flight in the lifeboat. There could be few such flights: the charlesite, even with the surplus salvaged from the wrecked boat, must be hoarded. Ann and Ed had flown over the lake on the day after their recovery, searching for any sign of _Argo_. Returning, Ed's face had been a leather mask of grief, and neither had wanted to talk of it. Later they explained: the lake was a profundity of secret blue; a shelf of sand or possibly white stone ran out some yards offshore, under water marvelously clear, and ended abruptly. Beyond it, where _Argo_ must have fallen, no bottom could even be guessed at; the lifeboat's camera confirmed the presence of an abyss that would have thwarted the most complex twenty-first-century machinery.

This stream, Paul knew, came from the western hills, flowing east and slightly north until it entered the lake northeast of the clearing called home. Another creek joined it east of the spot where they now stood, and Pakriaa's village--if the parallel lines did represent its location--was not far upstream from that junction.

Worn boulders rose above noisy water. The stream was twenty yards wide, sluggish even here in the shallows. A steppingstone crossing.

Nearly all the rivers on the map passed through jungle for most of their length; numberless smaller streams would be hidden from the sky. There was grassland for fifteen to twenty miles on the eastern side of every range of hills. The prevailing winds were from the west; perhaps a dryness in the lee of the hills favored the grass. The broadest stretch of such open land lay east of a rugged coastal range seventy miles to the southwest; some of the mountains in that seacoast formation were mighty enough to hold a blur of snow at their summits. The base of the coastal range was narrow--hardly more than twenty miles. From this the peaks shot up with incredible sheerness to great heights of bare rock that glittered in morning sun like black and red glass. This grandeur, like nothing known on Earth, was clearly visible from the camp above the near hills, especially at midday, when the mists were gone.

And ten miles offshore from that dizzy range, Paul remembered a mountainous island. On his solo exploration two days ago, with the lifeboat's panoramic camera and a head full of puzzled dreams, he had soared above it, noting a peninsular strip of red sand at its southern end, sheltered mountain valleys--one framing a jewel of lake. In the north was a white beach where landing should be easy, and this was protected by a low headland of red cliffs running out to the very tip of the island. Surely a place to carry in the mind, it seemed to invite human living as did no other near region in this continent of Lucifer. Wright thought so: he listened to Paul's description and named the island Adelphi....

North of the camp, the range of low western hills dwindled to rolling land and was lost in a tremendous expanse of unbroken jungle, which ended only at the shore of one of the great lakes four hundred miles away--an inland sea fourteen hundred miles long. Sixty-odd miles to the south there was that large cluster of parallel lines in jungle, and beyond it the forest gave way to more open ground, prairie, red desert, and bare mountains.

Abro Pakriaa dipped her spear in the water; she lifted a handful, letting it trickle away while she spoke a rippling invocation; then she was lithely crossing on the stones after the bowmen. The bottom was pale sand with varicolored pebbles.

Beyond the stream, Pakriaa followed a path a short way and pressed into undergrowth. Spearman grumbled, "Good path for once, and we have to--"

"Path's probably booby-trapped. She expects us to know that."

"Hell...." It was difficult passage, stooping on a trail meant for little folk; it ended at a ditch six feet wide and five deep. The ditch made a right angle, both lines stretching away straightly as far as the eye could go; the inner side of the ditch was heaped with dry sticks and bundles of grass. Pakriaa trilled orders to an old black-skirted woman with a whip, in charge of a gang of four women and three men, all totally naked. They were struggling to shove a movable bridge into place across the ditch--two logs bearing a mat of vines and bark. It was grunting work for them, and when the end of the bridge was in reach, Pakriaa's escort made no motion to help. Spearman started to; Paul interfered. "We'd lose face. Those are slaves. Women tied together at the ankles--one of the men a eunuch. Look at the brands on their cheeks. Nan, you're the dominant sex--try to look more like the president of a women's club."

Her finely modeled face had dignity enough, he thought, if she could keep the worry out of it.... The old woman in the black skirt bowed arrogantly to Pakriaa; the slaves cringed, with the hating stare of the trapped. All were scarred and young except for the eunuch, who was wrinkled and flabby. One female had a recent chest wound; the effort at the bridge had made it bleed, but she ignored it. Paul saw Spearman's face settle into lines of poker blankness and thought: _Good_. _And if, to patience and courage, he could add (I hear you, Doc) charity and self-knowledge--Oh, be quiet, critic, be quiet._...

Trees had been felled--some time ago, for the stumps were rotted--and the spacing was such that the tops of the trees left standing provided a gap twenty feet wide, the entire length of the village. There would be two other such gaps, visible from the sky as parallel lines, admitting full midday sunlight but shutting out the omasha. "Nan--let's try to learn something about that big settlement in the south--the other parallel lines."

It was surprisingly easy to convey the question to Pakriaa with the help of signs, but her response when she understood it was a shrill snarl and shaking of her spear, a repetition of a name, "Vestoia," which seemed to be the place, and of another name, "Lantis," a name that caught in her throat and made her spit. Paul said, "We make faces at the south too, and do it fast." It seemed to appease the princess: she even smiled.

The area bordering the ditch had been left wild, a barrier of vines, brush, untended trees. Inside were orderly rows of plants, some broad-leaved, resembling beets, some bushy; another type was rangy with cosmos-shaped blooms of startling emerald green. Near the row of trees was a path which Pakriaa followed; under the trees stood grass-thatched structures. Paul counted thirty, well separated, before the princess left the path, and no sound came from them. The trees were mostly of the same species, thin-trunked towers with dark serrated leaves, blazing with scarlet blossoms like the one Pakriaa wore. They were the source of an odor like frangipani which filled the village, heady and sweet but clean. It was no primitive agriculture in this part-sunny corridor: rich darkness of earth was drawn up about the plants; there was not a weed in sight. And there was no trace of the strangling purple vines.

Pakriaa's male attendants had slipped away; her spearwomen accompanied her through an opening into the next corridor, where her people were waiting for her, the soldier women in three formal ranks. There were about fifty in each rank, and here again were dyed skirts of every color but the regal blue that was Abro Pakriaa's. Small faces maintained the flat indifference of the unliving copper they resembled.

Pakriaa's intricate oratory flowed over them. More than two thirds of the stiff soldiers were gashed with recent wounds, ranging from scratches to lost hands or breasts or eyes. Some had deep body wounds so ugly it was amazing that they could stand upright, but there seemed to be no evidence of infection and there was no wavering in the lines while Pakriaa declaimed. Her right hand soared with spread fingers. The lifeboat? The name Torothee occurred; when it was repeated the women swayed with unchanging faces, murmuring it in unison like a breath of wind. Pakriaa faced her guests. Tears were not unknown to her; laughter might be. She clenched and relaxed her hands, the fourteen fingers rising and falling until Paul lost count of the motions--more than twenty. She pointed to the soldiers, repeating the display more slowly and only ten times; then one hand rose alone with the thumb curled under. Paul muttered, "I think she's saying only 146 are left after the war, from--maybe three hundred."