Here Comes Civilization: The Complete Science Fiction of William Tenn Volume II (90 page)

Roy came across next. He had a hard time, but he didn't do nearly as badly as Walter. It was obvious that the younger the man, the more resilient he was psychologically, and the more capable of taking the shattering experience of negotiating open Monster territory. They guided Roy to a rod: he wound himself around it for a dozen tortured breaths before coming to and taking a look up, down, forward, backward.

The rest of the expedition came over in groups of three. They had their hands full with men who slumped to the floor and wound themselves up in tight little balls of refusal, with men whose eyes suddenly rolled up in their heads and who wandered jerkily off in this direction or in that, with men who started to run away and who would bite and kick and gouge when they were caught. But fully half of the men made it across by themselves.

When they had been distributed, one or two men to each upright post climbing above their heads into emptiness, Eric, Roy and Walter discussed the next move with Arthur.

"I think we'll stay here for a while and take a break for a meal," the Organizer decided. "Do you agree? I think we should. We'll wait till everybody calms down and comes back to normal. Meanwhile, do you three feel like going on ahead and taking a look at what we've got coming up? How many more open spaces—you know, problems we might be facing—anything that looks like a weapon—whatever strikes you as a good idea."

Eric and Roy followed Walter to the last row of standing rods. They shaded their eyes and stared across a long empty stretch of floor—to where there was another rodlike structure, very much like the one they were in.

"What do you think those shiny cubes are?" Eric asked, pointing. Here and there, high in the other structure, were semitransparent boxes just like the ones above them. A few contained liquid shadows.

"I don't know," Walter admitted. "But I intend to find out. They're what I noticed when I passed this way before. They look as if they might be useful. Only, how will we get up to them? Think a spry man might climb up one of these rods?"

Eric and Roy considered the height and the lack of handholds. They both shook their heads. The Weapon-Seeker nodded ruefully.

"Then there's only one thing to do. We go on until we find a structure low enough to climb. Monster furniture comes in all kinds of different sizes. We'll find a low one with some shiny boxes close to the floor. And we'll find other stuff, too. In this place, I have a real strong feeling—"

"Hold it!" Eric grabbed his arm. "Listen! Do you hear it?"

The short, heavy man listened anxiously for a moment, then shook his head. "Not a thing. What do you hear?"

But Roy had also tensed at Eric's warning and leaned forward alertly. "Something's coming this way. It's not much of a sound yet, mostly vibration. You can feel it with your feet."

The Weapon-Seeker listened again. This time he nodded rapidly. "Monsters. And more than one." He whirled to face the expedition, strung out at the bases of the rods behind them. Pointing his forefinger straight up in the air, he rotated one hand rapidly over his head. This, the most fearful alarm of all to any band, had to be given silently. It meant:
"Monsters are upon us—up there—look out!"

No reaction from the others, and the three of them groaned to themselves. The members of the expedition were stuffing food into their mouths, taking swallows out of canteens, chatting together in low, friendly voices. No one was bothering to watch the scouts.

What a bunch,
Eric raged hopelessly.
Baby warriors,
his uncle, Thomas the Trap-Smasher, would have called them.

The rumbling noises were getting louder. Walter made up his mind to dispense with expedition security precautions. "You damn fools!" he yelled. "
Monsters!
Don't you hear them?"

That got a reaction. Every man leaped to his feet, knapsacks and canteens rolling away. White faces turned rapidly in their direction, looked off to examine the brilliantly lit spaces above.

Eric slapped the backs of the two scouts on either side of him. "Let's get out of here," he said urgently. This was traditionally an every-man-for-himself situation among the peoples of the burrows. He pointed across the floor to the other rodlike structure. "There! They'll be after the bulk of the men in this one. Let's go!"

Without waiting for a reply, he darted out into the open. From the corners of his eyes, he was conscious as he ran of huge gray Monsters materializing out of the whiteness on all sides. Those things could move fast when they wanted to! And in relative silence, too—the floor was vibrating no more than it had this morning when the creature watching them had walked away.

He ran fast, forcing every bit of speed out of his legs, not at all aware now of the openness of the space he was on. The only thought in his mind concerned the Monsters all about him. Would he be stepped on? When? Would he feel it when it happened—or would it be over too fast?

A moment before he reached the other set of rods, somebody passed him and leaped into hiding among the posts of the structure. Roy the Runner, starting late, had the legs to make up for lost time. Then Eric was there too, cowering behind a rod. He watched Walter the Weapon-Seeker stumble the last couple of paces and fall gasping two rods away from him.

But the rest of the expedition was in trouble. The men scrambled about, mindlessly, shrieking, inside the rod structure they had quit. Five Monsters now stood around it in silence, making any escape to the outside almost impossible.

The Monsters had known where the expedition lay hidden—they had made directly for it. And they were doing something in an organized fashion. What?

Eric strained his eyes to see, but the movements of the gray bodies were unfamiliar and unclear. Suddenly, from each one of them, a long green rope dropped to the floor. The ropes seemed almost alive: as they lay on the floor they quivered and bits of darker color slid up and down their coils.

There was a click from one of the Monsters, then a long, scraping musical note. The ropes began acting even more like live things. They slid into the rodlike structure and among the upright posts. Wherever they touched a man, they turned completely dark and he was carried along with them, apparently stuck to their surface.

"All together, now!" Eric heard Arthur the Organizer yelling. "Stay together and work on these ropes. All we have to do is get each man free—" Then a rope touched him in passing and he became just another shrieking attachment, alternately tugging and pushing at it. In a few brief moments, every man in the other structure was a madly wriggling prisoner.

"They seem to want us alive," Walter whispered to Eric. "And do you notice how these Monsters move around? They're a lot more deliberate than any I've ever seen before."

With their clusters of screaming, arm-waving humanity, the green ropes were picked up one at a time by the Monsters. Eric saw that the long necks came down and the pink tentacles near the head did the grasping. The tentacles, then, were the equivalent of hands—or fingers.

"There goes the entire expedition!" Roy called out hysterically. "What do we do now? What the hell do we do now?"

Walter shot an angry scowl in his direction. "Keep your voice down, you damn fool! If you lose control of yourself, we're all three dead."

As if in corroboration, a long neck twisted down out of the whiteness above, and a Monster's head swung to and fro inquiringly outside the rodlike structure in which they were hiding. It was only a man's height above the floor and Eric, nauseated with fear, felt that the eyes, in each of which a narrow, purple iris swam, were staring directly at him. And that pointed, stinking mouth—at least three men could disappear into it without creating a noticeable bulge!

He forced himself to stand absolutely still, although every muscle in his body yearned to leap off and make a run for it. Those pink tentacles—this close, for the first time, he saw how incredibly long they were—they could probably grab him up with ease.

But the monster, though staring directly in his direction, did not seem to see him. The head poked around among the rods and a corner of it touched Roy where he stood rigidly a short distance away.

The Runner threw his hands up, screamed—and ran. Instantly, the head was pulled up out of sight. Roy flung himself to the other end of the structure.

"Now we're in for it," said Walter the Weapon-Seeker grimly. The two of them saw a rope drop among the rods near Roy. It slid toward him smoothly, caught him—and kept going. It was going for them.

"We scatter," the Weapon-Seeker ordered. "Good luck, kid."

They leaped apart in opposite directions. Eric bent over, trying to keep his body low, for minimum visibility, and sped in a zigzag course among the rods. If he could get to the other side, there might be another structure nearby—

He heard Walter yell, and he spent a precious moment on a look. The Weapon-Seeker was now caught on the green rope only a few paces from the struggling Runner. And the rope was sliding swiftly at Eric, pulling both men along with it.

Eric straightened. Visibility was unimportant now—he might as well be running as fast as he could.

He heard the yells of Walter and Roy coming closer and closer behind him. He could not run any faster.
He just could not run any faster...

Swift, terrible cold touched his side and he was pulled off his feet. He found himself screaming. He hammered at the green rope, dark black where it was attached to his hip. It was like a part of him—it couldn't be pulled off. He screamed and screamed and screamed.

A Monster head came down and one of the pink tentacles grasped an end of the rope. Up they went, the three of them, screaming, flailing their arms and legs, beating against the rope with their fists, up they went, higher and higher, into the dizzying whiteness, up, up they went to where the floor was no longer visible, to where the Monsters could examine them, the Monsters whose prisoners they were.

Eric was never able to remember clearly what happened afterward. It was as if a massive hysteria had crashed into his mind and obliterated most of the record. There were isolated, scattered impressions: the rope from which he hung being passed from one neckful of pink tentacles to another, a great purple eye coming intently close, a gust of stinking, suffocating Monster breath—but over all beat the memory of men screaming as they dangled from the heights in clusters all around him, his own will and self-awareness completely lost in that hoarse, unending chorus of the doomed.

The impressions he retained of that moment became coherent only after the rope to which he, Walter and Roy were attached had been dipped by a Monster into a large, transparent box and he suddenly found himself able to walk again on a floor. Near him, the other two scouts were getting to their feet, yells subsiding into painful, sobbing breaths; while over their heads, the rope, of which they were at last gratefully free, was being pulled back into the heights, its color no longer bright but a dirty greenish gray. A large proportion of the expedition was already standing all around him, and the rest arrived in the next few moments as rope after rope was lowered into the transparent box, discharged its prisoners, went limp and was pulled away.

Boxes? Transparent boxes? Eric stared down intently. Through the bottom, he saw layer after layer of intersecting rods under his feet. Every once in a while, at the junction of a set of rods there would be a large box, such as the one he was in. Some of the boxes contained humans; others were empty.

Walter met his eyes when he looked up. "Sure," the Weapon-Seeker said with a grimace. "Those shiny boxes with shadows in them. The shadows were men. The boxes are cages." He cursed. "Walter the Weapon-Seeker, they call me. And this big, new weapon I was going to get from the Monsters turns out to be—We got it all right. We got it good."

The other men had been listening. Manny the Manufacturer came up, holding a forefinger in the air. He looked right past them, his old, wrinkled face heavy with thought. "Cages," he muttered. "There was a legend about these things in the old religion—in the Ancestor-Science we used to believe in. What was it? Something about what happened to people who fooled around with Alien-Science, who had too much to do with the Monsters—Let me remember—"

They waited while he shook the forefinger slowly at his mind. "Cages. Yes. Once, when I was a boy, I heard these things described in terms of Ancestor-Science. The Cages of Sin. That was it—the Cages of Sin! And there was a line about them that went like this:
The Cages of Sin is death.
"

"
Are
death, you mean," someone corrected. "The Cages of Sin
are
death."

"That's not the way the line went," Manny insisted. "Not the way I heard it. It went:
The Cages of Sin is death.
Just like that."

A chilled silence followed. After a while, a man dropped to his knees and began muttering an Ancestor-Science litany used by his own people. Another man from the same tribe knelt beside him and joined in. The chant filled the cage, awoke guilty memories in all of them.

O ancestors, O ancestors, I have failed and I have forgotten. Forgive me. I have failed to hit back at the Monsters in the ways you taught. Forgive me. I have forgotten to follow your ways. Forgive me, forgive me...

Eric shook himself out of the hypnosis of misery the words induced. Give in to this sort of thing and they'd be worth nothing. The whole bunch of them would be so much sewerage.

He still burned with shame when he thought of how the mass panic had swept him up a short while ago. That was no way for an Eye to act—and he was an Eye. An Eye should observe and record, no matter how fearfully unusual the circumstances, even if death seemed imminent. Wherever and however he found himself, an Eye must store impressions for future use: he must act like an Eye.

This cage, now—He walked away from the group surrounding the kneeling men. Roy the Runner and Walter the Weapon-Seeker gave him a startled glance, then fell in behind him. They passed Arthur the Organizer, sitting on the floor, his head in his hands.
"Forgive me,"
Arthur was intoning.
"Forgive me, forgive me..."