The _Olympus_ could never return to her home planet;
her crew was destined to live out their lives among
the savages of this new planet. But savages could be
weaned from their superstitions and set on the road
to knowledge, Theusaman thought. Or could they?
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Rocket Stories, July 1953.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
Baiel had always shown me the degree of respect prescribed in the Space
Code. Aboard the _Olympus_ we clashed only once, and that was when I
ordered the emergency landing.
"You've no right to risk it, Captain Theusaman," he protested.
"We can't do anything else," I answered. "We're ninety-three million
light years away from the Earth, and twenty-five outside the patrol
area."
"Sir, this star sector is totally new to us!" Baiel was standing by
the control panel, a tall, thin man in his early thirties. His face
was hollowly angular, sun-bronzed and capped with a brush of thick,
black hair. He looked away from the sight dome and I saw bitterness
and anger blazing in his blue eyes. "This is an exploratory expedition,
Captain Theusaman. We were sent out to record the conditions beyond the
periphery of the Earth charts, and it's vitally important for us to
return with the data."
"I'm aware of that, Baiel."
"Then face the facts. We've blown our dorsal tubes and lost our
emergency fuel. Unless we restock with fissionable material, we've no
chance of getting back to Earth. You believe we can restock on that
unknown planet out there, but--"
"I know we can. I've seen the spectroanalysis; it doesn't lie."
"Not in the statement of data. But--with the best of intentions--a
man can lie in the generalization he draws from the data. The
spectroanalysis tells us that planet out there has an atmosphere like
ours. It tells us there's an abundance of fissionable material in the
mineral chemistry. But suppose it can't be recovered with any of the
machines we have aboard? If we land, we'll have no chance of rising
again."
"It's a necessary risk."
"No, Captain Theusaman! We have almost enough energy in our functioning
tubes to reach the outer fringe of the patrol area. From there we'd
be close enough to beam an emergency call back to Earth. One of the
patrols might pick it up in time to--"
"Might," I snapped. "I'm glad you recognize that as a possibility,
Baiel."
"Even if none of us survives, our data will still be there; sooner or
later an Earth ship would find the _Olympus_."
"You risk more than I do, Baiel."
"But our information would be saved for the scientific processors."
"I prefer to save the men. We know they can live on that planet, even
if we find no fissionable material. The issue is settled."
"There's one other consideration, Captain Theusaman. With our dorsal
tubes gone, we can't maneuver. Even you can understand, sir, that a
crash-landing--"
"I've given the orders, Baiel. Will you execute them, or must I have
you cabinized for insubordination?"
"Very well, sir."
He departed without saluting.
Baiel was right, on both counts. I knew there was a chance he might be.
Yet I had made emergency landings before. Nothing had ever gone wrong.
This time it did. As soon as we nosed into the stratosphere we were in
trouble. The _Olympus_ angled down too sharply. The gyrometers failed,
since they were engineered to make use of the compensating drive from
the dorsal tubes. I tried to bring the ship up into the freedom of
space again, but the best I could manage was a slow, corkscrew dive
toward the unknown planet.
As we spun through the cloud wreath, I studied the globe carefully.
Within limits, I could still select the place where I wanted to land.
The planet was capped at both poles by gleaming ice fields which spread
down over the sphere like giant hands. Only a narrow equatorial band
was free of ice. The landing site I chose was a wooded area at the edge
of the glacier. The nearby ridge of jagged mountains suggested volcanic
action, and the possible presence of the fissionable metals we wanted.
We crash-landed at the base of the glacier, skipping over the ragged
ice until the bow caught and shattered in a deep ice gorge. The safety
stabilizers functioned in all the cabins that were not pierced by
ice. Our heaviest casualties were among the tube-room crew and the
astrographers. Only one of the scientists survived. I ordered station
formation on the frozen meadow outside the ship. Baiel bawled out the
roster, while I ticked off the names of the survivors: forty crewmen,
none seriously wounded; one scientist, fatally hurt; and fifteen of the
female staff of astrographical clerks. Counting Baiel and myself, we
numbered fifty-eight.
As the last of the names was read off, we stood for a moment shivering
in the icy wind. Slowly Baiel looked up from the ship's roll and let
his blue eyes move along the buckled hulk of the _Olympus_. Then he
glanced at me, and the set of his jaw was as coldly emotionless as the
ice bank behind him.
"Have you any further orders to give, Captain Theusaman?" His tone
was frankly insolent. I clenched my fists, but checked the response
I might have made. Baiel and I were the only Space Officers with the
expedition; any difference between us would be disastrous.
"Turn all hands into the stern cabins," I said, "and break out the
landing gear. It'll keep us warm. Detail five men to check on the
damage, and have them report to me."
* * * * *
An hour later Baiel and I stood at the control panel reading through
the list of damages. Remarkably little had happened--nothing, at least,
that we could not repair with material we had at hand. We organized all
survivors into repair crews of five each; even the women were given
assignments.
Baiel and I made preliminary soil tests for fissionable metals. The
computer prognosis from such highly selective data is never infallible,
but the probable degree of error is no more than .0006. Over a period
of two hours we made five tests, with the same results. There was
fissionable matter on the planet--no doubt of that--but it was locked
in a chemical combination we could not release without building a giant
separation plant such as we used on Earth.
"Our data is too limited if we sample so close to the ship," I told
Baiel.
"Possibly." There was a long pause before he added the prescribed,
"sir."
I nodded toward the hill sloping away from the glacier toward a forest
of tangled pines. "We'll make another test down there." With a shrug,
Baiel followed after me obediently.
Three miles from the _Olympus_, in a thick grove of trees, we found
the man. Naked, he lay bound over a heap of boulders, his dead eyes
staring up at the sky. A gash had been torn in his chest and his blood
had spilled out over chunks of glacial ice arranged in a crude pyramid
beside him.
To both of us, the sight of a man and the thing it implied was vaguely
terrifying. For almost five centuries expeditions of Earthmen had
explored the skies, slowly reaching beyond our own solar system toward
the stars. Where the atmosphere was hospitable, we had built thriving
colonies. But nowhere had we found a race of people like ourselves. The
planets had been so consistently untenanted that we had grown to expect
nothing else.
Now here, on this unknown world, twenty-five million light years
beyond the periphery of the Earth patrols--here we found men, men like
ourselves!
Baiel cut the thongs and lifted the rigid body off the pile of rock.
"If you don't mind, Captain," he said, "I'd like to examine--this--up
in the ship lab. Since there's a chance--just a chance, sir"--His
sarcasm was unmistakable, "--that we'll be staying here, I want to know
what we're up against."
Late that night, while the rest of the expedition slept, Baiel and I
carried the body into the laboratory. Baiel performed a thoroughgoing,
workman-like autopsy. It was impossible not to admire his efficiency
and skill. We were momentarily united in the rising excitement of
mutual curiosity.
"There's a fascinating structural similarity to our own," Baiel
pointed out. "Identical organs; identical blood composition. All
the differences are minor--a smaller brain case, with a retreating
forehead, and pronounced orbital ridges. And look at those teeth and
the chinless jaw!"
"In a way, it suggests Bonn's Hypothesis," I said.
"Aubrey Bonn? Why, he's the laughing stock of the Anthropological
Academy. We've never found a whisper of evidence to suggest a basis for
his Hypothesis."
"How could we? There have never been any people on any of the planets
we've explored."
Baiel dropped his scalpel and stepped back from the table, kneading
his chin thoughtfully. "Bonn said that an identical chemistry and
atmosphere, plus identical time phase, would produce an identical
chronology of the species. This planet may do that. It should have
been obvious when we had the negative tests for fissionable material.
The Earth itself is the only planetary body we know where we've had to
build separation plants to recover the metal."
* * * * *
"But, according to Bonn's Hypothesis, the resemblance should be exact."
With disgust, I glanced at the torn corpse on the table. "None of us
has an idiot's skull like that."
"We may have had once, Captain. You're forgetting the time phase.
This planet is the Earth as it was millennia in the past, in the age
of the great glaciers. The ice cap here has obviously reached its
maximum penetration. It will begin to recede now, decade by decade,
and civilization will slowly take root where now there is nothing but
primitive savagery."
"Civilization, out of that brain, Baiel?"
He smiled at the ape-face of the corpse. "Not that, but the one that
comes after. Perhaps the new man will evolve, Captain." Baiel licked
his lips thoughtfully. "Or perhaps he will be created."
"I don't think I quite follow--"
"Created by the gods!" Laughing, Baiel ripped off his laboratory jacket
and flung it over the corpse. "I think, Captain, that we shouldn't tell
the others about him quite yet. You and I have some investigating to do
first."
The next morning Baiel called me into the control room. When the door
was shut, he turned up the viewscreen. By adjusting the angle of the
beam, he had focused the projection upon the _Olympus_ and the frozen
terrain surrounding the ship in a ten mile radius.
The ship lay on a tilted, empty meadow above a forest of pines.
Five miles away a limestone cliff rose out of the forest. A crude,
semicircular clearing was beneath the cliff and on it we saw a tribe
of men and women gathered around a fire built at the mouth of a cave.
Baiel turned up a section enlargement and we studied the men carefully.
There was no doubt that they were the counterparts of the corpse lying
in the laboratory of the _Olympus_.
That same morning Baiel and I made our first visit to the village.
Fortunately we went armed, for they received us with violent hostility,
attempting to drive us away with a volley of spears.
A peculiar greeting from a people we now understand to be cordial and
open in their friendship! But their motivation was entirely logical.
Faced by a diminishing source of food, the tribe saw every stranger as
a potential threat to tribal survival.
Baiel and I used our Haydens to curb their belligerence. The sight
of red flame blasting their spears into dust awed them into a sullen
kind of submission. But it was not until our second visit, when we
took them a gift of bear meat, that we began to make any progress in
communication.
We watched curiously while the tribe wolfed the meat, crudely searing
it over an open fire. As hungry as they obviously were, each of them
nonetheless set aside a liberal portion which was later taken to
a grizzled old man who never moved from the mouth of the cave. In
response to our gestures, they made it clear to us that the old man was
their equivalent of high priest. He apparently commanded the wind and
the sun, and he had some sort of a terrifying blood relationship with
the glacier.
Comfortably fed, the tribe became cordial. Baiel and I had found a
touchstone. Whenever we visited the village after that, we always
took them food. In less than a week we knew their dialect. It was a
very small vocabulary, built chiefly of denotative symbols. Baiel
concentrated his attention upon the high priest; I stayed with the
tribal Chief.
It was a tactical error on my part, since Baiel already knew what he
intended to do. I did not. I wasn't aware, then, that the conflict
between us had already begun.
* * * * *
As our degree of communication improved, the various members of the
tribe shyly began to express curiosity about us. Our Haydens aroused
no interest, except for a vague and superstitious awe. The mechanism
of the weapon was entirely beyond their comprehension; they wrote it
off as a kind of magic closely allied to the mysteries practiced by
their priest. Our garments were of greater significance. The tribe was
irresistibly drawn to caress the sleek material, to hold it against
their cheeks and chatter excitedly over its unexpected warmth.
Once, as we sat in a circle around the fire, the Chief asked me the
name of our tribe.
"We are Earthmen."
"The Earth tribe? I do not know it."
"It is not a tribe, but a place." I picked up a handful of soil. "This
is earth to you--everything that you see around you. We came from
another place like this, a place in the sky."
They stared at me blankly. Then one of the young hunters scooped up
soil, as I had, and said brightly, "Earth. Yes, your name for the
hunting ground. Earth! It is a good name."
"No. We are Earthmen!"
"Yes, Earthmen--all of us. Not beasts that howl by night and haunt the
forest trails. Men. We are men. But also we have a tribe."
I tried to make my explanation more explicit. "We came here in a sky
carrier which is named the _Olympus_. It rests now up by the great ice
wall. There are others like us, too, who may--" I stopped, because one
by one they were rising and moving away from me.
"You are wrong!" the Chief cried. "Your tribe cannot live by the
glacier, on the tabooed ground!"
As he mentioned the name, it threw the whole tribe into a panic.
Nothing I could say would undo their rising fear. They shrank from
me, running into the dark recesses of the cave. Eventually the high
priest--with Baiel standing beside him--restored order by crying shrill
prayers up at his brother, the glacier. Fortunately, the harm I had
done did not seem to call for the drastic remedy of human sacrifice.
After the tumult had passed, the Chief said to me, "It was a cruel
thing to say, Seus-man." (The tribe always had trouble pronouncing my
name; sometimes they would drop whole syllables from it.)
"On my word, it was not meant so," I replied. After a silence, I asked
cautiously, "Suppose it had been true?"
"It may not be. The brother glacier is a great threat to us all. He is
not a friend. In my time and in the time of my father before me, the
ice has always moved closer to us, everywhere destroying more and more
of our hunting ground."
"Can your people not move away from it, into better land?"
"We have, as far as we dare. Beyond the forest the ground is taboo.
There the sun god strikes fire from the mountain tops, to warn us away
from his domain."
"Is there no land on the other side of the fire mountains?"
"The hunting ground of the dead. It is not for us, the living."
When Baiel and I returned at dusk to the _Olympus_, I walked
thoughtfully through the swirling snow, saying very little. For the
first time I faced, without regret, the fact that we were doomed
to live out our lives on this frozen, nameless world. I had found a
purpose, and it seemed good.
This friendly, impoverished tribe was man himself, as he had been
on the Earth in the remote darkness of our own uncharted past--man,
clinging precariously to a hard-won savagery, plagued by ice and wind,
threatened by a vanishing supply of food.
To the nearly insurmountable problems set by nature, this tribe
had added one final prison of their own creation, the taboos and
superstitions that penned them fast on the brink of the glacier. As
things stood, the tribe would not survive. To become men as we were,
they had to be freed of the weight of the gods, freed of superstition
so they could deal with the facts of reality. With our help the tribe
might eventually learn how to create a civilization. Without it, they
were doomed.
Hesitantly I explained myself to Baiel.
"Of course," he said. "It's obvious. We can't allow nature to forget
the proper chronology of the species, can we?"
"It will be slow work, but--"
"But not impossible. Their life span averages less than thirty years;
ours exceeds a century. That's time enough."
He agreed with me at once and, I think, he was entirely sincere. We
were simply using the same words to express two totally opposed ideas.
Neither of us, I'm sure, was aware of the ambiguity.
* * * * *
The need for decision came immediately. That night the power failed in
the _Olympus_ and the winter cold settled slowly into the cabins. The
residue of fuel energy left in the tanks was not enough to power the
heating grids, and our portable solar heaters were ineffectual in the
cavernous space of our cabins. Our food tanks froze over; the producing
cultures died. Baiel and I built an open furnace in the control room,
and the expedition crowded there around the fire.
Baiel and I had already told them about the primitive village;
the expedition had learned the tribal tongue as we brought the
knowledge back to the _Olympus_. Now, for the first time, I told them
frankly that we were never going to leave the planet. Hand-picked,
psycho-processed personnel, the expedition adjusted readily to the
new reality. Without the benefits of the machines of our earthly
civilization, we were faced with extreme hardships on such an
unfriendly world. Our only sound course was to join the village tribe
and survive through mutual efforts.
The following morning I went to the Chief to propose the merger. He
refused until I offered to guarantee a food supply for both groups.
It was a safe enough promise. We had the Haydens and enough energized
rounds to kill anything that walked the forest, for at least a year or
more. I counted heavily on the fact that, within that period, we would
be able to unhinge the paralyzing weight of tribal gods and taboos. The
tribe could then be encouraged to migrate into a more fertile area.
The business of negotiation was concluded in less than an hour. But the
elaborate ceremony of union lasted for two days. It was not a frequent
occurrence, and yet tribes had occasionally united in the past. There
was, therefore, a rigid body of custom proscribing the form; it was
interpreted entirely by the priest.
Since I symbolized the chief of the incoming tribe, I was expected
to spend the first night in the village alone, while the rest of the
expedition shivered around the improvised fire in the _Olympus_. The
Chief sealed me in tribal brotherhood by the gift of his daughter.
Dayhan was shy, filthy, repulsive with the stench of the animal skins
she wore. Lice ran in her matted hair and grime streaked her cheeks.
She smiled at me with an idiot's grin.
Yet I went willingly with Dayhan to the dark recess of the cave,
which was traditionally reserved to the new wedded. It was painfully
obvious that the success of my negotiations depended upon our mating.
I stomached my revulsion in silence. In the morning, when Dayhan first
addressed me publically as "My Lord," the tribe was satisfied.
Throughout the day the ceremony became general, climaxed by the
symbolic mingling of blood. To satisfy custom, each member of the
expedition--except for the women--was paired with a tribesman of equal
status. Curiously, they seemed to accept Baiel as our high priest. With
decided misgiving, I watched while he complacently established himself
in the priest's portion of the cave.
At sundown the ceremony ended. The old priest mounted a granite
pedestal erected near the fire. Raising his long arms to the sky, he
screamed guttural syllables at the gathering darkness. As the sun
tinged the distant glacial wall with scarlet, the priest looked down
upon the throng and proclaimed the need for sacrifice to brother
glacier.
The members of our expedition reacted with shocked silence, but the
primitive tribe matter-of-factly went through the deadly lottery. The
chosen hunter moved out toward the sacrificial grove, followed by the
priest who held his blade naked in his hand.
I cried reason at them, to hold them back. But the tribe neither heard
nor comprehended. With glazing eyes they were lost in the terrifying
ecstacy of tradition. Satisfy brother glacier, and the village would be
safe.
* * * * *
At the grove Baiel suddenly joined the priest. They whispered together
for a moment. Then Baiel raised his arms and spoke.
"Wait! We bring the tribe the new gods of the sun. Our gods are
stronger than brother glacier. Let them speak to the ice, and no life
need be given."
"Let the new gods satisfy the old!" the tribal priest echoed.
His statement gave Baiel's innovation the stamp of approval. The tribe
began to chant a sing-song thanksgiving. Baiel, like the priest,
raised his arms and shouted gibberish which they took as prayer. When
he lowered his hand, he pointed at the pile of rock in the grove. Red
flame flashed. The stones dissolved. The surrounding ice wasted into a
pool of water, slowly seeping into the blackened earth.
It was a simple enough trick. Baiel had concealed a Hayden in his
sleeve. But it impressed the tribe. They sang their exaltation,
clapping hands on the broad shoulders of the young hunter who had been
spared.
Baiel joined me as we walked back to the village.
"I knew something had to be done, Captain Theusaman," he explained.
"Fortunately, my idea worked."
"It's wrong, Baiel; all wrong."
"I saved the man, didn't I?"
"By substituting new gods for theirs. We want to free them, Baiel."
"Is there any other way to do it?"
"By teaching them the truth. By destroying their burden of gods and
superstitions--not by creating more."
This amused him and he laughed. I thought his reaction was odd, but I
still misinterpreted it.
For the next two months I became more and more involved in helping the
tribe find its way toward civilization. We could not impose anything
remotely like our Earth culture. The answer to the problem, without
the technique for reaching the solution, would be meaningless. But in
small things, like the brief spring thaws that slowly ate away their
planet-capping glacier, we could erode and destroy their shell of
savagery.
Because of its application to my own situation with Dayhan, the first
teaching I undertook was cleanliness. On the Earth it is an old joke
that, when we build, we plan the bathing facilities first; our space
ships are notably awkward to maneuver because we include so many
elaborate baths. To us, filth equates with savagery. Cleanliness was
a concept which the tribe quickly adopted and understood, because the
reward was both visible and immediate.
We erected stone culverts above the fire, melting chunks of ice and
channeling the warm water into a stone pool built inside the cave.
Following the example set by the expedition, the tribe shortly took to
daily bathing as a matter of course. We taught them to scrape the filth
from their skins, to comb the lice out of their hair.
I was amazed--and enormously pleased--with the physical change a bath
brought in Dayhan. Her stringy hair took on a golden luster. Her dirty
skin softened and color came slowly into her yellow cheeks. The running
sores dried, caked, and disappeared. Instinctively she came to be aware
of her potential loveliness. She began to experiment with braiding
her hair in various ways over her slanting skull. Once I found her
trying sprigs of greenery in the knot and studying the effect in her
reflection in the bathing pool.
The cave was always warm, particularly when the wind and snow howled
through the village; but it was uncomfortably crowded. Because the fire
was built at the mouth of the cave, the oxygen inside was inadequate.
We never slept through a night without feeling a nagging nausea from
the foul air we breathed.
Therefore, as soon as the tribe understood how the stone culvert had
been built, we proposed building stone cabins. So rapidly had they
learned that most of the labor was performed by the tribe. The Earth
people merely advised and suggested. And we did very little of that,
allowing them a great deal of trial and error experimentation.
It was the happiest time of our merger with the tribe. Everyone worked,
and worked in unison. I had never made any explanation of my point of
view to the other members of the expedition. I hadn't considered it
necessary. No Earthman was certified for space travel unless he had
first been successfully psycho-processed. In effect, that meant that
we took a scientific rather than an emotional view of any given set of
data. Since each of us was faced with an identical pattern of facts, I
assumed that each of us would approximate the same generalization.
To a degree, that happened. We all realized the need to teach the
tribe; no one proposed bringing machines from the _Olympus_ to give the
savages the products of our culture without their specifics. One by one
members of the expedition followed my lead and mated with the women of
the tribe.
Only our own women--the fifteen astrographical clerks--and half a dozen
men held off. I failed to perceive the significance until it was too
late. The six men were Baiel's closest friends; each of them had spent
at least a year at the Academy, while the rest of us were Rankers,
traditionally considered their inferiors. And the women, being clerks
rather than crewmen, had not been psycho-processed.
The breach into factions came when our village of stone huts was
completed. We were faced with the problem of heating. I wanted the
solution to be worked out by the tribe without our help. Slowly they
made progress in their efforts to discover how to build fires within
the huts without filling the rooms with smoke. They had just discovered
how to pierce the roofs with chimneys when I awoke, one morning, to
find that Baiel had presented them with a pat answer to the problem.
* * * * *
During the night he had stealthily returned to the _Olympus_ with four
of his men. They had brought back to the village a dozen solar heaters.
Before I was awake, he had presented the heaters to the tribe as gifts
of the sun god.
In wonder the tribe gathered around the tiny machines, holding out
their hands to feel the mysterious warmth. Then they thronged at
Baiel's feet as he stood on the rock pedestal above the village fire.
They swayed and chanted their prayers which had once been reserved
solely for the majesty of brother glacier.
As I approached, Baiel began to address them.
"The sun god sends you these because of your obedience to his ways.
Through me--through Baiel, the high priest--he makes you promise of
even greater gifts than this, if your faith continues."
The tribal chanting arose in ecstacy. The old priest knelt at Baiel's
feet, offering up a chunk of glacial ice in token of brother glacier's
submission.
"There is one all-powerful god!" Baiel cried. "Only one. And I, Baiel,
I am his priest."
"All-powerful; the only one," the villagers responded.
It was at that point that I intervened. The tribe stared at me in
bewilderment. I took one of the heaters and dismantled it.
"This was made by men," I explained. "By men like yourselves. See, this
is no more than a substance like the hard veins of metal you find in
your rocks. In time you can learn to make these as we do."
For a quarter of an hour I talked, patiently repeating and
demonstrating the facts. But still their eyes were glazed with
bewilderment and the ghosts of hidden fears. Since they had no
understanding of the processing of ore, how could I explain away the
appearance of the supernatural? Even when I disassembled the machine, I
proved nothing except that I was tinged with godhood myself.
Baiel stood smirking, saying nothing. When I turned on him in anger, he
said quietly:
"Earthmen understand reason, Theusaman." It was the first time he had
dropped my title, and he did so intentionally. "These animals--this
amusing burlesque of real men--I'm afraid you ask too much of them."
"I ask nothing but their right to survive and evolve, as we did."
"But they can't. Haven't you learned that yet?"
Still smiling, he slid off the pile of rock and went into the cave. I
followed him. One by one, the members of the expedition gathered around
us. Slowly fifteen women and six men grouped themselves behind Baiel.
The rest of the Earthmen were with me. Baiel was outnumbered and most
of his people were unarmed, but they faced us with a peculiarly firm
kind of confidence.
"I think it's time we had an understanding," I said. "I'm still in
command here, Baiel, and--"
"In command? Of a ship that will never fly again, and an expedition
that can never return to Earth? In another ten years, Theusaman, the
glacier will have moved over the _Olympus_. It will be ground into
dust."
"That's hardly the point."
"It writes finale to the past. It means this planet is ours--it must
be--whether we want it or not."
"Ours, and theirs, Baiel."
He threw back his head and laughed. "In the Academy, Theusaman,
we're taught to face reality, not to romanticize it. This tribe is
semi-human, if you like; I'm charitable enough to grant that. But they
aren't men, any more than the primitive species on the Earth were men.
Observe the skull of your--your bride, if you will; observe the idiocy
in her vacant eyes; observe--"
"This is man as he was, Baiel! You pointed that out to me yourself."
* * * * *
"On the contrary, I was simply discussing the Bonn Hypothesis. I never
said I believed it. On the Earth, Theusaman, before true man appeared,
nature created a number of semi-men--homo-failures, you might say.
They weren't men; they grew to the limits of their physical potential,
but they never achieved human rationality. At the end of the Earth's
ice age, the continents were widely populated by the last of nature's
failures. Then, abruptly--we've never known where he originated, or
how--man himself came on the scene. Overnight he wiped out the half-men
and took over the planet. Man has come here, now, Theusaman; these
failures will survive only so long as we need them. At the moment, they
constitute a convenient labor force. A handful of us can control them
by controlling their gods."
I drew my Hayden. "As I said, Baiel, I'm still in command of this
expedition."
He shrugged. "You've out-Haydened me, naturally; any Ranker could. If I
reach for mine, you'll burn me where I stand."
"I'm glad you understand that. Give me your weapons--you, Baiel, and
all your followers. Make any excuse you like to the tribe. You'll never
have an activated Hayden again, for hunting or any other purpose."
Without resistance, they allowed themselves to be disarmed. I pulled
the charges on all their weapons and negativized them.
"You settle everything so smoothly," Baiel laughed. "Next, of course,
you'll propose a--"
I cut him short. "All the expedition is here in the cave with us. They
all understand the differences between Baiel's objectives and mine. The
issue is clear enough for a vote." Slowly the hands went up. I counted
twenty-two in Baiel's faction, more than thirty in my own.
"So typical!" Baiel snorted. "So much like an Earthman! The will of the
majority--our universal cure-all for all things."
"You agree to abide by it, Baiel?"
His eyebrows arched in a mocking imitation of surprise. "Can an
Earthman do anything else, Captain?"
"So that we won't have a repetition of this morning's episode," I
said, "I'm giving this order: None of us will return to the _Olympus_
again for any reason without my consent. If it is violated, I'll take
disciplinary action under the terms of the Space Code."
There was a mutter of agreement, primarily from my faction, and the
angry meeting broke up. Nothing had been settled, except the division
of the expedition into two camps. We never worked together again in
harmony. Since Baiel's group was unarmed, their greatest potential
danger seemed to be gone; yet the village tension persisted.
Baiel could no longer use his Hayden to make a spectacular display
of the power of the sun god; slowly the old priest began to reassert
the cult of brother glacier. It seemed to me that Baiel encouraged
the change; certainly he and the old priest became more intimate than
before. I wanted to order an end to their close association, but my own
faction was against it.
"Baiel's harmless," they told me again and again. "Don't ride him,
Captain. Let this thing simmer down and we'll have them all on our side
again."
Gradually I realized that the very existence of the _Olympus_ was a
constant threat to the precarious stability of our community. There
were still countless machines aboard which could be converted into
further enervating gifts of the sun god. The _Olympus_ had to be
destroyed, and yet I had no means to accomplish it.
Built to withstand the extreme radiations of spatial sunlight
unfiltered by any atmosphere, the metal of the hull was immune to
the relatively low degree of heat generated by the Hayden. Only the
converted energy used to fuel the tubes could be used for emergency
welding if repairs had to be made away from our Earth bases. While
there was still a residue sealed in the tanks, I knew it was not enough
to liquidate even a part of the ship.
The alternative was to move the community to a place where it would be
physically impractical to return to the _Olympus_. To the south the
land would be more fertile in any case, the game more plentiful. To
migrate had always been one of my goals for the tribe.
But, when I proposed migration, I came face to face with the strongest
of their taboos. The volcanic mountains to the south were more
terrifying than brother glacier, which moved inexorably closer with
the passing years. No argument, no logic, no patient persuasion could
weaken the force of the taboo. Even Dayhan, who had learned so much,
refused to listen to me. Beyond the fire mountains lay the hunting
ground of the dead; it was forever forbidden to the living.
Suddenly, one night, the sky to the south blazed orange-red as the
slumbering volcano erupted. The ground trembled and we heard long
crevices cracking through the glacial ice; a gray ash settled down from
the sky, smearing the snow heaped around our stone huts.
The tribe flocked in terror to the old priest. Brother glacier, he told
them, was angry because he had been neglected; brother glacier demanded
sacrifices.
Baiel stood on the stone pedestal beside the priest, smirking
helplessly. When he caught my eye, he pointed to his sleeve to show
me that it was empty. Since I had negativized his Hayden, he could do
nothing to prevent the orgy of human slaughter.
I climbed the pedestal and tried reason. For a moment it seemed that
the tribe might listen. But the earth shook again and, panic stricken,
they started their lottery. Even then I would not have resorted to
Baiel's trick, if they had not chosen one of the Earthmen for the
sacrifice.
I made a display of the sun god's power; it worked, of course. The old
priest responded as if he had been waiting for my cue, and swayed the
mob with him. Then Baiel began to exhort them, crying that the quaking
ground was a sign sent by his god, not brother glacier. I slid blindly
back to my stone hut, sick with self-revulsion; I felt soiled with the
same deception of which Baiel stood accused.
* * * * *
The next morning, while the ground still shook periodically, Baiel
returned to the _Olympus_. It was whispered on all sides, from both his
faction and my own.
I had to follow him. I had to know what he was up to. But the
undercurrent of feeling ran so high, it seemed necessary to conceal my
intention. I said I was going root-digging in the forest. According to
custom, Dayhan went with me.
I had taught her a great deal, but not enough to overcome her fear of
the tabooed ground. She was willing to wait for me at the edge of the
forest, just outside the sacrificial grove, but I hated to leave her
alone and relatively unprotected. With some misgiving, I gave her my
Hayden.
"My Lord!" Dayhan's almond eyes widened as she fingered the weapon. It
was the first time I had allowed any of the tribe to touch an energized
Hayden.
"Do you trust a woman's hand with the brother-of-the-sun?" she asked.
"Can I hope to understand the bark of your great god?"
"It is only a weapon, like your spear or arrow."
"So my Lord has taught me."
"It will burn any animal that threatens you while you wait."
"As I have seen when you go hunting. I point this small end at the
beast, and then call upon the sun god for--"
"No, Dayhan. Aim well and push the small handle. It is not a god that
makes the power, but the skill of man. Do not change the nozzle dial,
or you will blast the whole forest into flame."
"Enough sun-fire to burn the forest! Yet you say he is no god. I am
truly your mate, my Lord, when you share such power with me."
I left the forest and walked across the ice-covered meadow toward the
glacier. Three miles away, nestled like a black beetle at the foot of
the ice wall, lay the smashed cylinder of the _Olympus_, already nearly
covered with ice and snow. A thin ribbon of smoke curled up from the
open furnace.
Baiel met me at the door of the control room. Over his fraying
officer's uniform he wore a clumsy cloak of animal skins, as I did
myself. Particles of ice were frozen into his black beard, transforming
it into a jutting blade of ebony. I was suddenly aware how much he
had changed since our crash-landing. Always thin, he now appeared
emaciated. His youth was gone. Only the blaze in his blue eyes remained
the same--glittering, self-confident, determined. Denied the dress,
the grooming, the daily ritual of shaving, both Baiel and I had become
bearded, stoop-shouldered patriarchs, imposing hulks in our animal
cloaks.
"I expected you would follow me," Baiel said.
"Why did you come?" For a moment, I felt a peculiar warmth and pity for
him. "It's insubordination. I'll have to take disciplinary action when
we go back."
"I'm only trying to help, Captain." The words seemed right, but the
voice was mocking.
Baiel turned to the viewscreen and dialed the focus on the area of the
planet south of the volcanic mountains. I saw rolling hills and rich
forests, green plains watered by a network of streams; the land was a
broad peninsula surrounded by the calm, blue water of an immense sea.
There was no indication of human inhabitants.
"I know you've been trying to encourage the tribe to move," Baiel
explained. "I came up here to see if I could locate a place for us to
migrate. This peninsula is ideal, Captain. It's far enough from the
glacier for agriculture to be practical, and--"
"The problem isn't to find the place, Baiel, but to conquer their taboo
against migration."
"But you can do that, Captain; just teach the little savages to reason
the way men do. Nothing to it." He smiled, then, and held out his hand.
"Face it, Captain Theusaman; admit you're wrong! Last night you had to
call on the gods; you couldn't control them any other way. If the sun
god orders a migration, we can have them on their way in two hours."
"So you're still trying to convince me that you're right."
"Of course; that's why I wanted you to follow me here. Would I have any
other reason?"
His answer seemed too quick. I looked at him, frowning, but the smile
on his face was unreadable.
"Tell me, Baiel: What did you really want on the _Olympus_?"