Critical Threshold (13 page)

He was on top of me in a second. My instinct said to throw him off, to fight him. But there were five of them, armed, and these, after all, were the people we had come to find.

I relaxed, let him get astride my chest, so that his eyes were looking down into mine. Then I grabbed his wrists, held him. And waited.

I could see every detail of his face. His hair was matted, a tangled mass gathered about his skull. His beard was short, but the hair on his supper lip grew over his mouth. There were particles of food sticking the hairs together. His teeth were sound but stained yellow-brown. His eyes were gray-blue and staring.

He made no sound at all. Not a whisper. But I felt that he was looking into my head. And whatever he found there was, to him, so utterly strange....

His right hand was clenched into a fist, and he was trying to raise it. I knew he was going to hit me with it and I didn't let go. I was considerably stronger than he. In a wrestling match he had no chance. But I don't think he wanted to wrestle. He didn't want to beat me up for firing darts at this young relative. He didn't want to kill me because of an inherent distrust of strangers. There was something else behind the urge to hit me, to hit me in the face.

“No,” I said, enunciating the syllable quite clearly. These were the descendants of English-speaking people. Fourth or fifth generation. If they had retained anything at all of their previous cultural identity they had to know the word. They had to understand.

But the sound meant nothing. The face staring into mine did not change. The maniac mask was set firm. To this man I was something alien—something inexplicable—something he had never met before and about which he knew nothing.

“I'm a man, damn it!” I said. “I'm a man.” Again, I put all the emphasis into the word he should have known—
had
to know. But he didn't. There was no reaction. ‘Man,' to him, was just a noise.

It was suddenly starkly clear that whatever had happened to these people—whatever event had caught them up entirely, while releasing their erstwhile brethren half-mad to return to the settlement—had been drastic indeed. If the people at the settlement had minds blown like a series of fuses, what of
these
minds?

His hand relaxed and he tried to pull away. This time I let him.

He bounded back and away, toward the spot where he'd dropped his bow and arrows. I sat up and looked at the others—five, now, for the boy had joined them. Two of them had arrows notched to their bowstrings, and they were already bringing up the weapons to aim.

I dived forward, but from a half-sitting, half-crouching position I couldn't get the impetus necessary to carry me far. I was still several feet short of the rifle and I knew as I scrambled on that I wasn't going to be winning any battles even if I reached it.

Then I heard Karen shout, in the stentorian tone that only she could muster: “Cover your eyes!”

I dropped flat, shutting my eyes and drawing up my sleeve to protect them still further.

I heard the report of the flashgun—once, twice, and again. I heard howls of anguish from the white savages. Then I heard: “Okay, you dumb bastard—get the gun and
run!
”

Karen had already reached Mariel and was pulling her to her feet. I grabbed the gun. The blinded savages were in a state of considerable confusion. One had disappeared into the trees, two had fallen and were pawing their faces. Two had moved toward the last sound they had heard—Karen's shout. I tripped one of them and body-checked the other, knocking them both ass over tit. Then, while Karen helped Mariel, I joined the retreat, covering our rear as we ran back toward the banks of the river.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

There was no sign of pursuit. We got back to the packs without any trouble. Then we hesitated, not knowing what to do. I felt dreadfully vulnerable. As if there were no place to hide. The savages knew the forest—they were at home here. If they wanted to hunt us down they could do it. We had the gun, but they had bows and arrows, and all the time in the world.

The first thing to do was to try and get some sense out of Mariel. It wasn't easy. She was in a state of some considerable shock. Whatever she'd read in the faces of those people had been far worse than anything she'd got from the sick ones at the settlement. She knew she had to talk, to try to explain it to us, but she couldn't find the words.

“They're not human,” she said, half-whispering.

We let her sit on a tussock of grass by the bank. Karen helped support her body while I held her hands. We were both trying hard to transmit waves of reassurance.

“That's the one thing we can be sure of,” I murmured. “Whatever else they are, they're human all right.”

“No,” said Mariel. “Outside. Not in. The things inside their heads—
they
aren't human.”

I looked at Karen. If that meant what it sounded like, it was a very nasty thought indeed.

“Listen, Mariel,” I said, gently. “You have to be careful. Think about what you're saying. Are you saying that something else is inside them—a parasite of some kind—which has taken over their bodies?”

She looked up. There were tears in her eyes. “I don't know,” she said. “I don't know what happened. But their minds aren't human minds. They're
twisted.
They see, and hear, and feel, and everything—all the senses are
different
....”

“Mariel,” I said, as softly as I could. “This is vital. They reacted to you, and to me, just as strongly as you reacted to them. And they didn't seem to recognize even the simplest words. Tell me, do they communicate amongst themselves
your
way? Never mind what that way is, whether we call it telepathy or what the hell—just try and tell me—is that the way they communicate?”

The tears were rolling down her cheeks. She wasn't sobbing. Her body was still now, relaxed and weak. The tears were just leaking steadily from her lachrymal glands.

“They must,” was all she managed to say.

It had to be true. It was the only thing that made sense. Loss of language—so quickly—couldn't be the result of a mere regression. These people hadn't simply slipped back into barbarism. Something very profound indeed had turned their minds into something new—something alien. A parasite? Some alien thing which had got into their bodies and changed the entire organization of the mind within the brain? Or had it been a kind of metamorphosis, sparked off, somehow, by something that had happened to them—something they had met here, in this special area of the forest?

“Is there anything?” I asked the girl. “Anything at all you can tell us?”

“Not now,” said Karen, cutting in quickly. “Maybe later, but leave it now.”

I released Mariel's hands. I looked round, now wondering whether there was an archer behind every tree.

“What the hell are we going to
do?”
I said. I spoke the words aloud, though they were directed as much at myself as anyone else.

Nobody answered, least of all me.

I took the radio apparatus out of the big pack, set it up, and began sending a signal to the ship. It seemed to be a long time before anyone answered. Finally, though, Pete Rolving responded.

“Find something?” he said.

“No,” I said. “But something's found us. There are people here, all right, but they aren't quite what we expected.”

“Need help?”

“Not so desperately that you have to lift the ship. We don't actually know what kind of trouble we're in. We got involved in a fight. We don't know whether they're going to come after us.”

“You didn't kill anyone?”

“It's all right,” I assured him. “Your beloved regulations are still intact. You can assure Nathan we're sticking to the spirit of the mission. But it isn't easy. There's something grotesquely out of place here. The moment they look at us they practically throw a fit—I think they can look inside our heads much the way Mariel can. Only what they see they don't like. They see something alien, because something's twisted their minds into a pattern no longer human. If they decided to come after us there's no way at all we're going to be able to talk to them. You understand that?
No way at all
.”

“Okay,” said Pete. “Take it easy, Alex. I'm not trying to issue orders or hand out advice—here's Nathan now.”

“Did you hear all that?” I asked.

“Not all of it,” he replied.

I repeated the essential information, in a somewhat less aggressive way. I had had no call to get angry with Pete. Of all times possible, this was definitely the one where I couldn't afford to lose my grip on my self-control.

When I finished the second summary, Nathan said, quietly: “And what are you going to do?”

“I don't know,” I said.

“You want to come back?”

Until he asked the question, I hadn't put it to myself. Not in those terms. I did want to go back, but it was the taint of panic that made me want it. I thought it over, trying to be calm.

“We still need to know what happened,” I said. “Now more than ever. But now, more than ever, we want to make bloody certain it's not going to happen to us. While we stay here we're under threat both ways. We've got natives playing rough games and we've got some mysterious nemesis lurking round these rotting trees. Look, Nathan, we can't take Mariel any further. She's shaken up badly. We can't risk exposing her to those people again, bows and arrows or no bows and arrows. She has to come back. Karen had better come with her. But I'm staying. I'm going on to wherever these people live, and I'm going to find out one way or another exactly where their humanity went.”

“No!” said Mariel, interrupting in the most violent tone I'd ever heard her use.

I stopped, and waited.

She had stopped crying now. She seemed, in fact, to have recovered her composure. It must have required an enormous effort of will.

“I can't go back,” she said.

At the other end of the radio link, Nathan was also silent, listening.

“Why not?” asked Karen.

“You
know
why not.”

“Come on, Mariel,” I said. “No one expects miracles. I'm not prepared to take the risk of exposing you to that again.”

“You have to take the risk,” she said. “I panicked. I reacted just as they did, blindly, stupidly. For them, that's okay. But not for me. All right, now I've done it once. I've seen it. The second time I'll be ready. I won't panic. I'll get inside their heads and I'll find out what's wrong.”

“You can't...,” I began.

“You don't know what I can or can't,” she retorted, swiftly. “And neither do I. But there's one thing we both know, and that's that
without me the only way you'll ever find out what happened here is by letting it happen to you!
”

Well, maybe that was true and maybe it wasn't. But the force with which she put it across made it seem true, just at that moment. Nevertheless, I wasn't about to accept that logic as a reason for taking her with me.

“Nathan,” I said, into the microphone. “She's under your authority. You have to order her back to the ship.”

“No,” said Nathan.

“In my judgment...,” I began.

“Never mind your judgment,” he said, and to judge by his tone he was showing considerable restraint in choice of words. “Mariel can make her own judgments.”

“She's a fourteen year old girl!” I objected.

“She's a member of the team,” he insisted. “Picked for her talents. She has a job to do.”

I wanted to say: You bastard, if anything happens to her....

But I didn't dare. Not with Mariel there. I just couldn't talk over her head like that. Because she wasn't a child. She didn't want to be a child. She was a professional, like the rest of us, because that was the only way she could see to make sense of herself.

Talents grow old quickly.

I lowered the mike, but didn't switch off.

“This is no walk in the countryside,” I said, to no one in particular. “We can get killed.”

That, however, was stating the obvious. I was way behind the current state of-group awareness.

“All right,” I said, in a soft and bitter tone. “We play it the crazy way.” It didn't seem necessary to add any footnotes about not blaming me for arrows in the back, if and when. Nobody would be blaming anyone.

I said goodbye to Nathan and packed up the equipment again. I picked up the rifle from where it lay, and passed it to Karen. She seemed surprised.

“I thought you didn't trust me with fireworks?” she said.

“If anyone's going to start slaughtering the natives in self defense,” I said. “I'd rather it wasn't me. I'm squeamish, remember?”

She gave me a curious look, as if she couldn't make up her mind what I was at. She knew I wasn't simply dodging responsibility.

“Am I supposed to save the last bullet for myself?” she asked.

I didn't deign to reply to that, but simply stood up and shouldered the big pack. I carried a flashgun in my hand. Mariel did the same.

Silently, we moved off, still heading downriver.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Understandably, we went cautiously and nervously. There was not the slightest overt sign of human habitation, but we knew better now, and we were ready to see people in the shadow of every bush. It was all too easy to imagine a stone-age ambush. But if they were aware us they continued to avoid us scrupulously. Perhaps they had more sense than we did.

The life of the forest went on quite regardless, but it no longer seemed quite the same. The shafts of sunlight which reached through the canopy to the forest floor now seemed to accentuate the dim shadows accumulated about the trunks rather than to illuminate the dancing of the butterflies. There were still a great many butterflies, and a particular abundance of one species, whose wings were scalloped at the edges, patterned black and yellow, with small “false eyes” on each hind wing. The false eyes were hidden while the insects were at rest, but flashed suddenly as they took off, providing a means of frightening or deflecting the attack of a threatening predator.

The scent of the forest was particularly sweet.

We had been walking for an hour or so when Karen said: “What's that noise?”

I listened. Above the perpetual rustling of the wind was a new sound—not very different but lower in pitch, harsher. For a moment, thinking only of wind and weather, I suspected thunder, but then I realized what it was.

“Waterfall,” I said. “The lake is ahead of us. Not far.”

We went forward, sticking close to the river bank. The river flowed into the lake, and if there was a substantial fall then the best place to be would be on the lip of the fall, looking out over the water and the shore.

It was late afternoon, the brightest and most even-tempered time of day. As the river moved toward the cataract it swelled in girth and seemed to run preternaturally still. We began to find spurs of bare rock projecting through the carpet of vegetation, and the character of the vegetation in a band about thirty or forty feet wide along the riverside changed to the more familiar aspect we had encountered on the long slopes. Many of the trees were stunted, and rather more light came through the canopy.

Within half an hour we came to the falls, and were able to look over the shallow ridge at the great lake.

The falls were not deep—perhaps only as high as they were wide, which was something like a hundred feet. Nor were they sheer, for the rock had eroded unevenly, and the water tumbled over a face that was pitted and scarred, interrupted by studs and knuckles of stone which forced the great curtain to erupt here and there into sheets of spray. On either side of the falls was a jumble of naked weathered rocks, containing the cataract like a pair of cupped hands. Beyond these areas there were shallow slopes, like the rim of a dish whose hollow held the placid water of the lake.

The lake seemed perfectly round, although from where we stood we could see only a green blur on the horizon marking its other shore. The arc of the shore which swept away on either side of the falls was neat, almost geometrically perfect. Whether the perfection was an accident of fate, or whether the lake was an ancient crater, the scar of a meteor strike, there was no way of knowing. There did seem to be a kind of ragged ridge dressing the top of the shallow slopes which led down to the water's edge.

The slopes were, of course, no less verdant than any other part of the forest, but the trees were smaller, wider-spaced, and shared their land with a great many more squat bushes, thorn-thickets and cane breaks.

Here it was that the people lived. Among the trees we could see numerous shelters decorated with feathers, their slanting roofs presenting all colors of the rainbow to the sunlight. Many of the dwellings were rounded, looking rather like patchwork igloos with hats.

Our view was limited by the greenery, but we could see people moving about or involved in particular tasks among loosely-aggregated shelters. We could see children playing. On the lake there were two long canoes, each manned by half a dozen men, trailing nets in the water. Several more such canoes were drawn up at the water's edge.

We watched from the top of the thumb of rounded stone which sat beside the crest of the fall, partly hidden by a knob of gray rock. We put the packs behind us and crouched so as not to be noticeable. I got out the binoculars and began to search between the treetops, trying to identify the particular work in which the various groups of individuals were involved.

All the people were naked, but I saw a couple of women working with animal skins, presumably for use in the shelters. I saw other women working with wood—stripping bark with rough stone tools.

There was no fire. Try as I might, I could catch no glimpse of flame or smoke. There was no sound either. The children played, but never called out to one another.

A hundred years ago, I thought, the ancestors of these were the children of civilized men. Knowledgeable men. And yet they no longer have fire, the primary source of non-biological energy. They no longer have spoken language. They've lost six millennia of history, maybe a million years of evolution. Lost—or abandoned....

But they obviously had what their civilized ancestors had not. The willingness to live together, as a tribe. They were regathered together, united into a community.

I scanned back and forth with the binoculars, looking for something—some little thing which would provide another clue, another piece in the jigsaw. I looked for a long, long time, because I couldn't believe that everything should be as it seemed—quiet peaceful, serene—a community completely integrated into the ultra-stable everlasting present of the forest.

I had to give up, in the end. My eyes were hurting. I glanced at the others, then after a moment's hesitation, passed the glasses to Mariel.

“A great chance,” I commented, “to break the world long-distance mind-reading record.”

She put the binoculars to her face, adjusting the focus slightly, without replying. Her face was very serious and firmly set. I looked over her head at Karen.

“It's crazy,” I murmured.

“They're alive,” she replied. “And they're in a much better way than the shabby collection on the hill.”

Telling points, both of them.

“One way or another, though,” I observed, “the price of survival here on Dendra seems pretty high.”

“It's high anywhere,” she replied. “And it keeps getting higher. That's the way it goes.”

Just at that moment, I couldn't help feeling that her cynicism was hitting the appropriate note.

Mariel lowered the glasses.

“See anything?” I asked.

“No,” she said, tiredly. “I get a faint feeling of unease. Could be something I ate. There's something weird, but I can't begin to fathom it. If only I hadn't cracked up when I had the chance....”

“Take it easy,” said Karen.

“Do we go closer?” asked Mariel.

“Not yet,” I said. “I want to think this through, first. It's no good charging in there and running our necks into a noose. There must be some way that this whole stupid thing makes sense, and we have to be able to come up with some ideas. Let's for God's sake have some kind of plan of action.”

“If it were up to me,” mused Karen, “I'd say there's only one sensible thing to do.”

We both waited, expectantly.

“Back home,” she said, when the pause had had its dramatic effect, “we call it kidnap.”

She was probably right. If we were ever going to get close enough to one of these people to figure out exactly what had put his mind through the mangle we were going to have to get him away from the bow-and-arrow-brigade. But the thought of a forced march all the way back to the ship with a tribe of angry savages trailing us wasn't very funny. It could happen, no matter how clever we were in securing our specimen.

“Brute force isn't the only way,” said Mariel. “Not necessarily. If I can make contact....”

“It'd take a miracle,” I said. “The moment you make eye contact the sparks start flying. Even if you can keep hold of yourself, they aren't going to be so determined.”

“So what do you want us to do?” put in Karen. “Sit here and pray for inspiration?”

I couldn't do anything but shrug, annoyed and frustrated.

“On the other hand,” said Mariel, who was still doggedly thinking away. “We could combine the two.”

There was a moment's pregnant silence.

“If I could just have an hour,” she said, carefully, when she saw that we knew what she meant. “If I could just muster everything into one big effort. I could do it. And we could be away before the rest knew that anyone was missing.”

“Not necessarily,” I said. “If these people are genuinely telepathic—the last rescue party arrived in double quick time, remember.”

She shrugged. “We're not going to get anywhere without taking risks.”

I looked at her pensively. She was determinedly calm, determinedly logical. She was trying with all her might to put what had happened earlier in the day behind her. She was bitterly ashamed of what she obviously considered her failure. She was forcing herself hard, now. But child or adult, that was a dangerous policy. In this mood, she was a poor risk. Maybe she could do it, but there are some risks which are never worth taking.

“Before we go into another confrontation,” I said, in a deadly serious tone, “I think we should do a little more work on the last one. Whatever state you were in, you got into their heads then, for just a few moments. All right, maybe you couldn't make any sense of it then and maybe you can't when you look back from your present state of mind. But you did see, just for a moment, whatever it was that frightened the hell out of you. You're feeling brave enough now for a repeat performance, but are you brave enough to go back into your own memory and try and sort it out inside yourself? It might be the harder way.”

She looked at me hard, then looked away. I didn't press the point.

“Evening's coming on,” I said, this time to Karen as well as to the girl. “We aren't going to do anything tonight. I don't think there's much point in moving back upriver to camp, we'll pitch the tent here where there's a reasonable amount of open space. Someone will have to stay on watch all night. We'll use the hand lamp inside the tent, no light out here. In the meantime, we watch and we think—all right?”

The sun was sitting atop the water in the west. A thin black line, the shore, formed a bar between the ruddy globe and the sea of yellow fire reflected in the still surface of the lake. The sky overhead was a deep blue. For the moment, the forest seemed almost silent. Even the wind was momentarily quiet.

The instant was crystallized. Time seemed to have frozen in its tracks. I studied the top of Mariel's bowed head, trying to imagine the turmoil within. It was impossible—like trying to figure out what was going on in the heads of these naked savages.

Parasites,
I thought. Worms inside brains, gnawing away, filling their gray cocoons with alien consciousness. It was a strong image. But it wasn't real.

“Hey,” said Karen, breaking up the petrified moment. “Trouble—I think they've seen us.”

I looked round, quickly, and grabbed the binoculars. Something was going on, for sure. People were looking our way, and one or two were pointing.

When I had the glasses focused, though, I realized that they weren't looking directly at us. They were looking somewhere to our right, further round the crater's rim. There were trees in our way, but after five or six seconds I was able to catch a glimpse of what was really exciting them.

It was a group of men walking down the slope. Six of them, one no more than a boy, about Mariel's age.

“It's the bunch we met earlier,” whispered Karen.

“They should have been back hours ago,” I muttered. “Long before us.”

“They had business in the forest,” she replied. “They weren't just out looking for a fight.”

“If they were out hunting,” I commented, “they had a bad time.” They weren't carrying so much as a bird. They just had their bows and arrows, and the curious spherical things. I focused the glasses on one of the round things, which was being held very carefully by one of the older men. I couldn't see through the wickerwork, but I knew there had to be something inside it. What?

“It's a
cage!
” I said, suddenly—still whispering, although there was no real need.

“For what?” asked Karen. “Canaries?”

I couldn't see. But I could guess. “Butterflies!” I hissed.

A crowd was gathering around the five men and the boy as they reached the nearest of the rounded huts. The whole tribe was alert by now to the fact that they were back. I glanced at the boats on the lake, and saw the men reeling in their nets, ready to go home.

The sun was dipping into the bar of black shadow that sat atop the fiery water.

The two men carrying the cages went into one of the huts near the center of the group. The children had stopped playing. Men and women alike stopped working. They were gathering, gradually, around that particular hut. They came quickly but unhurriedly, most sitting down, or even lying down, as and when they arrived.

“Looks like a prayer meeting,” said Karen.

“More like a union meeting,” I replied. I still had the binoculars pressed to my eyes. “Looks like we arrived at the right time. I don't suppose this happens every evening.”

“Who knows?” she said.

Minutes drained by. Mariel raised her head to watch along with us. She wasn't happy, but she was interested. We waited.

So did they.

They tended to be grouped in knots of five or six—families, perhaps. They did nothing. They seemed quite patient. They looked at one another, but they didn't fidget much. Like a queue at a supermarket till—quietly philosophical.

The wind seemed to have died, temporarily. Such breeze as there was blew waywardly, as much in our faces as at our backs. I caught faint traces of a weird smell—like nothing I had encountered before. Without the wind to carry it away it hung in the air, drifting and diffusing.