Break a Leg, Jim Harmon [rooftoppers .txt] 📗

small slip and he would be dead. Yet, so far, he had followed the pattern we had used at the other colony exactly.

Instantly I realized that it must be a mistake to follow the other pattern with this second group of aliens, if Charlie Baxter did it.

At first I couldn't understand why the pattern should be wrong for this group if it was right for the first. They were close enough so that there must have been intercourse between them, and if customs were violently different, there would probably be a state of warfare between them and none was apparent.

I finally realized why warfare would be almost impossible and why the customs of the separated colonies might be extremely at odds.

The colonies were three months apart by fastest transportation, which was longer than a generation of the natives. No one could live long enough to reach a second colony, so each culture developed in isolation along entirely random lines.

I felt like yelling at Charlie. There was literally no way of telling how he might be offending and antagonizing this Moranite by treating him as we had learned to treat the others.

The alien finally spoke. "You are part of a—Family?"

Charlie nodded his head.

So did the native—he bobbed Charlie's head with a rock.

"Close in on 'em fast but gentle," I radioed the guards.

The native dragged Baxter's limp body through a nearby thicket and into a small clearing. Abruptly I saw they were up against the base of the nearest mountain. A bubbling, dancing stream twisted through brown and green rock and disappeared into a ridge of gray slate. It reappeared below the hill, steaming, obviously passing through an underground hot springs.

The alien had Charlie where he wanted him before we could move. He lashed him securely with stringy vine and, with him thrown over his shoulder, ran up the slate, which rumbled down ominously behind them. He tossed Charlie over a wide hole at the top of the ridge. Slate rained down into the hole. If the Prone hadn't snapped awake and made his body rigid, he would have tumbled into the hole at that moment.

"So you wake, Familyman," the native said. "How could you admit to being anything so immoral when you were alone? You surely did not think you could eat me without help from the others of your evil brothers!"

Charlie licked his lips and moved his eyes; that was about all he dared move. "You—don't approve of families?"

The native drew himself up to his full elongated height in the screen. "Like all good People, I was properly abandoned at birth and I proudly say I have never associated with others except for Mating and Trading."

I noticed abstractly that he finished moving his lips long before the translation was finished. He was using a very primitive language. I screwed the button nervously in my ear for Charterson and Von Elderman to report.

The alien looked at the rigid form of Baxter over the pit. "I suppose I should have some pity for you. You began your filthy practice too young to know better. But imagine! Combining with others of your kind to survive—at the expense of decent individuals like myself. Robbing us, eating us. The Finger of Fire will come soon and will destroy you. I have heard Familymen often try to aid one another. Perhaps others of your kind will die with you!"

He was gone long before the translation was finished, leaving Charlie Baxter arched across a pit that widened as the alien's descent disturbed more of the soft shale.

The native was out of sight. I realized his tribe would soon be extinct. The racial mind for the whole species seemed obsessed with survival by natural selection, but his tribe had gone off on the tangent of individualism, which was fine to some extent, but the Service had learned that a race couldn't survive without some degree of cooperation and this one's level of mating and trading did not seem sufficient.

"Captain Jackson!" Von Elderman's voice said in my ear. "We can't reach him! If we start up that hill, the soft shale is bound to shift and drop him right into that hole."

"I'll send Bronoski with a personal flyer immediately to make an air pickup," I said numbly.

It wasn't the guards' fault. Charlie hadn't seemed to be in any immediate danger and we don't kill intelligent life-forms without damned good reason—the kind of reason that stands up in court. But he was now stretched over what I was fairly certain was an active geyser—"The Finger of Fire," the native had called it, and had assured Charlie that it would kill him.

I dispatched Bronoski, but that was all I could do. I did not know when the geyser would spout. Maybe Bronoski would make it. Maybe he wouldn't.

I magnified the view from the useless little Bird and studied Charlie's face in the screen. If he lay there doing nothing, waiting for a miracle to happen, he was—I shuddered—cooked. He had to make an active decision.

If he didn't, he was almost sure to die.

But maybe that was what he wanted. Maybe accident prones really want to destroy themselves.

It was his bid.

Slate dropped off the rim of the hole into the pit and Charlie stiffened. More passive acceptance. But maybe I wasn't being fair. There wasn't much Charlie could do. There wasn't much else for him to do except give up.

But I noticed his eyes moving. They went up to the bubbling ribbon of water and down to the steaming stream below the ridge where it emerged. Charlie smiled. He had made a decision.

He folded his knees and dropped into the hole.

He had naturally made the wrong decision. Bronoski in the flying platform swung into position above the pit.

Charlie must have figured that he would be washed on through the hot springs and out into the shallow water below. He would be, but he would be boiled alive.

Only there are mistakes and mistakes, and sometimes mistakes aren't mistakes at all.

The geyser exploded, higher, faster and harder than it ever had before. And Charlie, half-drowned and half-or-more scalded, popped up and landed in the brush twenty feet away.