West Of The Sun, Edgar Pangborn [world of reading txt] 📗

fourteen-year-old musician to carry her violin on man's greatest venture—with enough strings to last two or three years and no means of restringing the bow. Later Ann threw herself into the labor of clearing brush but tired quickly from her own violence. Sears' microscope occupied a camp table; Paul and Dorothy joined him in a pause for rest. "Got anything for the local news-paper?"

"Unboiled lake water-assorted wrigglers." Sears mopped his cheeks. "'Twas never meant my name should be Linnaeus. Have a look." The world on the slide seemed not unlike what Sears had once shown him in water from the hydroponics room of Argo: protoplasmic abundance no[38] mind could grasp. "So far, nothing basically different from what you'd find in lake water on Earth—except for the trifle that every species is unknown, hey? I suppose that's why they heaved a taxonomist into space, to see what the poor cluck would do, hey? Now, those red dots are something like algae. Notice a big ciliated schlemihl blundering around? He could almost be old man paramecium, oh my, yes. Gi'me your sickle, muscle man."

"Hot work, Jocko. Take it slow and easy."

"Believe me, Mistuh Mason, I will. What——"

In undergrowth beyond the clearing there was deep-throated fury, a crashing of branches. A gray and white man shape staggered out of concealment, wrenching at what looked like swollen black rope. But the rope had a head, gripping the giant's forearm; a black loop circled the giant's loins and his free arm, tearing and pounding, could not loosen it. A saurian hind leg groped, hooking for purchase into gray fur.

Paul's hunting knife was out; there was time only for recognition. The gray and white being was everything human caught in a coil. Paul forced himself through a barrier of fear, hearing Wright yell, "Don't shoot, Ed! Put that away." There was no shot. Paul knew he was between Spearman and the confusion of combat; someone was blundering behind him. A black reptilian tail stretched into bushes, grasping something for anchorage. Paul slashed at that. The mass of heaving life rolled on the ground as the giant lost his footing, serpent teeth still buried in his forearm. Green eyes were pleading in a universal language.

Wright was clutching a black neck, with no strength to move it, and Paul stabbed at scaled hide behind a triangular head, but the skin was like metal. The forelimbs were degenerate vestiges, the hind legs cruelly functional. At last the steel penetrated; Paul twisted it, probing for a brain. The giant had ceased struggling; the furred face was close. Paul could feel the difficult breath, sense a rigid waiting.... The teeth let go. The giant leaped free, returning at once with a stone the size of Paul's chest, to fling it down on the slow-dying body, repeating the action till his enemy was a smear of black and red.

Now in returning quiet a furred man eight feet tall[39] watched them openly. Wright said, "Ed, put away that gun. This man is a friend."

"Man!" Spearman holstered his automatic, ready for a draw. "Your daydreams will kill us all yet."

"Smile, all of you—maybe his mouth does the same thing." Wright stepped to the trembling monster, hands open. Ann was sobbing in reaction, smothering the sound. Wright pointed at himself. "Man." He touched the gray fur. "Man...."

The giant drew back, not with violence. Paul felt Dorothy's small fingers shivering on his arm. The giant sucked his wound and spat, turning his head away from Wright to do it. "Man—man...." Wright's hand, small and pale as an oyster shell, spread beside the huge palm, six fingers, long four-jointed thumb. "Paul—your first-aid kit. I want just the gauze."

Spearman said, "Are you crazy?"

"It's a chance," Sears Oliphant said in a level, careful voice. "Doc knows what he's doing. Ed, you should know you can't stop him."

Wright was pointing to Paul's bandaged shoulder and to the giant's wound. The high furred forehead puckered in obvious effort. Dorothy was choking on a word or two: "Doc—must you—"

"He knows we're friends. He's been watching a long time. He saw Paul get hurt and then bandaged." The giant's trembling was only a spasmodic shuddering. "Man—man...." Wright snipped off gauze. "And he knows that thing is a weapon, Ed. Will you put it away?"

"He could break you in two. You know that, don't you?"

"But he won't. Give protoplasm a chance." Now Wright was winding gauze lightly, firmly, hiding the already clotting blood, and the giant made no move of rejection. "Man—man."

"Man." The giant murmured it cautiously, prolonging the vowel; he touched his chest. "Essa kana." A finger ran exploringly over the gauze.

"Essa kana—man," said Wright, and swayed on his feet.

The giant pointed at the bloody mess on the ground and rumbled: "Kawan." He shuddered, and his arm swept in a loose gesture that appeared to indicate the curving[40] quarter mile where lake and jungle met each other in a black-water marsh. Then he was staring out, muttering, at the wings in the meadow, and presently he touched Paul's bandage with fantastic lightness. "Omasha," he said, pointing at the flying beasts. He indicated the rifle wobbling in Sears' arm and held up two fingers. "Omasha."

"Yes, we killed two omasha. Sears-man. Paul-man. Wright-man."

The giant rumpled his chest fur. "Mijok."

"Mijok-man.... Mijok, why didn't I have you in Anthropology IA fifteen years ago? We'd've cleaned up the joint." Mijok knew laughter; his booming in response to Wright's tone and smile could mean nothing else. But Wright staggered and was breathing hard. Dorothy whispered, "Paul—"

It could not be pushed aside any more—the pain separate from the smart of his shoulder, tightness in the eyeballs, chill, nausea. "The air—"

Wright's knees buckled. Sears had dropped the rifle and was helping him to the lifeboat, Paul watching the action in a daze of stupidity. Wright's eyes had gone empty.... Paul was uncertain how he himself came to be sitting on the ground. Dorothy's face was somewhere; he touched it. Her brown cheek was fire-hot, and she was trying to speak. "Paul—take care of you—always—"

The face of Mijok was there too—red vapor turning black.

[41]

5

Paul Mason stared into blue calm: airy motion of branches against the sky, a mystery remembered from long ago, in a place called New Hampshire. Those years were not dead: secretly the mind had brought them here. What a small journey! Less than five light-years: on a star map you could hardly represent it with the shortest of lines.... He was without pain, and cool. Time? Why, that amiable thud of a heart in a firm, familiar body (his own, surely?), that was indicating time. The boy in New Hampshire, after sprawling on his lazy back and discovering the miracle of sky—hadn't he tried to paint it, even then? Messed about with his uncle's palette, creating a daub that had—oh, something, a little something. Very well. Once upon a time there was a painter named Paul Mason ... Dorothy....

"You're back—oh, darling! No, Paul, don't sit up fast or your head'll hurt. Mine did." Now she was curling into the hollow of his arm, laughing and weeping. "You're back...."

A thin old man sat cross-legged on gray moss. Paul asked him, "How long?"

Christopher Wright smiled, twisting and teasing the skin of his gaunt throat, gray with a thick beard stubble. "A day and a night, the nurse says. You know—the nurse? You were kissing her a moment ago. It's early morning again, Paul. She was never quite unconscious, she claims. I recovered an hour ago. No ill effects. It knocked out the others at nightfall—predictable. They were exposed to Lucifer's air thirteen hours later than we were." Paul saw them now, lying on beds of the gray—moss? And where he and Dorothy clung to each other was the same pleasant stuff—dry, spongy, with an odor like clover hay.[42] "Beds by courtesy of Mijok." Wright nodded toward the gray giant, who had also brought moss for himself and now sprawled belly down, breathing silently, the bulge between his shoulder blades lightly rising and falling. Mijok's face was on his arm, turned away toward the purple shadow of forest.

Dorothy whispered, "He watched over us all night."

"So you were conscious all the time? Tell me."

Dorothy kept her voice low. Paul noticed the towering slimness of the lifeboat beyond the barrier of branches, reversed—Ed Spearman's work, he supposed. It pointed toward the west. Turned so, the jet would blast toward the lake, harming nothing. Its shadow held away the heat of the sun, a gleaming artifact of twenty-first century man, the one alien thing in this wilderness morning. The sickness, Dorothy said, had taken her with a sudden paralysis: she could see, hear, be aware of boiling fever, but could not move. Then even the sense of heat left her—she was only observing eyes, ears, and a brain. She had had a fantasy that she was dead, no longer breathing. "But I breathed." Her small brown face crinkled with a laughter rich in more than amusement. "It's a habit I don't mean to abandon."

"Neurotoxin," said Wright, "and a damn funny one. Back on Earth, when I believed myself to be a doctor, I never heard of anything like it."

The condition had lasted all day, she said; at nightfall her sense of touch had gradually returned. She could move her hands, later her feet and head. At length she had sat up, briefly blinded by pain in the forehead, then she had given way to an overwhelming need for sleep. "I got a glimpse of you, Paul, and tumbled off into a set of dreams that were—not so bad, not so bad. I woke before sunrise. Different. Don't ask me how. Never felt healthier. Not even weak, as you should be after a fever. But Doc—what if the illness—"

Wright looked away from the terror that had crossed her face. "If you go on feeling all right, we can assume nothing's wrong with the baby. Don't borrow trouble, sugarpuss—we've got enough."

"Maybe," Paul suggested, "the illness was just—oh, some of our Earth metabolism getting burned out of us.[43] A stiff acclimation course." Wright grunted, pinching his long nose. Paul said, "Wish it had burned out the yen for a cigarette that I've had for eleven years."

Sears Oliphant, the only other with some medical knowledge, had taken charge immediately after their collapse. "He is—scared, Paul," Dorothy murmured. "Of Lucifer, I mean. I could feel it when I was just a pair of eyes and ears. More physical shrinking in him than in the rest of us, and he's fighting it back with all he's got. He's a very big man, Paul...." Sears looked peaceful enough now, in the dark sleep of the sickness, his moon face bristling with black beard growth but relaxed and bland. On another couch of moss, Spearman was more restless, powerful arms twitching as if he needed to fight the disaster even in sleep. Ann Bryan was deeply flushed and moaned a little now and then. "Ed was all right too. Considerate. Took all Sears' orders without any fuss or question; I don't think he's much scared. He feels he can bull his way through anything, and maybe he's right." Dorothy's helpless eyes had also seen Mijok bringing moss in great armfuls. This, she thought, had helped Ed Spearman to accept the giant as a man and perhaps as a friend. She remembered Mijok raising Paul and herself in one careful swing of his arms to set them down beside each other on the moss. Later she had watched him turning the lifeboat under direction of Spearman's blunt gestures. Its length was thirty-four feet, its weight over three tons Earth gravity—more here. One gray-white arm had lifted the tail and swung the boat on its landing gear as a man might push a light automobile. "I wasn't afraid. After dark, when I knew the sickness had got the others, I still wasn't afraid. Believe me? I could see Mijok moving around. Once I heard him growl—I think he was driving something off. And then while the red moon was coming up, he sat by us—his eyes are red in the dark, Paul, not green. He smells musky at close range, but clean. I wasn't afraid. Now and then he'd look us over and smile with his funny black lips and touch the furry back of his finger to our foreheads.... I could see the blue fireflies, Paul. Someday you'll make up stories about them for the baby.... I heard that crying again—much nearer than when we heard it that first night by the other lifeboat. Like a[44] group of children crying, if you can imagine that synchronized, almost musical. Mijok growled and fretted when it began, but it came no nearer. It had stopped when I woke."

"Some of Earth's critters sounded human—panthers, owls, frogs—"

"Ye-es. Just possibly something like tree frogs...."

Wright said, "Mijok brought