"Answer me. I've run away from them too. Answer me!"
"Answer me answer me answer me...."
The echoes died away and it was quiet, too quiet. No sound. Even if they
heard him, they wouldn't answer.
He couldn't track them. If they had homes that were easy to find they
would have left them by now. He was helpless.
The heat from the fire rose about him, and he tasted smoke and coughed.
Nothing moved. Finally he stood up, turned away from the fire and walked
on past it, up the stream.
No one. No tracks. No sign. Only the feeling that other eyes watched him
as he walked along, other ears listened for the sound of his passing.
He turned back, retraced his steps to the fire. The embers had
blackened. The wisp of smoke that curled upward was very thin now.
Otherwise everything was the same as it had been.
He couldn't give up and fly back to the museum. If he did he might never
find them again. But even if he didn't, he might never find them.
"Listen!" He screamed the word, so loudly that they could have heard it
miles away. "I'm one of you. I can't perceive. Believe me! You've got to
believe me!"
"Believe me believe me believe me...."
Nothing. The tension went out of him suddenly and he began to tremble
again, and his throat choked up, wanting to cry. He stumbled away from
the embers, back in the direction of the aircar.
"Believe me...." This time the words were little more than a whisper,
and there was no echo.
"I believe you," a voice said quietly.
* * * * *
He swung about, trying to place it, and saw the woman. She stood at the
edge of the trees, above the campfire, half hidden in the undergrowth.
She looked down at him warily, a rock clenched in her hand. She wasn't
an attractive sight.
[Illustration]
She looked old, with a leathery skin and gnarled arms and legs. Her
grey-white hair was matted, pulled back into a snarled bun behind her
head. She wore a shapeless dress of some roughwoven material that hung
limply from her shoulders, torn, dirty, ancient. He'd never seen an
animal as dirty as she.
"So you can't perceive," the woman cackled. "I believe it, boy. You
don't have that look about you."
"I didn't know," Eric said softly. "I never knew until today that there
were any others."
She laughed, a high-pitched laugh that broke off into a choking cough.
"There aren't many of us, boy. Not many. Me and Nell--but she's an old,
old woman. And Lisa, of course...."
She cackled again, nodding. "I always told Lisa to wait," she said
firmly. "I told her that there'd be another young one along."
"Who are you?" Eric said.
"Me? Call me Mag. Come on, boy. Come on. What are you waiting for?"
She turned and started off up the hill, walking so fast that she was
almost out of sight among the trees before Eric recovered enough to
follow her. He stumbled after her, clawing his way up the steep slope,
slipping and grabbing the branches with his hands and hauling himself up
the rocks.
"You're a slow one." The old woman paused and waited for him to catch
up. "Where've you been all your life? You don't act like a mountain
boy."
"I'm not," Eric said. "I'm from the valley...."
He stopped talking. He realized, suddenly, the futility of trying to
explain his life to her. If she had ever known the towns, it would have
been years ago. She was too old, and tattered, and so dirty that her
smell wasn't even a good clean animal smell.
"Hurry up, boy!"
He felt unreal, as if this were a dream, as if he would awaken suddenly
and be back at the museum. He almost wished that he would. He couldn't
believe that he had found another like himself and was now following
her, scrambling up a mountain as if he were a goat.
A goat. Smells. The dirty old woman in front of him. He wrinkled his
nose in disgust and then was furious with himself, with his reactions,
with the sudden knowledge that he had glamorized his kind and had hoped
to find them noble and brilliant.
This tattered old woman with her cackling laugh and leathery, toothless
face and dirt encrusted clothing couldn't be like him. He couldn't
accept it....
Mag led him up the slope and then over some heaped boulders, and
suddenly they were on level ground again. They had come out into a tiny
canyon, a blind pocket recessed into the mountain, almost completely
surrounded by walls that rose sharply upward. Back across the gorge,
huddled against the face of the mountain, was a tiny hut.
It was primitive, like those in the prehistoric sections of the old
history books. It was made of branches lashed together, with sides that
leaned crookedly against each other and a matted roof that looked as if
it would slide off at any minute. It was like a twig house that a child
might make with sticks and grass.
"Our home," Mag said. Her voice was proud.
He didn't answer. He followed her across toward it, past the mounds of
refuse, the fruit rinds and bones and skins that were flung carelessly
beside the trail. He smelled the scent of decay and rottenness and
turned his head away, feeling sick.
"Lisa! Lisa!" Mag shouted, the words echoing and re-echoing.
A figure moved just inside the hut doorway. "She's not here," a voice
called. "She's out hunting."
"Well, come on out, Nell, and see what I've found."
The figure moved slowly out from the gloom of the hut, bending to get
through the low door, half straightening up outside, and Eric saw that
it was an old, old woman. She couldn't straighten very far. She was too
old, bent and twisted and brittle, feebler looking than anyone Eric had
ever seen before. She hobbled toward him slowly, teetering from side to
side as she walked, her hands held out in front of her, her eyes on the
ground.
"What is it, Mag?" Her voice was as twisted as her body.
"A boy. Valley boy. Just the age for our Lisa, too."
Eric felt his face redden and he opened his mouth to protest, to say
something, anything, but Mag went right on talking, ignoring him.
"The boy came in an aircar. I thought he was one of the normals--but
he's not. Hasn't their ways. Good looking boy, too."
"Is he?" Nell had reached them. She stopped and looked up, right into
Eric's face, and for the first time he realized that she was blind. Her
eyes were milky white, without pupils, without irises. Against the brown
leather of her skin they looked moist and dead.
"Speak, boy," she croaked. "Let me hear your voice."
"Hello," Eric said, feeling utterly foolish and utterly confused. "I'm
Eric."
"Eric...." Nell reached out, touched his arm with her hand, ran her
fingers up over his shoulders, over his chest.
"It's been a long time since I've heard a man's voice," she said. "Not
since Mag here was a little girl."
"Have you been--here--all that time?" Eric asked, looking around him at
the hut, and the meat hanging to dry, covered with flies, and the
leather water bags, and the mounds of refuse, the huge, heaped mounds
that he couldn't stop smelling.
"Yes," Nell said. "I've been here longer than I want to remember, boy.
We came here from the other mountains when Mag was only a baby."
* * * * *
They walked toward the hut, and as they neared it he smelled a new
smell, that of stale smoke and stale sweat overlying the general odor of
decay.
"Let's talk out here," he said, not wanting to go inside.
They sat down on the hard earth and the two women turned their faces
toward him, Mag watching him intently, Nell listening, her head cocked
to one side like an old crippled bird's.
"I always thought I was the only one like me," Eric said. "The people
don't know of any others. They don't know you exist. They wouldn't
believe it."
"That's the way we want it," Mag said. "That's the only way it can be."
Nell nodded. "I was a girl in the other hills," she said, nodding toward
the west, toward the museum. "There were several of us then. There had
been families of us in my father's time, and in his father's time, and
maybe before that even. But when I was a girl there was only my father
and my mother and another wife of my father's, and a lot of
children...."
She paused, still looking toward the west, facing a horizon she could no
longer see. "The normal ones came. We'd hidden from them before. But
this time we had no chance to hide. I was hunting, with the boy who was
my father's nephew.
"They surrounded the hut. They didn't make any sound. They don't have
to. I was in the forest when I heard my mother scream."
"Did they kill her?" Eric cried out. "They wouldn't do that."
"No, they didn't kill any of them. They dragged them off to the aircars,
all of them. My father, my mother and the other woman, the children. We
watched from the trees and saw them dragged off, tied with ropes, like
wild animals. The cars flew away. Our people never came back."
She stopped, sunken in revery. Mag took up the story. Her voice was
matter-of-fact, completely casual about those long ago events.
"A bear killed my father. That was after we came back here. Nell was
sick. I did the hunting. We almost starved, for a while, but there's
lots of game in the hills. It's a good life here. But I've been sorry
for Lisa. She's a woman now. She needs a man. I'm glad you came. I would
have hated to send her out looking for a normal one."
"But--" Eric stopped, his head whirling. He didn't know what to say.
Anything at all would sound wrong, cruel.
"It's dangerous," Mag went on, "taking up with the normals. They think
it's wrong. They think we're animals. One of us has to pick a man who's
stupid--a farmer, maybe--and even then it's like being a pet. A beast."
It took a moment for Eric to realize what she was saying, and when he
did realize, the thought horrified him.
"Lisa's father was stupid," Mag said. "He took me in when I came down
from the hills. He didn't send for the others. Not then. He kept me and
fed me and treated me kindly, and I thought I was safe. I thought our
kind and theirs could live together."
She laughed. Deep, bitter lines creased her mouth. "A week later the
aircar came. They sneaked up to the garden where I was. He was with
them. He was leading them."
She laughed again. "Their kindness means nothing. Their love means
nothing. To them, we're animals."
The old woman, Nell, rocked back and forth, her face still in revery.
Flies crawled over her bare arms, unheeded.
"I got away," Mag said. "I saw them coming. They can't run fast, and I
knew the hiding places. I never went back to the valleys. Nell would
have starved without me. And there was Lisa to care for, later...."
The flies settled on Eric's hands and he brushed them away, shivering.
Mag smiled. The bitterness left her face. "I'm glad I don't have to send
Lisa down to the valley."
She got up before he could answer, before he could even think of
anything to say or do. Crossing over to the pole where the dried meat
hung, she pulled a piece of it loose and brought it back to where they
sat. Some she gave to the old woman and some she kept for herself and
the rest, most of it, she tossed to Eric.
"You must be hungry, boy."
It was filthy. Dirt clung to it--dust and pollen and grime--and the
flies had flown off in clouds when she lifted it down.
The old woman raised her piece and put the edge of it in her mouth and
started to chew, slowly, eating her way up the strip. Mag tore hers with
her teeth, rending it and swallowing it quickly, watching Eric all the
time.
"Eat."
It was unreal. He couldn't be here. These women couldn't exist.
He lifted the meat, feeling his stomach knot with disgust, wanting to
fling it from him and run, blindly, down the hill to the aircar. But he
didn't. He had searched too long to flee now. Shuddering, he closed his
mind to the flies and the smell and the filth and bit into the meat and
chewed it and swallowed it. And all the time, Mag watched him.
The sun passed overhead and began to dip toward the west. The shadows,
which had shortened as they sat in front of the hut, lengthened again,
until they themselves were half in the shadow of the trees lining the
gorge. Still Lisa did not come. It was very quiet. The only sounds that
broke the silence were their own voices and the buzzing of the flies.
They talked, but communication was difficult between them. Eric tried to
accept their ideas, their way of life, but he couldn't. The things they
said were strange to him. Their whole pattern of life was strange to
him. He could understand it at all only because he had studied the
primitive peoples of the old race. But he couldn't imagine himself as
one of them. He couldn't think of himself as having grown up among them,
in the hills, living only to hunt and gather berries and store food for
the wintertime. He couldn't think of himself hiding, creeping through
the gorges like a hunted animal, flattening himself in the underbrush
whenever an aircar passed by.
He sat and listened to them talk, and his amazement grew. Their beliefs
were so different. He listened to their superstitious accounts of the
old race, and the way it had been "in the beginning."
He listened to their legends of the old gods who flew through the air
and were a mighty people, but who were destroyed by a new race of
devils. He listened as they told him of their own ancestors, children of
the gods, who had fled to the hills to await the gods' return. They had
no conception at all of the thousands of years that had elapsed between
the old race's passing and their own forefathers' flight into the hills.
And when he tried to explain, they shook their heads and wouldn't
believe him.
He didn't hear Lisa come. One minute the far end of the clearing was
empty and still and the next minute the girl was walking across it
toward them, a bow in one hand and a pair of rabbits dangling from the
other.
She saw him and stopped, the rabbits dropping from her hand.
"Here's your young man, Lisa," Mag said. "Valley boy. His name's Eric."
He stared back at her, more in curiosity than in surprise. She wasn't
nearly as unattractive as he had thought she would be. She wouldn't be
bad looking at all, he thought, if she were clean. She was fairly tall
and lean, too skinny really, with thin muscular arms instead of the
softly rounded arms the valley girls had. She was too brown, but her
skin hadn't turned leathery yet, and there was still a little life in
the lank brown hair that fell matted about her shoulders.
"Hello, Lisa," he said.
"Hello." Her eyes never left him. She stared at him, her lips trembling,
her whole body tensed. She looked as if she were going to turn and run
at any moment, as if only his quietness kept her from fleeing.
With a sudden shock Eric realized that she too was afraid--afraid of
him. His own hesitation fell away and he smiled at her.
Mag got up and went over to the girl and put her arm around Lisa's
shoulders. "Don't be afraid of him, child," Mag said. "He's a nice boy.
Not like one of _them_."
Lisa trembled.
Eric watched her, pitying her. She was as helpless as he before the calm
assumption of the older women. More helpless, because she had probably
never thought of defying them, of escaping the pattern of their lives.
"Don't worry, Lisa," he said. "I won't hurt you."
Slowly she walked toward him, poised, waiting for a hostile move. She
came within a few feet of him and then sank to her haunches, still
watching him, still poised.
She was as savage as the others. A graceful, dirty savage.
"You're really one of us?" she said. "You can't perceive?"
"No," he said. "I can't perceive."
"He's not like them," Mag said flatly. "If you'd ever been among them,
you'd know their ways."
"I've never seen a man before, up close," Lisa said.
Her eyes pleaded with him, and suddenly he knew why he pitied her. It
was because she felt helpless before him, and begged him not to harm
her, and thought of him as something above her, more powerful than she,
and dangerous. He looked across at her and felt protective, and it was a
new feeling to him, absolutely new. Because always before, around the
normals, even around his own parents and Walden, he had been the
helpless one.
He liked this new feeling, and wished it could last. But it couldn't. He
couldn't do as the old women expected him to, leave the valley and his
parents, leave the books and the museum and the ship, just to hide in
the hills like a beast with them.
He had come to find his people, but these three were not they.
"You two go on off and talk," Mag said. "We're old. We don't matter now.
You've got things to settle between you."
She cackled again and got up and went into the hut and old Nell got up
also and followed her.
The girl shivered. She drew back a little, away from him. Her eyes never
left his face.
"Don't be afraid, Lisa," he said gently. "I won't hurt you. I won't even
touch you. But I would like to talk to you."
"All right," she said.
They got up and walked to the end of the gorge, the girl keeping always
a few feet from him. At the boulders she stopped and faced him, her back
against a rock, her thin body still trembling.
"Lisa," he said. "I want to be your friend."
Her eyes widened. "How can you?" she said. "Men are friends. Women are
friends. But you're a man and I'm a woman and it's different."
He shook his head helplessly, trying to think of a way to explain things
to her. He couldn't say that he found her dirty and unattractive and
almost another species. He couldn't say that he'd searched the hills,
often thinking of the relationship between man and woman, but that she
wasn't the woman, that she never could be the woman for him. He couldn't
tell her that he pitied her in perhaps the same way that the normals
pitied him.
Still, he wanted to talk to her. He wanted to be her friend. Because he
was sure now that he could search the mountains forever, and perhaps
find other people, even if those he found were like her, and Mag and
Nell.
"Listen, Lisa," he said. "I can't live up here. I live in the valley. I
came in an aircar, and it's down in the canyon below here. I have to go
back--soon. Before it gets completely dark."
"Why?"
"If I don't the normals will come looking for me. They'll find the
aircar and then they'll find us. And you and your family will be taken
away. Don't you understand?"
"You're going?" Lisa said.
"In a little while. I must."
She looked at him, strangely. She looked at his clothes, at his face, at
his body. Then she looked at her own hands and touched her own coarse
dress, and she nodded.
"You won't come back," she said. "You don't like me. I'm not what you
were searching for."
He couldn't answer. Her words hurt him. The very fact that she could
recognize their difference from each other hurt him. He pitied her still
more.
"I'll come back," he said, "Of course I will. As often as I can. You're
the only other people I've ever known who didn't perceive."
She looked up into his face again. Her eyes were very large. They were
the only beautiful thing about her.
"Even if you do come back, you won't want me."
There wasn't any answer at all.
* * * * *
It was dusk when Eric got back to the museum. He landed the aircar and
climbed out and walked across to the building, still feeling unreal,
still not believing that the events of this day had actually happened.
He nodded to Prior and the old caretaker nodded back and then stood
staring at him, troubled and curious. Eric didn't notice the other's
expression, nor the fact that Prior followed him to the top of the
spiral ramp and remained there for a while, watching.
Eric stood at the bottom of the well where he had so often stood before,
staring across at the ship, then looking up, up, up its sleek length to
where its nose pointed yearningly toward the night sky. But tonight he
found no comfort in the sight, no sense of kinship with its builders.
Tonight the ship was a dead and empty thing.
"_You won't want me--_" Her voice, her eyes, came between him and the
stars.
He had thought of finding his people and sharing with them their common
heritage from the past, the knowledge of the old race and its thoughts
and its science and its philosophy. He had thought of sharing with them
the old desire for the stars, the old hunger, the old loneliness that
the new race could never understand. He had been wrong.
_His people...._ He pushed the thought away.
He looked up at the stars that were merely pin-pricks of light at the
top of the well and wondered if anyone, old race or new or something
different from either, lived among them now. And he felt small, and even
the ship was small, and his own problems and his own search were
unimportant. He sat down and leaned back against the smooth wall and
closed his eyes, blotting out the ship and the stars, and finally, even
Lisa's face before him.
The old caretaker found him sleeping there, and sighed, and went away
again, still frowning. Eric slept on, unheeding. When he awoke it was
late morning and the stars were gone and clouds drifted across the mouth
of the well.
There was no answer here. The starship would never fly.
And Eric went back to the mountains.
* * * * *
It was two weeks later that the councilmen stood facing Walden across
the great museum table. They had come together, Abbot and Drew and the
others, and they faced him together, frowning. Their thoughts were
hidden. Walden could catch only glimpses of what lay beneath their
worry.
"Every day." Abbot's eyes were hard, unyielding. "Why, Walden? Why does
he go there every day?"
"Does it matter?"
"Perhaps. Perhaps not. We can't tell--yet."
The ring of faces, of buried perceptions, of fear, anxiety, and a worry
that could no longer be shrugged off. And Eric away, as he was every day
now, somewhere in the distant hills.
"The boy's all right." Walden checked his own rush of worry.
"Is he?"
The worry in the open now, the fear uncontained, and no more
vacillation. Their thoughts hidden from Walden, their plans hidden, and
nothing he could do, no way to warn Eric, yet.