"Fool you?" I said slowly. "I'm afraid I don't understand."
"Oh, you understand, all right. You're very clever--_or think you are_."
"I wasn't trying to be clever," I told her. "It looked pretty bad for
us. They would have killed us both if I hadn't talked them out of it."
"You could have told me!" she flung at me, her eyes abruptly accusing.
"Why did you have to make a secret of it?"
"A secret of what?"
"You didn't think I'd guess straight off? You didn't give me credit for
knowing even that much about the psychology of primitives?"
"You're talking in riddles," I protested. "You're taking too much for
granted."
"Am I? The things _you_ take for granted are beyond belief. I know
exactly how your mind worked. You told yourself they were angry enough
to kill impulsively. You had to give them the strongest possible reason
for _not_ wanting to kill us. Isn't that so?"
"Well--"
"There's a very old saying that has a universal application," she said,
a stinging contempt in her voice. "All the world loves a lover. I
thought of it instantly myself."
"You did? If I had known--"
"Keep quiet and let me finish. You told them that I was _your woman_.
You probably added that the whole ridiculous insanity was recent enough
to be celebrated right here in their own village. Naturally that did
it. Whisper the words 'nuptial ceremony' to a primitive and you've
transferred to him an inward glow that makes him your friend forever.
"If he's old he remembers what it meant when it happened to him. If
he's young there's the rapture of anticipation. Besides, primitives
like display and drama, human giggling and embarrassment just as much
as you do. You of Earth still throw rice, you know. We have passed
beyond such foolishness, but there are times--"
She looked at me and giggled. It was the cruelest thing she could have
done because, despite the giggle, there was a cold mockery in her stare
that castigated my Earthborn heritage and made me feel ridiculous.
It was then that she _really_ threw the book at me. "Instead of
discussing the whole matter as an anthropological problem that could
only have been solved by analyzing it in a calmly scientific and
detached way you acted as if you thought me capable of making an
embarrassing situation out of it."
She stood up abruptly, removing the binding circlet from her hair,
and shaking her head until the freed tresses descended in a tumbled
red-gold mass to her shoulders.
"Prudishness is both barbaric and childish," she said. "It has nothing
to do with modesty and reserve, which are admirable when a man and
a woman do not know one another well enough to feel at ease in an
atmosphere of mutual respect and admiration."
There was a heavy silence for an instant. Then very calmly and
deliberately she took off her weather jacket, folded it, and laid it on
the floor at her feet.
"It will do for a pillow," she said. "I hate sleeping without a support
for my head."
I stared automatically at her bare shoulders, the way I might have
stared if a blinding vision of paradise had appeared to me between
sleeping and waking and vanished in a flash.
"What makes all this so amusing is the way it parallels a good many
of the farcical situations in the ancient folk writings of Terra,"
she said. "I've made a comparative study of them, and they really are
precious."
The precise set of her waistline seemed to annoy her, and she changed
it perceptibly, loosening the binding straps until I caught the barest
glimmer of white between them. She stared at me with patronizing pity,
as if my startlement was tantamount to a further step downward into the
murk of a prudishness so childish that it branded me as a barbarian
without a single redeeming trait.
She stared through and beyond me, her eyes stabbing the shadows, her
voice derisive in its composure, "For some reason a man has to pretend
that a woman is his wife. There's a wealthy relative to impress, or a
primitive conveyance breaks down, and a thunderstorm compels the pair
to take refuge in a wayside dwelling.
"There is only one sleeping compartment available and what do you
suppose the man does? The sane scientific approach would be to behave
like an intelligent human being. When a man and a woman are alone
together excessive prudishness is ridiculous. Why with such a charming
companion available should he not relax as I am doing--be completely
natural and human and at his ease? Why should he not sit down and
discuss art and philosophy, music and the dance the whole night through?
"But does he--in the ancient folk writings? No. The silly fool gets up,
takes a blanket and creeps out into the night. He shivers in the cold
for no reason at all. Owls hoot at him, but he still persists in making
himself ridiculous until the dawn comes up."
I looked at her for a long moment in silence. It has never been
difficult for me to take a hint. I knew, of course, that women have a
remarkable capacity for burying their real feelings beneath a dozen or
more carefully arranged masks for the sole purpose of keeping a man
guessing. But I decided not to even attempt to peel off the masks. It
would have been too dangerously time-consuming.
Fortunately I was wearing heavy enough spaceleather to protect me from
the cold. I wouldn't need a blanket, and there were no owls on Dracona
to hoot at me.
"I'm afraid I'm still too much of a primitive to find our ancient folk
writings amusing," I told her.
Without another word, ignoring her abrupt, startled gasp, I swung about
and went striding out of the hut into the cool night.
I slowed my stride the instant I found myself alone under the stars.
So far I'd gained a respite. But I knew that what remained to be done
could backfire and destroy me. She'd stepped into a situation more
complicated than any we could have planned together. Nature had set
the stage for it before her arrival, and the performance was about to
begin. If the first act went wrong the music might well become a dirge,
and the final curtain descend on a funeral landscape as bleak as a
fire-ravaged tinder box.
A half mile from the village there was a hill where I could get a clear
view of the volcano, and the cloud that hung poised above it night and
day, its peculiar configuration giving it the aspect of a gigantic
black moth flailing the air with soot-encrusted wings. For centuries
that cloud had hung there, and would probably remain until the volcano
burnt itself out.
I skirted the shadows until I was clear of the village and then I
walked with my shoulders squared until I reached the hill. On Dracona
a man must walk boldly if he is to walk at all.
It was cold on the hill--chillingly bleak and depressing. But I knew
that my spaceleather would keep me warm enough. Thinking of Kallatah's
violet eyes and the incredible glints of gold in her hair I threw
myself down and lay stretched out at full length in the velvety
darkness.
My eyes were on the cloud when the strange, startling play of colors
began. First a flash of red on the underside of the cloud, and then a
flash of dazzling violet piercing the cloud. Red, violet, and then red
again--each color lingering for perhaps ten seconds.
I took out my instruments then, and made a careful check. My equipment
consisted of a tiny electro-magnetic linear strain seismograph which
was sensitive to a tremor as faint as one ten-billionth of an inch, and
a vertical recorder which gave me a picture in two dimensions of the
surface tension at the edge of the crater ten thousand times enlarged.
I watched the cloud and studied the instruments, waiting until I was
completely sure. Then I arose, brushed the dirt from my knees, returned
the instruments to their cases, and started back down the hill.
When I reached the village there was no stir of movement anywhere. I
did not trade on my luck by pausing to explore the shadows. I went
straight to Geipgos' hut, pushed the boughs aside, and crept inside on
my hands and knees.
Geipgos was sleeping on a couch of matted vines with his arms
interlocked on his chest, the green sheen of his skin, and the
prominence of his cheekbones giving him an eerily mummified aspect.
I knelt at his side, got out the little reflector and strapped it to
my forehead. I had to pause an instant to control the trembling of my
hands.
The light came on in a sudden, blinding glare. I was hardly aware
that I had switched it on until I found myself staring directly into
Geipgos' startled eyes.
To get anywhere with hypnosis you've got to start fast. I looked
Geipgos straight in the eye, passing my hand swiftly back and forth
before his face, giving him no chance to realize that he was no longer
asleep. The abrupt, almost intolerable glare was my greatest immediate
asset.
"Yon Honi Erun," I whispered. "The Servants of the Mountain are very
evil."
Geipgos blinked furiously, and his eyes widened in stark, incredulous
terror.
I went on quickly: "You have always known them to be
wicked--monstrously wicked and hateful. How repulsive they are in
appearance alone, with their long scaly bodies so like the bodies of
the shadow monsters which you feared would tear you piecemeal when as a
child you disobeyed your parents.
"Do you not remember how you ran screaming from your father's wrath
and hid in the dark, wishing that you might be a man grown, mighty in
your contempt and defiance? You have always known the Servants of the
Mountain to be hateful. But in your great fear you dared not say to
yourself: 'They have brought me nothing but disaster!'"
Geipgos groaned and his eyes rolled.
"You dared not say," I went on relentlessly, "what you knew in your
heart to be true. You dared not say: 'The Servants of the Mountain are
false servants. They have brought my _people_ nothing but disaster!
When a man is hungry must he starve? Must the fruits of his labor, the
harvest that he has sown not only for himself alone, but for the adored
ones of his heart be snatched from him?'"
Geipgos' eyes took on a strange glaze and his lips began to tremble.
"Soon the sky will be red," I told him. "Soon the ground will shake.
Soon the wrath of the mountain will be terrible against its false
servants."
Geipgos tried to rise, but I gripped his arm and compelled him to
keep his eyes riveted on the reflector. "They are not true servants,
for they anger the mountain. The mountain would drive them forth, but
without your help how can the mountain free itself? The mountain has no
legs. It cannot walk about and seek out its false servants when they
descend on the village."
For the first time in Geipgos' life a deeply buried part of his mind
was stirring tumultuously. I could tell by the way he gnashed his
teeth, and swung his five arms about that he was raging inwardly.
You cannot hypnotize a man against his will. You can not force him
to do something that will outrage his moral sense. But what I wanted
Geipgos to do had the sanction of nature and common sense, and the
sanction as well of the wild, unruly part of himself that has shaped
his destiny from childhood. I was playing both ends off against the
middle--against a ridiculous straw man of a hated taboo.
"When you have done what you must do the mountain will cease to be
angry," I told him. "It will rejoice with you."
Then I told him what had to be done. I implanted the command with as
much majesty as I could summon, dimming the reflector with my palm so
that he could see me clearly.
"The mountain will rejoice with you," I repeated. "The sky will cease
to be red. The ground will cease to tremble."
I left him then. I left him and hugged the shadows, moving stealthily
from hut to hut. Into thirty huts I crept and roused the sleeping
warriors with the same hypnotic dazzlement. And to each I whispered the
same words, and imposed upon them the same urgent post-hypnotic command.
It is always unwise to take pride in a difficult task accomplished
with ease until the last obstacle has been overcome, the last hurdle
surmounted.
I almost did--until I walked through the high-arching entrance of the
thirty-first hut, and found myself confronting a warrior wide awake and
on his feet.
"I have been awaiting your coming," Geipgos' son said.
Our Earth heritage is rich in legends. The great poets, the
myth-makers, have all paid homage to the shining strength, the courage
and daring which sets a king's son apart from ordinary mortals.
_And the king's son came in his wrath and smote them. Terrible was he
in battle, shod in fire and fury, rallying the vanquished with his
might._
I had never believed it. But I was startled and must have shown it, for
into Slagoon's eyes came a look of mocking triumph.
"Gru Huhu Frum," he said. "I followed you when you left the village. I
watched you making magic on the hill."
"It was not magic, son of Geipgos," I said. "I was talking to the
mountain. Would you doubt the word of a guest?"
"I would doubt the word of a guest who does not speak the truth."
There was no need for further speech between us.
I measured him with my eyes, the length and breadth and thickness of
him. He had kept himself in fine physical trim, despite the demon of
hunger which must have dogged his footsteps night and day. A lean
panther is more dangerous than a well-fed one; a man with gaunt cheeks
and protruding ribs a treacherous adversary if his muscles have
retained their resiliency, and the will to wrestle and slay is strong
in him.
He had five hands to my two. He was armed and I was weaponless and his
weapon was a cruel one, a curving blade with a bone handle, ground to a
deadly sharpness.
When you're girding for a life-and-death struggle it's best to whittle
your adversary down to size. I told myself that I was a civilized man
with a resolution he could never hope to match. He would fight like
a savage, granted. But I was sure that two hands guided by a trained
intelligence could grip and hold, twist and bend twice as well as five
hands animated by a blind urge to kill.
I squared my shoulders and started walking straight toward him. I
was encouraged by the way he returned my stare, as if the look of
confidence in my eyes had planted a sudden, disturbing doubt in his
mind. It was enough to assure me that if I kept my head and closed in
relentlessly my chances would be good.
I gave him no opportunity to strike at me with his mind. I advanced to
within six feet of him, and maneuvered myself into a crouching position
with a grimace so scornful that his eyes remained riveted on my face.
I came up out of the crouch like a coiled spring unwinding. With
shattering violence I hurled myself against him, bone against bone,
solid cartilage against hard gristle. He let out a yell, and went
careening backwards like a feather in the path of a hurricane.
Subconsciously I must have expected him to crack his skull against the
baked mud wall of the hut, and flatten out at my feet. Otherwise why
was my next move so long delayed? He must have gotten at my mind a
little, for I stood like a man bemused while he hit the wall, twisted
about, and came swinging back toward me, his eyes filmed with pain and
shock.
The lunge he made was so accurately gauged that the bone handle
of the knife grazed my cheek. He was trading on his reflexes, the
sure instinct of a primitive strong in battle, confident of his own
strength. I leapt back, and sent my right fist crashing into his
stomach. The blow staggered him, but not enough. With a deliberation
unbelievable in one so hurt he slashed at me twice.
Just in time I ducked out of range, bent low and came up in a weaving
crouch. I started hitting him, raining blows on his face and chest. I
thought I heard his jaw crack, but as I whirled back to get a good look
at him he laughed like an insane monkey, and transferred the knife to
another hand.
He lunged again and I ducked again, and it went on in the same
nightmare fashion until the knife was gleaming at the tip of an
attenuated arm that followed my movements like a zigzagging lightning
bolt.
He transferred the knife eight times, his laughter an insane echo as he
weaved about. Desperately I dove for him and tried to knock the weapon
away, but each time he was too quick for me.
His eyes burned with defiance and derision. But I suddenly saw that his
mouth was beginning to sag, the lower lip trembling with unmistakable
weakness.
I don't quite know how I got the knife away from him. But get it I did.
I closed in suddenly, struck him a body blow that sent him reeling,
followed him as he went backwards and wrested the weapon from him
before he could recover his balance. I hit him again, and he went down,
and I stood wrathfully over him.
He looked at me, his eyes filled with bewilderment and horror.
"Trag Unil Deguna," I said. "I've beaten you man to man in honest
combat."
Suddenly his eyes widened, and all of the insane rage was gone from his
face. "It is true," he whispered. "The Mountain must have given you his
strength. How else could you have conquered the son of a Chief?"
"In no other way," I assured him.
"Does the Mountain now speak with your voice?"
"The Mountain is closer to me than it is to its false Servants," I told
him.
I bent and gripped him by the shoulders. "You are young and strong,"
I said. "The son of a Chief. Only such a one can truly lead his
people. If when the Mountain speaks and the sky becomes red you leap
straightway into battle at your father's side against the false
Servants I will spare your life."
He sat up and rubbed his chin. His eyes were still awestruck, and I was
confident that if the mountain itself had entered the hut, and spoken
to him he would scarcely have been more eager to obey.
"I will do as the Mountain desires," he promised.
"You will not have long to wait," I assured him. "Soon the wrath of the
Mountain will be terrible against its false Servants. Sit here quietly
and be patient. You will see."
It was almost dawn when I returned to the central hut. I walked in
boldly like a man coming home a little later than usual with some
tremendous bright surprise for his wife that would take the curse off
his lateness.
Kallatah was asleep with her weather jacket rolled up under her head, a
look of almost childlike innocence on her face. She looked so beautiful
that I was afraid if I knelt and kissed her she'd shatter and fly apart
like one of those ancient statues that have lain for centuries in the
buried past of the Earth.
There was no need for me to wake her. The rumbling did it. It started
far off, and came slowly nearer, sweeping down upon the hut like the
drums of primitive warfare beating at first in ominous undertones and
then ever more loudly as they converged upon their mark.
The drums were nature's own, and they were beating deep within the
ground. With the beating came a heaving and a quaking, and right where
I was standing a jagged rent appeared suddenly in the dried red clay
which had been baked by Geipgos himself to line the floor of his hut.
I had timed the eruption with the sure instinct of a trained scientist
who knows just how to fill in the gaps left by the hair-trigger
measurements of precision instruments with an intuitive sixth-sense.
It could have occurred an hour sooner or an hour later, but I wasn't
surprised that it occurred when it did.
* * * * *
Only Kallatah was surprised. She awoke with the first quake and looked
up at me. Her eyes grew wide and startled, and suddenly she was on her
feet, clinging to my arm and screaming.
I shook her until she grew quiet, then drew her to the hut's swaying
entrance and pointed out into the flame-streaked shadows. Flashes of
light were converging on the village from all directions, cascading
over the thatched roofs with their central supporting poles, sending
women and children scrambling frenziedly into the open.
"The volcano's in full eruption!" I whispered.
"How can you stand there so calmly?" Her face was white. "If a quake
opens a fissure at our feet--"
"We'll never know a moment's pain," I said. "It's the one great danger.
The lava flow won't reach the village."
"How do you know?"
"I used some very sensitive instruments to measure the banked up lava
flow and the intensity of the central fires with a minimal margin of
error," I said. "I knew almost precisely to the hour when the eruption
would occur. It's a fairly severe eruption, but not a major one."
"You knew--"
"It's been building up for days. It should be over in an hour."
She started to reply, then swayed toward me in blind panic.
It wasn't a stampede exactly. The lizards didn't emerge from the
shadows in a single onrushing column, but in threes and fours. Maddened
with terror they darted to and fro between the cowering, screaming
women and children, their distended eyes and metallic body sheen
mirroring the fiery sky glow.
They lunged and parried, striking out with their claws as they circled
about as any savage animal will when it feels itself to be hopelessly
trapped. There was a blind purposelessness in their movements, a
frantic swaying and thumping that churned up the ground beneath them
and sent clumps of uprooted vegetation spinning in all directions.
The sky glow became more fiery, spilling over in crimson splotches,
turning the village thatch poles into redly glowing fingers pointing
mountainward as if in remorseless accusation. The rumblings grew
louder, the quakes more frequent.
A woman ran into the open with a child in her arms. She set the child
down with a look of calm, tender solicitude on her face, picked up a
rock and hurled it at a lizard. Other women joined her, clustering
about her as if to draw strength from that straight unbending figure.
The lizards veered away from her, and she stood with the infant in her
arms again, a picture of quiet heroism.
Kallatah's eyes were shining. She seemed to have lost her fear, and
suddenly she too was joining in the attack on the lizards. She picked
up a stone and hurled it, and her laughter rang out defiantly above the
screams of the natives.
More lizards appeared, creating such panic that a few of the women ran
shrieking back into their huts again. The sky had become a solid sheet
of flame, and every hut in the village was writhing in fiery radiance.
There was a continuous loud scrambling and flapping noise as the
lizards tried in vain to take flight. Something had crippled and
imprisoned them in the flame-streaked region between the huts and they
were powerless to escape from it.
I didn't know exactly what was going to happen. I wasn't sure just how
the first destructive assault would be made on the lizards, whether the
mental tensions would increase first, or the physical ones shatter the
beasts with a sudden, explosive violence.
With poltergeists you can never be sure. The powerful waves of their
thoughts and emotions sweep through their minds in erratic currents,
and when a post-hypnotic command enters the picture--
We didn't have long to wait. With a shrill scream one of the lizards
leapt high into the air and was slammed back against a tree, so
violently that it sagged to the ground without a single convulsive
quiver of expiring life. A fire broke out where it lay, danced and
flickered about it. Another lizard was lifted high into the air, and
sent spinning with a terrible spasmodic contraction of its entire bulk.
The scramblings of the other lizards became more frantic, turned into a
hideous twisting and squirming that sent chills coursing the length of
my spine. Horribly one of the beasts exploded. Its chest was blown away
as it reared on its hindlimbs, and was carried backwards by a whirling
spiral of flame. Others were ripped apart as if by invisible talons,
flattened out, crushed and shredded into fragments.
We saw the warriors then. Straight into the village clearing they
strode, Geipgos at their head and his son Slagoon walking proudly at
his side. They were flourishing their spears and shouting, and the sky
glow was bright on their green-bronze shoulders, and was mirrored in
their eyes.
I had been right in my prediction. In less than an hour the rumblings
ceased and the ground stopped trembling. The fieriness vanished from
the sky. But for three days the warriors pursued the lizards across
the crater's rim, descending into the smoke-filled clefts where for
centuries they had nested and multiplied, routing and shattering them
until Dracona was cleansed and a brave new dawn broke over Geipgos'
unbowed head.