There was darkness and furtive movement ahead. There was the nervous
oppression one feels in deep caverns. There was silence and shadowy
impressions of movements as soundless and nerve-wracking as the silence.
Tiny pressed a hand radilume into Wilding's fingers.
"From here on, nobody knows the way," she said, an odd gentleness in
her voice. "I wish I dared go all the way with you. Shall I wait here?"
"No," Wilding answered uneasily. "Take the girl back safely. I will
find my way, or perhaps the Pit Men will show me...."
Tiny's laugh was gruesome. It echoed among the silent rocks and came
back magnified. While the sound still clattered back and forth from the
confining rock walls, Wilding left the women and went on.
He went through darkness and more silence. Flickering ghosts of
movement paced his progress. He knew the Pit Men were all around him,
watching, curious, waiting to spring and overwhelm him. His hand-light
made a narrow rent in the solid curtain of blackness. He could see the
path and the vague outlines of the passage for a few paces ahead. He
went on for a long time.
Finally, he stood still and waited. Movement ceased around him. He shut
off the radilume and shifted his position slightly. Again he waited.
He stood still, scarcely breathing. Movement began again, and oddly,
it seemed to move away from him. But one fragment of the movement
drew closer. It edged toward him and stopped. It came on, slowly,
softly, warily. Wilding could see nothing, scarcely hear the cautious
breathing. But his instincts sensed the creature and placed it exactly.
It was curious.
Suddenly Wilding leaped. There was quick, huddled violence in the
darkness. The thing seemed all body. Wilding could find no arms or
legs for leverage. But its strength was no match for his. Wilding
overpowered the creature, felt it fall under him. In a flash, he was
down on top of it, holding it against the rock floor, straddling a
furry bulk, pinioning its struggles. The thing writhed feebly, then
subsided and lay still. Wilding hoped he had not killed or seriously
injured the Pit Man. He eased the pressure, and felt the soft body stir
slightly. Relieved, he eased the strain a little more, but held his
advantage.
His fingers clicked the radilume switch. Light was momentarily blinding
after the darkness. Wilding ventured a quick glance at the captured Pit
Man and turned away in revulsion. How could people eat such things!
Wilding sat on the prostrate Pit Man and felt very unhappy about the
capture. The Pit Man goggled out of excited eyes and geysered an insane
gibberish of sound. There were no recognizable words, and not even
an indication that the sounds were words. It was like the notes of a
curious, chittering birdsong, chromatic, waveringly melodic and set to
vague rhythms, but it resembled no speech Wilding had ever heard.
Easy enough to carry out his plan to speak to the Pit Men, but what
language did one use? Wilding tried slum Venusian, two Earth languages,
a smattering of canal Martian dialects. He got nowhere. The Pit Man
stayed put and bird-sounds sprayed from him. Wilding straddled the
creature and spoke words in every language he knew. That was all.
A similar difficulty had baffled trained semantics men. Even the cipher
experts, though admitting that the birdsong sounds seemed to have a
musical or mathematical basis, could go no further. No dictionaries or
word-books exist, and the language, if it were even a language, seemed
not phonetic. No actual words had ever been distinguished, let alone
their meanings.
Nor was the language the only mystery about the Pit Men. No
anthropologist ever studied the race, catalogued its social patterns,
recorded its history. The Pit Men were non-human, their origins lost
in darkness beyond the dawn of time. In the chronicles of the early
(Martian) spacemen, there is mention of a fungus-people inhabiting some
of the larger asteroids, particularly the rogue asteroids and those
with a high content of radioactive ores. First explorations by solar
survey ships from Earth found the fungus life-forms existing much as
they still do, inhabiting deep caves in the honey-combed interiors of
some asteroids.
Practically nothing definite was ever learned about them. These
mobile, intelligent fungus-growths clung to their impregnable isolation
and lived among deposits of low grade radioactive ores, worthless to
mine and difficult to transport. In murky, dim-lit caverns, they lived
out their strange lives, eating if they eat, sleeping if they sleep,
and worshipping gods as ancient and strange as themselves. At first
contacts Pit Men proved friendly and harmless, if not molested--but
deadly dangerous if aroused or mistreated.
But communication always stopped dead beyond a few meager words the
more intelligent Pit Men deigned to learn and use.
Wilding got up, releasing the Pit Man. With a shudder, he helped
the creature to the horny pads which passed for its feet. The thing
retreated to the edge of the light cone and stood, half in shadows,
trembling. Wilding took a long look at the goggling alien, then wished
he had not.
* * * * *
It was a stubby, waddling horror of gray-green and fishbelly white,
oddly manlike, even birdlike as legend specified, but with no
resemblance to any particular bird life of the known worlds. The head
was huge in proportion, round and smooth as a polished plastic ball.
A long slender trunk or tentacle extended from the almost featureless
face. Limbs were not arms, but something between wings and flippers.
Folded membranes, like the gliding surfaces of flying squirrels
connected the flipper-wings to the plump, obscene body. In texture, the
skin was not slick, furry or feathered, but dusty, like the wings of a
moth-miller.
The Pit Man trembled and waited, while Wilding's nerves shrank from
remembrance of its foul contact.
Impatiently, with a recognition of futility, Wilding gestured for it to
go. Without language, communication was impossible, and there was no
hope of making a deal with the Pit Men. Birdmen or animals, plants or
parasites, the things were too alien.
He would have to manage his plan somehow without their help.
By signs, Wilding tried helplessly to convey a minimum of apology for
the outrage of capture and attempted kidnapping. He might as well have
waved his hand against the wind.
The fungus-thing goggled and trembled and waited, making no move to
leave, none toward Wilding. Treble sounds spilled from the orifice
of its waving trunk, almost made words, hinted at resemblances, at
possible meanings. Wilding thought he made out a corrupt and garbled
enunciation of a red Martian word.
"Tza-tchagalok," which means either priest or temple, depending upon
the tone in which it is spoken.
The Pit Man slid away. He came back. He retreated to the dark areas,
returned again. His flippers gyrated excitedly. He reminded Wilding
of a dog dumbly trying to lead a man to a discovery. The parallel was
obvious. He wanted Wilding to follow.
Wilding shrugged and went along. There was nothing to lose. If it were
a trap, he was already in it.
The darkness grew lighter, but oddly misty, as if some radiant vapor
swirled and flowed in the caves. He could now see surroundings but as
if through a veil of dancing dust motes. Light increased as they moved
forward, ever deeper into the rock heart of the asteroid. Wilding felt
his skin tingling as if he bathed in a thick liquid full of sparks.
Fatalistically, he wondered how much exposure to this a man's body
could stand.
The cavern opened out, became an immense chamber. Walls fell back and
the floor sloped into an abyss swimming with blinding mist. The ceiling
lifted and lost itself in vaulted brightness overhead. Pit Men swarmed
in the great cavern like bees crowding a giant hive. They paid no
attention to Wilding or his companion.
There was music, or at least unholy sound. It swelled and flowed in
monstrous organ notes, lingering on chords, measured by an alien
off-beat rhythm. The Pit Men wavered like shoals of fish caught in
powerful undertows. Their bodies swayed and bobbed in response to the
movements of sound. Even the light flared and faded like a visual echo
of the music.
Wilding's late captive, now his guide, paused indecisively and made
abortive motions with his flippers. Again the bird-sounds chimed and
whickered. Again, Wilding snatched at the Martian word for priest or
temple.
"Tza-tchagalok.... Tza-tchagalok...."
The Pit Man pointed a flipper upward. Suspended in mid-air, without
visible support except for the streaming pillars of light, was an
elaborate structure. Wilding studied it. There were bars studded with
prisms which shattered the streaming light to rainbow effects. It was
like an immense jewelled cage.
Wilding sensed movement within the cage. He was curious how the
creatures reached the staging, since there was no ladder, no ramp, no
stairs.
He learned quickly. The Pit Man took flight, lurching clumsily into the
air and floundering about on his flippers and the stretched membrane.
It was a combination of swimming and gliding. The thing poised, as if
waiting for the man to follow. Wilding did actually make the attempt.
With the light gravity and the heavily pressured air, such swimming
flight seemed almost possible. Wilding's attempt ended in ludicrous
failure. He sprawled in flailing trajectory and fell awkwardly into
web-like nets of glittering metal.
Pit Men gathered about and helped extricate him. Their birdlike vocals
chittered in ear-splitting showers.
His guide and two others whisked him off his feet and soared upward
through the mists. Once aloft, his low-gravity weight seemed no burden
to them. In flight, their awkwardness vanished quickly, and they swam
about with ease and grace. The approach to their temple may have been
ritual; it was certainly not direct.
Wilding's senses spun. He felt nauseated and alarmed.
The Pit Man trio swooped down and deposited Wilding solidly on a
platform built into the cage.
On the platform, paddling about mysterious ceremonies, was a very old,
very gray, and very dusty Pit Man. He looked more like an owl than
anything else. He goggled and waddled ponderously. He made a bobbing
obeisance to a gigantic image, and to Wilding the ritual posturing was
both solemn and impressive.
So was the idol. It was towering, of some burnished red metal, and
represented a being completely non-anthropomorphic, like those strange
and morbid Pzintar images Wilding had seen on Mars. Ancient Mars had
worshipped beings neither birds nor serpents, but mending qualities
and appearances of both. This idol was like those, though not an exact
duplication. It represented something utterly alien to man, infinitely
wise, infinitely benevolent, infinitely sad. There was no suggestion
of good or evil; there was only calm acceptance and understanding of
things as they are, and a serene certainty in things as they should
be....
Wilding stared upward at the gigantic symbol, and felt a stir of
religious awe.
The owl-like priest spoke then. He spoke in good, cultured Martian,
though his vocal apparatus massacred word sounds.
"Even the gods die," he said in whistling accents. "Or they grow bored
and tired and go away. The gods are beyond understanding, and sometimes
we are beyond their understanding as well."
Wilding shivered as if a blast from icy eternities blew over him.
"My time is short," he said quickly. "I came to ask help from you,
but a man's bones and flesh can stand only brief exposure to this
radiation. If I stay here too long, I will die."
"Perhaps you will be reborn as a Pit Man," suggested the old priest
philosophically.
The possibility was no consolation to Wilding.
He talked quickly, outlining his project, stating his needs, and the
possible gain to the Pit Men in co-operating with him.
"I plan to escape with the bulk of the prisoners," he said. "If you
will help, you can have your asteroid to yourselves again."
"How could we help you?"
"The Pit Folk are immune to radiation that is deadly to us. We have no
shielding, so we cannot handle or process the radioactive ores. We can
provide equipment, if you will supply the labor. All we want is enough
to power heavy machines for two weeks, and sufficient purified atomic
fuel to power the space-lighter on a short voyage. It will not require
much knowledge or labor for that."
The gray priest was thoughtful. "If you escape in that small lighter,
not many of the prisoners can go with you."
"Not many," agreed Wilding. "Not in the lighter. I intend to seize the
supply ship and take along all who wish to go."
"There will still not be space enough for all," said the priest
gravely. "What of those who will remain behind?"
* * * * *
Wilding grunted. "That is not my problem. Perhaps the guards will send
out and pick them up. Certainly there will be an investigation and no
more prisoners will be sent here. I will leave you the means to dispose
of the remaining prisoners. If they try to harm you, I leave the
decision in your hands. You can destroy all of them."
"You are a more ruthless people than my race," commented the old Pit
Man.
"Circumstances sometimes require me to be ruthless," Wilding replied,
without apology. "It is like surgery, needed to remove cancerous
tissue. Will you help?"
"I do not know," said the priest. He moved to the edge of the platform,
and suddenly was surrounded by swarming hordes of the Pit Men. There
was no audible consultation, no words, no waving of the flipper limbs.
Music died away into silence.
Finally the gathering broke up and the Pit Men swooped away in all
directions.
"What was that--a council talk?" asked Wilding.
The gray old priest goggled at him. "Not in words. Not talk in the
sense you mean. My people are a symbiotic group, all parts of one
personality. Each colony is group-brain, a group nervous system,
the individuals are its limbs and organs. We have no speech, and
communicate with each other by what you would call telepathy--though
it is not that. We are not individuals at all, but parts of a great
organism. Vocal sound with us is not communication, but an expression
of mood-music."
Wilding looked upward at the gigantic image. "If you are still
undecided, why not ask your gods?" he inquired cynically.
The priest whistled words in an eery tone. "One does not disturb the
gods with questions unless he wants disturbing answers. We have already
reached our decision. We will help you escape."
Wilding gave swift instructions and the priest agreed upon terms and
methods of carrying them out.
Without visible or audible summons, Wilding's Pit Man guide reappeared
suddenly, swooping down from the brilliance near the roof of the
cavern. He settled with a flutter of membranes and a flurry of flippers.
"This one will return you to your own kind," said the priest. "You will
not come here again, for this cavern is sacred to us. And there must be
no more seizing and eating of Pit Men."
"There will be none," Wilding promised savagely. "Not after I warn the
convicts that if any incidents occur, I will turn the human offenders
over to you for punishment."