Part One

A.D. 2056

1

Morning was flowing over the red-green planet. "What do we know?" The delicate brown face of Dorothy Leeds kindled with questions. "Summarize it."

Edmund Spearman achieved casualness. "Diameter and mass a trifle more than Earth's, larger orbit around a larger sun. A year of 458 days, twenty-six hours each. Moderate seasonal changes, axial tilt less than Earth's, orbit less elliptical. See the smallness of the north polar ice cap? The equatorial region--much too hot; the rest is subtropical to temperate. We should go down (if we do) near the 50th parallel--north, I'd say. Too much desert in the southern hemisphere. Might be hot winds, sandstorms."

"The red-green _is_ vegetation?" Dr. Christopher Wright teetered on long legs before the screen, a classroom mannerism unchanged by eleven years in the wilderness of space. He pinched and pulled the skin on his Adam's apple, his hawk's-beak, small-chinned head jutting forward with an awkwardness not aggressive but intent. Paul Mason thought: _You love him or hate him. In either case he's never quite grotesque._ Wright's too-soft voice insisted: "It _is_, of course?"

"It has to be, Doc," Spearman said, and rubbed his bluish cheeks, looking older than his thirty-two years. Already he showed frontal baldness, deeply bracketed mouth corners. On Spearman's big shoulders was the burden of the ship. Watching him now, Paul Mason was troubled by a familiar thought: _Captain Jensen should not have died_.... "It has to be. The instruments show oxygen in Earth proportion, or somewhat richer, plus nitrogen and carbon dioxide. The camera gives us tree shadows in these latest photographs with the stronger lens. The air may make us oxygen-happy--if we go down.... Well, Dorothy--two continents, two oceans, both smaller than the Atlantic, connected narrowly at north and south polar regions. Dozens of lakes bigger than the Caspian. The proportion of land to water surface works out nearly the same as on Earth. No mountains to match the Himalayas, but some pretty high ranges. Unlimited forest, prairie, desert." He closed bloodshot eyes, pressing the lids. Paul Mason thought: _I should never try to paint Ed. The portrait would always come out as Hercules Frustrated, and he wouldn't care for it...._ Spearman said, "Even most of the tallest mountains look smooth--old. If there were glaciers it was a long time ago."

"Geologically a quiet phase," Sears Oliphant remarked. "As Earth looked in the Jurassic and may look again." Born fifty years ago in Tel Aviv, brought up in London, Rio, and New York because his parents were medical trouble shooters for the Federation, and possessed of a doctorate in biology (more exactly, taxonomy) from Johns Hopkins, Sears Oliphant claimed that his original Polish name could not have been spelled with the aid of two dictionaries and a crowbar. His fat face blinked at Dorothy with little kind eyes. "I forget, sugar--you weren't around in the Jurassic, were you?"

"Maybe." Her slow smile was for Paul. "As a very early mammal."

Wright said, "No artifacts.... At first it looked like Venus." His crinkled asymmetrical face probed at them with a wistful half smile like a child's. "May we call this planet Lucifer, son of the morning? And if we land and found a city (or am I being ridiculous?)--let it be Jensen City, in honor of a more-than-solar myth."

Shading closed lids, Spearman said with harshness, "Myth?"

"Why, Ed, yes--like all remembered heroes who continue in the love of others, a love that magnifies. How else would you have it?"

"But"--Ann Bryan was high-voiced, troubled--"Lucifer----"

"My dear, Lucifer was an angel. Devils and angels have a way of turning out to be the same organism. I noticed that first when I was a damned interne. I noticed it again when I switched to anthropology. I even noticed it on a space ship with the five persons I love best.... No artifacts, huh?"

Dorothy said, "You haven't seen these latest pictures, Doc."

"Something?" Wright hurried over, gray eyes wide and sparkling. "I'd quit hoping." Ann joined him, quick-motioned in her slimness, too taut. Wright slipped an elderly arm around her. "Parallel lines, in jungle? Ah.... Now, why none in the open ground?"

Spearman suggested: "We could take more shots. But...."

Paul Mason broke the darkening silence. "But what, Ed?"

"We're falling, some. I could move us out into a self-sustaining orbit by using more of the reaction mass. We have none to waste. Jensen's death eleven years ago----" Spearman shook his gaunt but heavy head. "Thirty pre-calculated accelerations--and the rest periods they allowed us were insufficient, I think. You remember what wrecks we were when it was finished; that's why I tried to allow more time in deceleration." His brassy voice slowed, fetching out words with care: "The last acceleration, as you know, was not pre-calculated. Jensen was already dead (must have been heart) when his hand took us out of automatic, made another acceleration that damn near flattened us----"

"Still here though." Sears Oliphant chuckled and patted his middle. "We made it, didn't we, boy?" It sounded a little forced.

"In deceleration I had to allow for the big step Jensen never meant; more of the mass was used to correct a deflection. Same allowance must be made in returning, not to mention the biggest drain of all--getting out of gravity here, a problem not present at the spaceport. Oh, it's planned for--she's built to do it, even from a heavier planet than this. But after she's done it the margin for return will be--narrower than I care to think."

Dorothy, small and soft, leaned back in Paul's arms. Her even voice was for everyone in the control room: "Nevertheless we'll go down."

Spearman gazed across at her without apparent comprehension. He went on, deliberate, harassed: "Here's a thing I never told you. In that accidental acceleration the ship did not respond normally: the deflection happened then, and it may have been due to a defect in the building of _Argo_, a fault in the tail jets. At the time, it was all I could do to reach Jensen before I blacked out--I still don't know how I ever managed it. Later I tried to think there could be no defect. The forward jets took care of us nicely in deceleration. Until we start braking, we can't know. Indicators _say_ everything's all right down there. Instruments can lie. Lord, they've sweated out atomic motors since before 1960, almost a century now--and we're still kids playing with grown-up toys."

Sears smiled into plump hands. "So I must be sure to pack my microscope in one of the lifeboats--hey?"

"You're for landing, then."

Sears nodded. Ann Bryan thrust thin ivory fingers into her loose black hair. "_I_ couldn't take another eleven years." She attempted a smile. "Tell me, somebody--tell me there'll be music on Lucifer--a way to make new strings for my violin before I forget everything...."

Dorothy said, "Land." Gently, as one might say time for lunch. And she added: "We'll find strings, Nan."

"Land, of course," said Christopher Wright, preoccupied; his long finger tapped on the photograph; his lips went on moving silently, carrying through some private meditation. "Land. Give protoplasm a chance."

"Land," Paul Mason said. _Did anyone suppose the First Interstellar would just turn around and go home? We're here, aren't we...?_

Through hours when spoken words were few, inner words riotous, Lucifer turned an evening face. A morning descent might have been pleasanter in human terms, but the calculator, churning its mathematical brew, said the time was now.

Paul Mason squirmed into his pilot's seat. It was good, he thought, that they could at least meet the challenge of the unexplored with adequate bodies. Wright was dryly indestructible; Ed Spearman a gaunt monolith; the plumpness of Sears Oliphant had nothing flabby. The women were in the warm vigor of a youth that had never known illness. As for his own body, Paul felt for it now a twinge of amused admiration, as if he were seeing an animated statue by an artist better than himself: slender, tough, nothing too much, built for endurance and speed--it would serve. Spearman was already talking in the earphones: "Close lock. Retract shield." Paul responded from ingrained training. Beyond the window that would give him forward vision in the (impossible) event he had to fly the lifeboat, the heavens opened. Withdrawal of the shield into the belly of the mother ship _Argo_ was a dream motion within a wider dream. Dorothy and Wright were strapped in the two seats behind him: half of _Argo's_ human treasure was here. "Go over what you do if you have to drive off. Over."

"Lever for release. No action till wing-lock indicator is green. No jet unless to correct position. In atmosphere handle as glider, jet only in emergency. Over." After all, Paul considered, he had had a thousand hours of atmospheric flying, and two years' drill on these boats. Ed could worry less and save wind. Beautiful mechanisms in their own right, Model L-46, lying eleven years secret but alert in the streamlined blisters, powered by charlesite to avoid the ponderous shielding still necessary for atomic motors--and charlesite, perfected only thirty years ago in 2026, was obedient stuff. In space, the boats were small rocket ships; in atmosphere, gliders or low-speed jet planes. While _Argo_ had been in the long ordeal of building, Paul had been shot from gleaming tubes like this into the atmosphere of Earth, the blind depth at the spaceport, the desolate thin air of Mars. Spearman said, "Turning in five minutes."

In the port lifeboat Ann and Sears would be waiting, but that lock would be open, for Ed must be in the control room. If they had to abandon ship (ridiculous!) Ed's boat would be many moments behind.

The stars moved. "Paul--check straps. Over."

Paul glanced behind him. "All set. Over."

The forward jets spoke once, and softly. Spearman said, "Out of orbit. We start braking sooner than you think. Then we'll know...."

The depth of quiet was a depth of eternity. Time to reflect--to marvel, if you wished. One hundred and eleven years since Hiroshima, which the inveterate insanity of history textbooks sometimes referred to as a great experiment. Eighty-five years since the first-manned spaceport; seventy since the founding of stations on Luna and Mars. But to Paul Mason a greater marvel was the responding warmth of the woman, the brooding charity of the old man, whose lives were upheld with him in this silent nothing, dependent on the magic bundle of muscle and nerve that was himself. _What is love?_

The greater spaceport had been twelve years in building. Then _Argo_. More than a century from early rocket experiments to the mile-long factories turning out charlesite. In that century man had even added to his morsels of self-knowledge a trifle more than he possessed in the days of flint ax and reeking cave. "We are in atmosphere," said the earphones.... _Time: a cerebral invention? How long is a May fly's life to a May fly...?_ "Braking starts in forty-five seconds. Warn the others."

Paul shoved down the mouthpiece, echoing the message. Wright said, "Six pushed-around people. The arrogance of man! Doing fine, Paul."

Pressure--not too bad. A long roaring. But then the stars....

The stars went mad. A glare--a cruel second of the light of the star that was now the sun and a flicker of red-green, not real. The roaring paused. Stopped.

The earphones screamed: "Release! _Drive off!_"

"Releasing." The amused voice was Paul's own. "Good luck, Ed."

No answer. There was still such a thing as time. _Now, look: the Federation was a grand thing, potentially, if only, as Doc insists, it weren't for the damned cultural lag of the humanistic sciences, but there is unfortunately no TIME to turn around and see if that little brown cowlick is over her forehead the way it_----Meantime he said aloud, "Doc, Dorothy, get ready for a big one." And his hand pulled for release--nicely, as you might steer a road car for a turn. The pressure torment....

Finished. He looked at a friendly green eye. So the retractile wings were as good as eleven years ago--you hoped. Atmosphere--thin, said the gauge. Never mind, thicker soon. _And down you go_----

_Too steep. Level off, if there's stuff to bite on. There is.... Thank you, Machine Age Man, for a sweet boat. That thing gibbering in the autonomic and voluntary nervous systems--merely fear. Overlook it...._

The ship was alien, far away. Turning, bright and deliberate, like a mirror dropped in a well. The other lifeboat? But Ed would have to reach it, close lock, strap in, open shield, while the ship went....

"Down"--lately an artificiality, now the plainest word in the language. A gleaming disturbance in the air "down" yonder--something streaking away from the dot that was a dying ship? "Ed, can you hear me? Over."

"Yes," said the voice in the earphones.

Paul noticed himself weeping. "They made it! They made it!"

The voice said coldly, "Quiet. Your altitude? Over."

"Forty-six thousand. All under control. Over, jerk."

"I'm going to head for----_Ah!_ Can you see the ship?"

It was possible to find the silver dot of _Argo_ above an S-shaped expanse of blue. The blue, Paul understood, was not becoming larger, simply nearer. The dot changed to a white flower, which swelled and hung tranquilly over the blue, a brief memorial. The radio carried a groan, and then: "Better maybe. The lake may be shallow enough for salvage. If it'd hit ground there'd be nothing at all. Get nearer, Paul. Keep me in sight--not too damn' near."

Time.... Delicately Paul asked the boat for a steeper glide. The response was even. Was it? Some peevish sound. He flattened the glide a thousand feet above Ed's boat. The red-green below--anything real about it? Yes, if time was real, but one had to think that over....

Mild hills of dark red-green, in the--west? Yes, because now there was a birth of sunset beyond them. Lighter green below, alongside the lake: that would be meadow. Not one of the great lakes--no larger than Lake Champlain, its outlet in the south blurred by marsh; only a portion of its northwest shore adjoined the meadow--except in that region the lake was a blue S written on red-green dark of jungle. A winged brown thing slipped by, teasing the edge of vision. "Bird or something...."

In the earphones was a dazed note, like shame. "Power was out of control, Paul--port motor. Had to be a defect in the building--something that couldn't take the strain of what happened eleven years ago. All the way--God!--and then to be loused up by a builder's error!" To Spearman, Paul knew, a mechanical defect was the gravest of indecencies, beyond any forgiveness.

True sunset here. A world. And you don't climb out of gravity on charlesite. Paul said, "Doc--parallel lines--I think."

But the speed of the glide allowed no certainty, only a glimpse of three dark bars, perhaps half a mile long in the jungle area northwest of the meadow, and a hint of other groups further north. They _should_ be there, according to a map Spearman had made in orbit from the final photographs. And some fifty miles south of here was a great network of them thirty miles long. The glide brought them out over meadow once more.

A thing was riding with them. A grumbling moan. Paul told himself: _With Model L-46 it cannot happen--it cannot--Dorothy--Doc_----

Dorothy cried, "Specks--in the open ground. Moving, hundreds of 'em. Oh, look! _Smoke_, Paul--campfires. How high are we?"

"Under seven thousand. Check your compass by the sunset, Doc. See if we have a magnetic north."

"We do...."

Spearman's far-off voice said, "Life all right. I can't make out----"

Paul cut in with hurried precision: "Ed--vibration, port wing, bad. I'm going to make one more circle over the woods if I can and try for the north end of this meadow."

A startled croak: "I'll jet off--give you room." Paul saw the squirt of green flame. Ed's boat darted westward like a squeezed apple seed. Paul dipped and leveled off as much as he dared. "We're--all right."

He lived with it a timeless time. Knowing it would happen. They were circling over jungle, pointed into sunset. The jet would only make matters worse--rip the heart out. Soon the meadow would come around again....

But the moment was now. An end of the moaning vibration. A lurch. Paul's hand leaped stupidly for the charlesite ignition and checked itself.

Calm, but for the reeling of sunset. _I must tell Dorothy not to fight the straps: L-46 is solid--is solid----_

Then the smash, the tearing and grinding. Somehow no death. Sky in the window changed to a gloom of purple and green. No death. Elastic branches? Metal whimpered and shrieked. _Is that us?_ They built them solid....

There was settling into silence. The pressure on Paul's cheek, he knew, was the wonderfully living pressure of Dorothy's hand, because it moved, it pinched his ear, it groped for his mouth. A hiss. Through the wrenched seams the old air of Earth yielded to the stronger weight of Lucifer's. The starboard wing parted with a squeal like amusement, letting the boat's body rest evenly on the ground, and Christopher Wright said, "Amen."

2

The Earphones Were Squawking: "Speak Up! Can you hear me? Can you----"

"Not hurt. Seams open, and there goes Sears' thirty-six-hour test for air-borne bacteria. Down and safe, Ed."

"Listen." In relief, Ed Spearman was heavily didactic again. "You are three quarters of a mile inside the jungle. I will land near the woods. It will be dark in about an hour. Wait there until we----"

"One minute," Paul said in sudden exhaustion. "We can find you, easier. Sears' test is important. We're already exposed to the air, but----"

"What? Can't hear--damn it----" The voice dimmed and crackled.

"Stay sealed up!" Nothing. "Can you hear?" Nothing. "Oh, well, good," said Paul, discarding the headset, adding foolishly: "I'm tired."

Dorothy unfastened his straps; her kiss was warm and quick.

"Radio kaput, huh?" Wright flexed lean cautious legs. "Pity. I did want to tell Sears one I just remembered after eleven years, about poor lackadaisical Lou, who painted her torso bright blue, not for love, not for money, not because it looked funny, but simply for something to do."

"You're not hurt, Doc," Dorothy said. "Not where it counts."

"Can't kill an anthropologist. Ask my student Paul Mason. Leather hides, pickled in a solution ten parts curiosity to one of statistics. Doctors are mighty viable too. Ask my student Dorothy Leeds."

Paul's forehead was wet. "Dark in an hour, he reminded me."

"How close are we to the nearest of those parallel lines?"

"Three or four miles, Doc, at a loose guess."

"Remember that great mess of 'em fifty or sixty miles south of here? Shows on Ed's map. We must be--mm--seventy miles from the smallest of the two oceans--oh, let's call it the Atlantic, huh? And the other one the East Atlantic? Anyway the ocean's beyond that range of hills we saw on the way down."

"I saw campfires in the meadow," Dorothy said. "Things running."

"I thought so too.... Paul, I wonder if Sears can do any testing of the air from the lifeboat? Some of the equipment couldn't be transferred from _Argo_. And--how could they communicate with us? They'll have to breathe it soon in any case."

Paul checked a shuddering yawn. "I must have been thinking in terms of _Argo_, which is--history.... You know, I believe the artificial gravity was stronger than we thought? I feel light, not heavy."

"High oxygen?" Dorothy suggested. "Hot, too."

"Eighty-plus. Crash suits can't do us any more good." They struggled out of them in the cramped space, down to faded jackets and shorts.

Wright brooded on it, pinching his throat. "Only advantage in the others' staying sealed up a while is that if we get sick, they'll get sick a bit later. Could be some advantage. Paul--think we should try to reach them this evening?"

"Three quarters of a mile, dark coming on--no. But so far as I'm concerned, Doc, you're boss of this expedition. In the ship, Ed had to be--matter of engineering knowledge. No longer applies. I wanted to say that."

Wright turned away. "Dorothy?"

She said warmly, "Yes. You."

"I--oh, my dear, I don't know that it's--best." Fretfully he added: "Shouldn't need a leader. Only six of us--agreement----"

Dorothy held her voice to lightness: "I can even disagree with myself. Sears will want you to take over. Ann too, probably."

His gray head sank in his hands. "As for that," he said, "inside of me I'm apt to be a committee of fifteen." Paul thought: _But he's not old! Fifty-two. When did he turn gray, and we never noticing it...?_ "For now," Wright said, "let's not be official about it, huh? What if my dreams for Lucifer are--not shared?"

"Dreams are never quite shared," Dorothy said. "I want you to lead us."

Wright whispered with difficulty, "I will try."

Dorothy continued: "Ed may want things black and white. Not Ann, I think--she hates discussions, being obliged to make up her mind. You're elected, soldier.... Can you open the door, Paul?"

It jammed in the spoiled frame after opening enough for a tight exit. Wright stared into evening. "Not the leader kind. Academic." His white hands moved in doubtful protest. "Hate snap decisions--we'll be forced to make a lot of them."

Paul said, "They're best made by one who hates making them."

The lean face became gentle. "Taught you that myself, didn't I, son...? Well--inventory. What've we got, right here?"

"Thirty days' rations for three, packed eleven years ago. Two automatic rifles, one shotgun, three automatic pistols, three hundred rounds for each weapon. Should have transferred more from the ship, but--we didn't. Three four-inch hunting knives, very good----"

"They at least won't give out. With care."

"Right. Two sealed cases of garden seeds--anybody's guess about them. Six sets of overalls, shorts, and jackets. Three pairs of shoes apiece--the Federation allowed that you and Ann might grow a little, Dot--plasta soles and uppers, should last several years. Carpentry tools. Ed's boat has the garden tools instead. Sears did pack his microscope, didn't he?"

"Oh my, yes," said Dorothy, in affectionate mimicry of the fat man's turn of speech.

"Each crash suit has first-aid kit, radion flashlight (good for two years maybe), compass, field glasses, plus whatever else we had sense enough to stuff in. Set of technical manuals, mostly useless without the ship, but I think there's one on woodcraft, primitive tools and weapons--survival stuff----"

"Oh, the books!" Wright clutched his hair, groaning. "The books----"

"Just that woodcraft----"

"No, no, no--the books on _Argo_! Everything--the library--I've only just understood that it's gone. The whole flowering of human thought--man's best, uncorrupted--_Odyssey_--Ann's music, the art volumes you selected, Paul, and your own sketches and paintings----"

"No loss there----"

"Don't talk like a damn fool! Shakespeare--_Divina commedia_----"

Dorothy twisted in the narrowness to put both arms around him. "Doc--quiet, dear--please----"

"I can remember pages of _Huck Finn_--_a few pages_!"

Dorothy was wiping his face with a loose comer of her jacket. "Doc--subside! Please now--make it stop hurting inside yourself. Oh, quiet...."

After a time he said lifelessly, "Go on with the inventory, Paul."

"Well--there's a duplicate of that map Ed made yesterday from orbit photographs of this area, about a hundred miles square. We're near the eastern edge of that square. There's the other map he made of the whole globe. We didn't duplicate that one. I guess that's about it."

"Knives," Wright muttered. "Knives and a few tools."

"The firearms may make a difference while they last."

"Yes, perhaps. But thirty years from now----"

"Thirty years from now," said Dorothy, still sheltering his head, "thirty years from now our children will be grown."

"Oh." Wright groped for her fingers. "You almost wanted it like this, didn't you? I mean, to land and not return?"

"I don't know, Doc. Maybe. I'm not sure I ever quite believed in the possibility of return. State Orphanage children like Ann and me, growing up in a tiny world within a big one, we weren't quite human ever, were we? Not that the big world didn't seep in plenty." She smiled off at private shadows of memory. "We did learn things not in the directors' curriculum. When they started grooming Ann and me for this--Youth Volunteers! Stuffing our little heads with the best they had--oh, it was fun too. By that time I think I had a fair idea of the big world. The Orphanage was pleasant, you know--clean, humanitarian, good teachers, all of them kind and more than a bit hurried. They did try so hard never to let me hear the word 'nigger'! Ignorance is poor insulating material, don't you think? And why, Doc, after all that's been known and thought and argued for the last hundred years, couldn't they select at least one Oriental for our little trip? Wouldn't have had to come from Jenga's empire--our own states in the Federation had plenty of 'em--scholars, technicians, anything you care to name."

Wright had calmed. He said, "I argued for it and got told. They even said that the spaceport rights and privileges recently given to Jenga's empire would allow the Asiatics to build their own ship--tacitly implying that humanity should stay in two camps world without end. Ach! You can shove the political mind just so far, then it stalls in its own dirt Even Jensen wasn't able to budge them."

"It's history," said Dorothy, and Paul wondered: _How does she do it? Speaking hands and voice, enough to shove away the black sorrow even before it fairly had hold of him--and she'd try to do it for anyone, loved or not. She was the first (and only one) who said to me there are some things more important than love-and she herself would be bothered to explain that in words._ "Well," Dorothy reflected, "I believe the Orphanage slapped too much destiny of Man on the backs of our little necks--they're just necks. Paul, why don't you sleep awhile? You too, Doc. Let me keep watch. I'll wake you both if anything stirs out there. Doze off, boys."

Paul tried to, his mind restless in weary flesh. No permissible margin of error, said the twenty-first century. But _Argo_ lay at the bottom of a lake because of an error. Not an error like the gross errors twenty-first century man still made in dealing with his own kind and still noisily disregarded, but an engineering error--something twenty-first-century man viewed with a horror once reserved, in not so ancient times, for moral evil. The cardinal sin was to drop a decimal. If, like Wright, or Paul himself, you were concerned with the agony and growing pains of human nature, disturbed by the paralytic sterility of state socialism and the worse paralysis of open tyranny, you kept your mouth shut--or even yielded, almost unknowingly, to the pressures that reduced ethical realities to a piddling checker game perverting the uses of semantics. They said, "There won't be any war. If there is, look what we've got!" If you were like the majority of Earth's three billion, you hoped to get by with as much as the traffic would bear and never stuck your neck out. They celebrated the turn of the third millennium with a jolly new song: "Snuggle up, Baby--Uncle pays the bill...." But for all that, you mustn't use the wrong bolt.

Unreasonably quiet here. A jungle evening on Earth would have been riotous with bird and insect noises.... He slept.

It was dark when Wright's finger prodded him. "A visitor."

The darkness was rose-tinged, not with sunset. There were two moons, Paul remembered, one white and large and far away, one red and near. Should the red moon be shining now? He gazed through the half-open doorway, wondering why he was not afraid, seeing something pale and vast, washed in--yes, surely in reddish moon-light. A thing swaying on the pillars of its legs, perhaps listening, tasting the air for strangeness. And scattered through the night, sapphires on black velvet, were tiny dots of blue, moving, vanishing, reappearing. "Blue fireflies," Dorothy whispered, "blue fireflies, that's all they are." He felt her controlled breathing, forced down a foolish laugh. _We could have done without a white elephant._

Nine or ten feet tall at the shoulder, a tapir-like snout, black tusks bending more nearly downward than an elephant's, from milk-white flesh. The ears were mobile, waving to study the night. There was an oval hump near the base of the neck. The beast had been facing them; it turned to pull down a branch, munch the leaves, casually drop the stalk. In silence it drifted away, pausing to meditate, grumbling juicily, but with no alarm.

Wright whispered, "The planet Lucifer did not ask for us."

"Paul--I stepped out for a minute, while you were both asleep. Firm ground. A smell--flowers, I think--made me remember frangipani."

"I'll try it."

"Oh, but not with that thing----"

"He didn't seem to mind us. I'll stay near the door." He knew Dorothy would come with him. Feeling earth under legs that had nearly forgotten it, he turned to help her down; her dark eyes played diamond games with the moon-light.

It could have been a night anywhere in the Galaxy, up there beyond torn branches, stars, and red moon in a vagueness of cloud. Blue fireflies....

But there was a child wailing somewhere. Far-off and weak, a dim rise and fall of sound, grief and remoteness. A waterfall? Wind in upper branches? But they were still, and the sound carried the timbre of animal life. Dorothy murmured, "It's been crying that way ever since moon-rise." She came closely into his arms.

"I can read one thing inside of you--you're not scared."

"I'm not, Paul?"

"No."

"But don't ever leave me--Adam."

3

This was dawn: vision out of the dark: ripples of music coalescent in one forest voice moving toward a crescendo of daytime.

Paul watched a spreading of color in the leaves, a shift from black to gray to a loveliness more green than red; the trees were massively old, with varied bark of green or purple-brown. Phantoms in the more distant shadows could be understood now that light was advancing: they were thick trees with a white bark like that of the never-forgotten birches of New Hampshire. Underfoot Paul felt a humus that might have been a thousand years in growing; he prodded it with his knife--a white worm curled in mimic death.

Everywhere purple-leaved vines, vastly proliferating, climbed in a riot of greed for the sunlight of the forest ceiling. Paul sensed a mute cruelty in them, a shoving lust of growth. It might have been these, elastically yielding, that had saved the lifeboat from total ruin.

Overnight the gravity of Lucifer had become natural. His close-knit body accepted and relished it, finding a new pleasure in strength: thirty-seven years old and very young.

One tiny voice was near, persistent. Paul walked around the boat, where Dorothy and Wright still slept. The starboard wing, parting from the lifeboat, had gashed a tree trunk, littering the ground with branches. The source of the voice was a brown lump, twenty feet up, clinging head downward, a body small as a sparrow's, wings folded like a bat's. As he watched they spread, quivered, and relaxed. Head and ears were mousy, the neck long, with a hump at its base. The throat pulsed at each cry. Near Paul's foot lay a fabric like an oriole's nest, fastened to a twig that had been torn from the tree. Three young had tumbled out. One was not mangled but all were dead, hairless, poignantly ugly. "Sorry, baby--our first act on Lucifer." The parent creature made another abortive motion as Paul took up the young.

Its high lament was not what he and Dorothy had heard in the night. That had been continuing when he slipped out to watch for dawn, and it had ended at some unnoticed moment--profoundly different, surely far off....

He tried to study the dead things as Sears Oliphant would want to do. Two were hopelessly torn; he dug a hole in the humus and dropped those in, smoothing the surface, wondering at his need for an act which could mean nothing to the unhappy morsel of perception on the tree trunk. The third, and the nest, he carried around the boat where the light was better.

All seven digits of the forelimb spread into a membranous wing; the hind leg divided at the ankle, three toes anchoring the wing, the other four fused into a slim foot which had suction pads. He cradled the bit of mortality in his palm, recalling a thing Wright had said when they entered the lifeboat. Captain Jensen, waiting for take-off at the spaceport, trying, as he drank sherry with Christopher Wright, to look at the venture under the aspect of eternity, had said he liked the philosophical implications of _Argo's_ converter, into which his own body was strangely soon to pass. What was Wright's comment eleven years later? "All life is cannibalism, benign or not: we are still eating the dinosaurs." There had been more, which Paul could not remember. So, man drove eleven years through space and killed three babies. _But there was no element of malevolence_....

Perhaps there was none in most of man's actions over the millennia.

Wright crawled out, stiff-limbed and unrested.

"'Morning, Doc. Let me introduce _Enigma Luciferensis_."

"'Luciferensis' won't do." Wright peered down. "Everything is 'Luciferensis,' including the posterity Dot mentioned. Well now, what----"

"A nestling. Our crash broke the nest and killed the young."

Wright fingered the fabric. "Beautiful. Leaves gummed together with some secretion." With a doctor's intentness he added: "How d'you feel?"

"Good."

A shadow circled Paul, settled on his arm, hobbling toward his palm and what it held. He felt the suction cups; with a careful mouth the creature took up its dead and flew away. "I've been remembering something you said: life eating life--without too much concern for the second law of thermodynamics. Forgive us our trespasses.... Good morning, lady."

"What did I miss?" Dorothy had glimpsed the departure.

"Lucifer's idea of a bat. I think that big flying thing I saw from the lifeboat was shaped like this midget. Haven't seen any birds."

Dorothy hugged his arm. "Not even one measly robin?"

"Sorry, Whifflepuff--fresh out of robins."

Wright blinked at his compass. "Meadow that way." Paul was inattentive, needing the warm quiet of the woman beside him. Wright added: "First, breakfast." He broke the seal of a ration package and snarled. "Thirty days, I b'lieve you said. Antique garbage--dehydrated hay."

Dorothy said, "You're nicest when you're mad, Doc. We'll soon have to try the local stuff, I suppose."

"Uh-huh. But no guinea-pig work for you or Ann."

She was startled. "Why not? I can digest boilerplate."

"Two women on Lucifer: valuable livestock." Wright smiled with his mouth full. "I'm boss, remember? For guinea-pig work, the men draw lots."

She was grave. "I won't argue. It so happens----" She peeked into the nest. "Poor little fuzzies lined it with fur. Their own, I'll bet."

"It so happens what, dear?"

"Ah.... This eleven-year-old gookum claims to be coffee. Can we make a fire? Looks like dead wood over there."

The branches burned aromatically; the morning was growing into deep warmth, but still with freshness. Wright said, "Coffee my shirt."

Dorothy tasted it. "Brr...! I was about to say when I interrupted myself, it so happens I'm six or seven weeks pregnant, I think."

"Six----" Wright set his aluminum cup carefully upside down. Paul mumbled, "That's what's been on your mind."

Behind her eyes he glimpsed the primitive thing, deeper than thought, not like a part of her but a force that sustained her, himself, all others: the three billion of Earth, the small grieving spirit now flown away into the trees. "Yes, Adam. I would have told you sooner, but we all had a lot on our minds."

"Even before we got in orbit, you saw us settling--staying----"

Dorothy grinned then. "No-o, Paul. I just wanted the baby. Could have been born on the ship. The Federation said no, but...."

Gradually Paul began to realize it. "But you said yes."

She leaned to him, no longer smiling. "I said yes...."

The forest floor hushed footsteps; some coolness lingered. Paul walked in front, then Dorothy, and Wright marked blazes on the tree trunks. Paul glanced backward often, to capture the receding patterns. At the third such pause the lifeboat was no longer visible--only a sameness of trees and sparse young life groping through shadow for the food of the sun. In this depth of forest there was no brush; the going was easy except for the nuisance of purple vines that sometimes looped from tree to tree. Paul searched for any change of light ahead.

The boat held all but what they wore, the two rifles, the three pistols holstered at their hips, the three knives, three sealed ration packages. Damage had prevented locking the door of the boat: to rob, an inhabitant of Lucifer would need only intelligence enough to solve the sliding mechanism. They had seen no life but that huge nocturnal leaf eater, the small fliers, a white worm, and now a few timid ten-legged scuttlers on the warm ground and midge-like specks dancing in shafts of sunlight. Too quietly, Wright said, "Stop."

Paul raised his rifle as he turned. Only untroubled forest. Wright's warning hand lowered. "Almost saw it. Heard nothing, just felt a--watching. Might be in my head. Let's go on. And don't hurry."

It would have been possible to hurry, even with an eye on the compass. It would have been possible, Paul thought, to run in panic, fall whimpering and waiting. But you wouldn't do it....

No shape in this dim region could be right or wrong; the trees themselves were no sweetly familiar beech or pine. They halted at sight of a new sprawling type of vine, uprooted where a break in the forest ceiling admitted more sunshine. The earth displayed hoof-prints like a pig's. Some scattered tuberous roots were marked by teeth; Dorothy sniffed one. "Spud with garlic for a papa." Paul pocketed a sample. She said, "Not that Lucifer cares, Doc, but what time is it?"

"My watch says we've been walking fifteen minutes. Take it slow." Wright presently added: "I've had another glimpse. Not a good one. Furry, gray and white--white face, splashes of white on a gray body seven or eight feet tall. Human shape. We may be all right if we don't bother him."

"Or blunder into territory where he doesn't want us."

"There is that, Paul."

"Human shape," said Dorothy evenly. "How human?"

"Very. Upright. Good-sized head.... Ah--hear that?" It was Ann's voice, calling, from someplace where there should be sunlight. "Don't answer just yet--no sudden noises."

Close to Paul, Dorothy whispered, "The baby--I don't want to tell the others quite yet."

That made it real--so real that in spite of a patch of beckoning blue Paul had to turn to her.

Behind Wright, he saw it, among the pillars of the trees, retreating in fluid slowness till it was only a black ear, part of a white-furred cheek, an iridescent green eye showing, like a cat's, no white. But the blue was also real....

The edge of the forest was a mass of young growth fighting for the gold coin of sunlight. "Shield your faces"--Wright was panting--"could be poisonous leaves." They broke through to a red-green field, the slim silver of the undamaged boat, the certainty of friends, an expanse of lake no longer blue but sickly white. The boat's nose was thrust under an overhang of branches. Ann Bryan was unsteady and wan, but there was welcome in her gray eyes for Dorothy, who joined her at once and whispered with her. Sears' fat affectionate face carried a determined smile. Ed Spearman came forward, alert and commanding. Wright asked, "How long have you been out in the air?"

"An hour." Ed was impatient. "Sealed overnight. Nothing in the boat for a test of the air, no point in waiting. You----"

"Okay." Wright watched brown wings over the lake. "What are those?"

"Birds or some damn thing. The white on the lake is dead fish. I suppose the ship blew under water or the impact killed them. Our Geiger says the water isn't radioactive. We haven't gone into the meadow--been waiting for you."

In the south the meadow reached the horizon--twenty miles of it, Paul remembered from the air view, before jungle again took over. Near by, threads of smoke were rising straight from the grass. "Abandoned fires? We scared off----"

"Maybe," Spearman said. "Seen no life except those birds."

"Bat wings," Sears Oliphant remarked. "Mammalian, I think--oh my, yes. Can't have furry birds, you know, with a taxonomist in the family, hey?"

Spearman shrugged. "Must get organized. How much damage, Paul?"

"The boat itself. Both wings off, radio dead. Couldn't lock the door...." It was like an Earth landscape. Tall grass carried oatlike ruddy seed clusters on green stems. The lake was bordered by white sand except close by, where jungle reached into water. There was casual buzzing traffic above the grass, reminiscent of bees, wasps, flies. Far up, something drifted on motionless wings, circling. And ten or fifteen miles to the west there was the calm of hills--rounded, old, more green than blue in a sleepy haze, but to paint them, Paul thought, you would shade off into the purple. Paul went on, absently: "We'll have the charlesite of the wrecked boat of course. That gives this one a theoretical twenty hours of jet. We have ammunition for long enough to learn how to use bow and arrow, I think."

Ann muttered, "Paul, don't----"

"What?" Spearman was disgusted. "Oh, you could be right at that, Paul. Hard to realize.... Well, we must make some kind of camp."

Wright began: "Some knowledge of the life around us----"

"Oh my, yes----"

"We'll have to make a camp before we can do any exploring, Doc. Here, out in the open. See anything in the woods?"

"Something followed. More or less human----"

"So we know the camp has to be in the open."

"Do we, Ed?" Wright watched the distant bat wings. Spearman stared. "Can't chance a forest we don't know."

"Still, I mean to look things over a bit. Feel not so good, Ann?"

"All right," she said, glancing from Wright to Spearman, silently begging to know: _Who is leader?_ "Slightly slap-happy, Doc."

"Mm, sure." Wright hitched his rifle. "Going to look at that nearest smoke. You come, Paul--or you, Ed. One of you should stay here."

Spearman leaned against the lifeboat, still-faced. "Paul can go if he wants to. I think it's a risk and a waste of time."

Paul watched him a moment, frightened not by a man whom he had never quite been able to like, but by the withdrawal itself, the sense of a barrier to communication. _We start with a division on this first morning of the world...?_ Paul hugged his own rifle and followed Wright into the long whisper of the grass.

4

Moist heat pressed down, but the air of the meadow was sweet. There were marks of trampling as well as the swath the boat had cut--trails, places where something might have crouched. Under his breath Wright asked, "Feel all right, Paul?"

Truth was more needed than a show of courage. "Not perfect, Doc. Am I flushed? You are, a little."

"Yes. Trace of fever; may wear off. Here's something----"

They had not come far. Two red bodies barely three feet tall sprawled near each other face down in the grass. Paul noticed oval bulges between shoulder blades modified to accommodate them, the pathos of fingers--seven-fingered hands--holding earth in a final grasp. The male wore a loincloth of black fabric and a quiver almost full of arrows; the female had a grass skirt, and her hand was tight on a stone-headed spear longer than herself. A bow of carved wood lay some distance away; one could see how the little man had crawled in his agony after the bow was lost. Wright turned them over gently--bald skulls, no trace of body hair on skin of a rich copper color exciting to a painter's vision, green eyes with no visible whites in human faces heavily tattooed, wide-open eyes, accusing no one. The bodies were in rigor, a shaft in the man's neck, the woman pierced by an arrow in the side. Blood colored the grass, dry but eloquent.

"War too," said Wright, and pulled out the arrows, showing Paul the stone heads, the intricate carving of the wood, thin-whittled wooden vanes taking the place of feathers. "Stone Age war...."

The male pygmy was the smaller of the two, and softer, his shape not feminine but rounded and smooth. Both seemed mature, so far as age could be guessed at all. The woman was rugged, with a coarser skin and the scar tissue of old wounds; her two pairs of breasts were scarcely more prominent than the ridged muscles of her midget chest.

Wright mulled it over, kneading his wrinkled throat. "Physical refinements of evolution as far along as our own. Straight thigh and neck, perfect upright posture; there was no slouch or belly sag when they were on their feet. Human jaw, big brain case. That furry giant I saw in the woods had complete upright posture too. Oh, it's natural, Paul. You stick fins on an ocean vertebrate, turn him into a four-legged land animal, give him a few hundred million years. Almost bound to free his front limbs if they've stayed unspecialized." In the gaunt face, sadness and pity struggled with a bitter sort of mirth. "The brain gets large, boy, and away you go, to--ach--to the Federation versus the Asian Empire--Lincoln, Rembrandt, the state papers of Abraham Brown. And to you and Dorothy and the baby." Wright stood erect, brushing bony knees, calm again. "I'm almost pleased to find it this primitive. I don't think it can have gone further anywhere on the planet, or we'd have seen cities, farms, roads, in the photographs. Unless----"

"Unless what, Doctor?"

"Oh--unless there might be forms with no Earth parallel. In the forests perhaps--even underground. Thought of that? But that's speculations, and our little soldiers here are fact. They have a civilization--arrows say so, tattooing, garments. Rigid, tradition-bound--or maybe not, depending on how much language they've developed to tie 'emselves in knots with."

"Bow and arrow--why, suh, almost as advanced as not being afraid to end a sentence with a preposition."

"Hell with you. Twenty thousand years ago, or whenever it was we reached our present physique, if there'd been anything external to teach men how to behave like grown-ups----. Well, we had to sweat it out--tribal wars, bigger wars, venerated fears, errors, and stupidities. But maybe here----"

"Are _we_ big enough?"

Wright shut his eyes. His thin cheeks were too bright; there was a tremor in the rifle tip. "Wish I knew, Paul. We have to try."

Ed Spearman yelled, "Look out!" A rifle banged, and a pistol.

A brown darkness had come swooping from the lake. Others followed--mud-brown, squealing. They had banked at the noise of the shots to circle overhead. Paul fired; a near one tumbled, screeching, thrashing a narrow wolfish head on a long neck, black teeth snapping in the death throes--but even now it was trying to hobble forward and get at them. The others wheeled lower until Wright's rifle spoke, and Spearman's; there was the dry slap of Dorothy's automatic pistol. "Back to the trees!" The wounded thing on the ground set up a bubbling howl.

More were coming, with weaving of pointed red-eyed heads on mobile necks. Paul ran, Wright loping beside him, hearing the crash of their friends' weapons. Something slammed Paul's shoulder, flopped against his leg, tripping him. He tumbled over a shape furry and violent that smelled of fish and carrion. He fought clear of it, sobbing in animal wrath, and reached the shelter of the trees and Dorothy's embrace. Sweat blinded him. Wright was clutching him too, getting his jacket off.

"Flesh wound. The hind foot got you----"

"I saw it." Ann Bryan choked. "Saw it happen. Filthy claws----"

Wright had a bottle of antiseptic. "Son, you ain't going to like this. Hang on to the lady." But the pain was a welcome flare. Paul's eyes cleared as Wright made him a bandage of gauze, with Dorothy's help. He could look from the shelter of overhanging branches at a confusion of wings. The creatures had not followed as far as the lifeboat; perhaps its shining mass disturbed them.

Spearman groaned: "You _would_ go out."

Wright snapped at him. "Camp in the open--some disadvantages----"

"Granted. But you sure learned it the hard way." "Eating"--Ann pointed, nauseated--"their own wounded--"

Wright stepped between her and the loud orgy in the meadow. "Wing spread, fifteen feet. Well--sky's bad, woods maybe. What do you suggest?"

"Clear underbrush," Spearman said, "so we can see into the woods. Pile it just beyond this overhang of branches for a barrier, leave a space so we can reach the lifeboat. We can get to the lake for water without going much in the open."

"Good," said Wright. A peace offering. Spearman smiled neutrally.

"If the water's safe," said Sears Oliphant.

Wright grinned at the fat man. "Pal, it better be."

"Miracles?" Sears' shoulders shot up amiably. "We can hope it is, with boiling. Gotta have it. Canteens won't last the day, in this heat."

Paul helped Ed unpack tools from the lifeboat. "One sickle," Spearman noted. "No scythe. Garden gadgets. Pruning shears. One ax, one damned hatchet. No scythe, no scythe----. There were two or three on the ship."

"Maybe the lake's not so deep."

"Maybe we'll play hell trying to find out too. Those things weren't much scared by the shooting...."

Hot, tedious work created a circle of clear shaded ground which must be called home. A fire was boiling lake water in the few aluminum vessels. It had a fishy, mud-bottom taste and could not be cooled, but it eased thirst. Paul had glimpsed Ann in the lifeboat, opening her violin case, closing it, sick-faced. He had marveled again at the mystery of a Federation governing two-thirds of a world, which had genially allowed a 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 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 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 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.

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. "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. 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 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 us raw meat this morning before he went to sleep, something like a deer haunch. The fire bothers him--he evidently didn't go near it last night after the others collapsed."

"Ed tried to show him about fire," Dorothy said. "I remember. Mijok was scared, and Sears told Ed to let it wait."

"Meat was good too." Wright smirked. "We got the fire going, and Mijok did try some cooked and liked it. You and Dorothy can have some tomorrow if I don't turn purple."

"Not guinea-pig," said Dorothy. "Just pig."

"Hungry?" Wright tossed Paul a ration package.

"Gah!" But he opened it. "Learned any more of Mijok's words?"

"No. He won't have many. Nouns, simple descriptives. Must have some continuing association with his own breed, or he'd have no words at all. A hunter--with only nature's weapons, I think. That haunch was torn, not cut--some hoofed animal smaller than a pony, fresh-killed and well bled. He must have got it while Dorothy slept. It may have strayed into the camp during the night. I think Mijok lives in the woods, maybe not even a shelter or a permanent mate. Anthropology IA." said Wright, and bowed in mimic apology to the sleeping giant. "Those pygmies will be something else again--Neolithic. Wish I understood that bulge between the shoulder blades. All the creatures we've seen have it--even that damn black reptile, I believe, though things were too mixed up to be sure."

Mijok woke--all at once, like a cat. He stretched, extending his arms twelve feet from wrist to wrist. He smiled down at Paul. He studied the helpless ones, peering longest at Ann Bryan; the black-haired girl was breathing harshly, fidgeting. Now and then her eyes flickered open and perhaps they saw. Softly as smoke Mijok stepped into the shadow of the trees and listened. Wright remarked, "Speaking of that reptile, we should set up a monument to it. Nothing luckier could have happened than that chance to lend Mijok a hand." His gray eyes fixed on Paul, lids lowered in a speculative smile. "I'm not the only one who remembers, Paul, that you were the first to go to his help. He hasn't forgotten.... Dot, you're sure Ed understood that we have a friend there?"

"He seemed to, Doc. I watched them. They got along--practically buddies."

Paul saw the bandage was still on Mijok's arm, earth-stained and with fragments of gray moss, but not disarranged; the bandage on his own shoulder had been removed. The flying beast's attack had left only a heavy scratch, which looked clean; there was no pain, only an itching. The meadow was empty of brown wings. The dead fish were gone from the lake. Perhaps other scavengers had been busy in the thirteen-hour night. The water was an innocent blue, a luminous stillness under the sun.

Mijok stole out into the grass, gazing westward along the line where meadow met jungle. Returning, he squatted by Wright and muttered, "_Migan_." He spread a hand three feet above the ground; two fingers drooped and indicated the motion of walking legs. Paul suggested: "Pygmies?"

"Could be." Mijok stared eloquently at Wright's rifle then crouched at the barrier of branches, complaining in his throat. Taking up his own rifle, Paul joined him. Dorothy hurried to the lifeboat and came back with field glasses for him and Wright and herself. In spite of the great planet's heavy pull, her body moved with even more light easiness than it had shown in the unreal years of _Argo_. With the glasses, vague motion a quarter mile away in the meadow leaped shockingly into precision.

The pygmies were not approaching but heading out from the edge of the forest, a group of nine, barely taller than the grass, bald red heads and shoulders in single file. The rearmost had a burden: seven others carried bows, with quivers on the right hip. "Left-handed," Paul observed aloud. The leader was the tallest--a woman, with a long spear. All were sending anxious glances at the sky and toward the human shelter; their motions suggested a fear so deep it must be pain, yet something drew them out there in spite of it. The pygmy with the burden, a rolled-up hide, was also a woman. The leader was bald as the others, slender, muscular, her head round, with prominent forehead and thin nose, tattooed cheeks. The bowmen had only simple loincloths, and belts for their arrow quivers. The women's knee-length grass skirts were like the Melanesian, but the leader's was dyed a brilliant blue. Her two little pairs of breasts were youthfully firm and pointed. Dorothy murmured, "American civilization would have gone mad about those people."

"What a girl!" Wright sighed. "I mean Dorothy--the Dope."

"Even a dope can be jealous. Do you s'pose Mrs. Mijok has--Oh! Oh, poor darling! Not funny after all, gentlemen----"

The pygmy leader had turned full face, as the nine paused at trampled grass. She wore a necklace of shell. These had no glitter, but their yellow and blue made handsome splashes against the red of her skin. Reason told Paul that she could see at most only dazzling spots where sunlight might be touching the glasses he had thrust through wilted leaves. It made no difference: she was staring directly into him, making her grief a part of his life. A still-faced grief, too profound for any tears, if she knew of tears. The green cat eyes lowered; she stabbed her spear into the ground and lifted her arms, a giving, yielding motion. Her lips moved--in prayer, surely, since all but one of the men were bowed, performing ritual gestures toward whatever lay on the ground. The one who did not bow never ceased to watch the sky. The prayer was brief. The woman's left hand dropped meaningly, the hide was unrolled, and its bearer raised what the grass had hidden--no more than a skull and a few bones, a broken spear, a muddy scrap that might have been a grass skirt. The hide was folded gently over these; the group went on.

"Dorothy--those things you saw running when we were circling down--I missed 'em," Wright said. "Poor eyesight, and seems to me the air was still misty from _Argo's_ crash in the lake. They were going south, away from here? And they could have been--people like these?"

"Yes. Hundreds or thousands of them. I suppose the crash of _Argo_ must have seemed like the heavens falling. The lifeboats too."

"I think we interrupted a war."

"These would be survivors? Live in this part of the jungle maybe? Looking for what's left after those--those flying beasts--"

"It makes sense," Wright said. "They're more afraid of the sky than of our setup over here. Maybe we're gods who came down to help them. If we did help them. Look: they've found another.... Yes, now the prayer.... Wish Mijok wasn't so afraid of them. Inevitable. To them I suppose he's an ugly wild animal. Different species, similar enough to be shocked at the similarity. 'Tain't good."

"Do we try for a foot in both camps?"

"Paul, I think I'll take a rain check on answering that.... Ach--if I could go out there now--communicate--"

"No!" Dorothy gasped. "Not while the others are still sick."

"You're right of course." Wright fretted at his beard stubble. "I get sillier all the time. As Ed would tell me if he were up and around. It's the high oxygen...."

There were brown splashes in the sky. The pygmies saw the peril first and darted for the woods--an orderly flight however--the woman with the hide in front, the blue-skirted woman next, then the bowmen. Three of the latter turned bravely and shot arrows that glittered and whined. The brown beasts wheeled and flapped angrily upward, though the buzzing arrows dropped far short of them. The pygmies gained the trees; the omasha scouted the edge of the woods, squawking, three of them drifting toward the lifeboat, weaving heads surveying the ground. Paul gave way to unfamiliar savage enjoyment. "Do we, Doc?"

"Yes," said Wright, and took aim himself.

All three were brought down, at a cost of four irreplaceable rifle bullets and two shots from Dorothy's automatic. Mijok bellowed with satisfaction but recoiled as Wright dragged a dirty brown carcass into the clearing. "A dissection is in order." Mijok grumbled and fidgeted. "Don't fret, Mijok." Wright pegged down the wings of the dead animal with sharp sticks and drew an incision on the leathery belly with his hunting knife. "Good head shot, Paul--this one's yours. We'll do a brain job from one of the others, but I think we'll let that wait for Sears--oh my, yes...! Doesn't weigh over thirty pounds. Hollow bones like a bird's, very likely. Hope they'll keep."

"You hope," Dorothy sniffed. "What do you do when I turn housewife and instruct you to get that awful mess the hell off my nice clean floor?"

"Dope! And you my best and only medical student." He worked at the cutting dubiously, inexpertly. "Conventional mammalian setup, more or less. Small lungs, big stomach. Hah--two pairs of kidneys?" He spread the viscera out on the wing. "Short intestine, also like a bird. And she was preparing a blessed event multiplied by--count 'em--six."

"Too many," said Paul. "Altogether too industrious."

"What I really want to know--Oh...?" With the lungs removed, it could be seen that the hump on the back was caused by a great enlargement of four thoracic vertebrae, which swelled into the chest cavity as well as outward. Wright cut away spinal cartilage. "Damn, I _wish_ Sears was doing this. Well, it's neural tissue, nothing else--a big swelling of the spinal cord." He sliced at the ugly head, but the hermorrhage from a .30-caliber bullet confused the picture. "The brain looks too simple. Could that lump in the cord be the hind brain? I hereby leave the theories to Sears. But, son, you might slit the stomach and see what the old lady had for breakfast."

Paul's clumsy cut on the slippery stomach bag made it plain what the omasha had eaten--among other things, an almost complete seven-fingered hand. Dorothy choked and walked away, saying, "I am going to be--"

"Cheer up." Paul held her forehead. "Never mind the clean floor--"

"Go away. I mean stay very close. Sorry to be so physiological. Me a medic student! Even blood bothers me."

"Never mind, sugar--"

"Sugar yourself, and wash your paws. We smell."

Mijok was muttering in alarm. Wright had abandoned the dissection and gone out in the meadow, cautious but swift, to the spot where yesterday they had found the pygmy soldiers. He took up a small skull and arm bone, pathetically clean--perhaps there were insect scavengers that followed after the omasha--and the discarded bow. But instead of bringing back these relics, Wright held them high over his head, facing westward. Tall and gray in the heavy sun, he stepped twenty paces further toward the region where the pygmies had entered the jungle; then he set the bones down in the grass and strode back to the shelter, fingers twitching, lips moving in his old habit of talking half to himself, half to the world. "The omasha," he said, "cracked the enlarged vertebrae--favorite morsel maybe."

Mijok moaned, blinking and sighing. He stared long at the silent grace of the lifeboat, then at Christopher Wright. He too was talking to himself. Abruptly, something gave way in him. He was kneeling before Wright, bending forward, taking Wright's hands and pressing them against the gray-white fur of his face and his closed eyes. "Oh, now," Wright said, "now, friend--"

Paul remarked, "You're elected."

"I will not be a god."

6

Mijok released the hands of his deity and sat back on his haunches, foggy-eyed. Wright stroked the great furry head, troubled and amazed. "It won't do," Wright said. "We'll have no gods on this planet. Unless human nature can make itself a little godlike. And no final Armageddon--for that's within too, and always was. Well, he'll learn language fast. As he does, the first thing he must discover is that we're all one flesh." But Mijok was gazing up in adoration at the sound of the voice, trembling, not in fear, smiling when he saw Wright smile. "I believe he never had a god before--hadn't reached the stage of personalizing the forces of nature. They're just forces, and himself a bundle of perception, not even realizing that he's more knowing and sensitive than other animals. Not arrogant yet, not sophisticated enough to be cruel, or mean, or even ambitious...."

Dorothy pushed her fists into her cheeks, brown eyes upturned to study the old man: a way she had, carrying Paul back eleven years to the day he had come aboard the ship and seen her for the first time and loved the woman who was, even then, manifest in the leggy, awkward child. "Doc, why did you do that, out there in the meadow?"

"Why, Dorothy, we must make contact with those pygmies too. They are--advanced. It'll be more difficult. They'll have traditions--maybe some very ancient ones. But we must make contact."

"Mijok hates them though. If they come here--"

Wright grinned. "Temporary advantage of being little tin deities. I think Mijok will do whatever we indicate--until we're able to teach him independence."

Paul said, "Don't think for a minute I'm not with you. But Doc, with the others helpless we're only three--"

"Four."

"Yes, four. There's our own survival to think of. It's a big planet. Seems to me you're taking it on all at once."

Wright slouched, loose-limbed, at the barrier, where he could watch the meadow, and Mijok stayed close to him. "I think we must, Paul. If we start right perhaps we can go on right. A mistake at this point could go on burning for a thousand years.... Why do you think he broke out into worship when he did? Our superior achievements--lifeboat, guns, the rescue from that reptile? The fact that I wasn't afraid of a poor pygmy's bones? All that, sure, but something else. Ed would say I was daydreaming--but I think Mijok's heart knows what his brain can't yet interpret. Sears would agree, I think--his own heart's bigger than Lucifer. Mijok hasn't the least conscious idea why I invited those pygmies to come and get their dead. Down deeper, in the part of him that made him bring the moss and the meat and take care of us, I think he knows very well."

"You're proposing," Dorothy said, "to take a chance on love?"

Wright was tranquil, watching the meadow. "Whenever men put their chips on the other thing they always lost, didn't they? Repeatedly, for twenty or thirty thousand years? Did they ever create anything good except in a milieu of co-operation, friendship, forbearance? One of the oldest of commonplaces--the teachers all knew it. Lao-tse--Buddha--or stated negatively: 'He who lives by the sword....' And so on. Good is not the mere absence of evil, but the most positive of human forces. The instruments of good are charity, patience, courage, effort and self-knowledge, each unavailing without the others; remember that. And that's all the basic ethics I know. The rest is detail, solution of immediate problems as they arise. Even on Earth the good tended to win out in the long run: at least it did until the mechanical toys got out of hand. Then there was a century of living under a question mark. There was also the Collectivist Party. Yes, as a prime example of a part of my own philosophy totally perverted, I give you the Collectivist Party." Wright was talking to himself again, the bitterness of Earth's history goading him into soft-spoken monotone, drawling and dark, on a planet nearly five light-years distant from the ancient confusions. "The Collectivist Party, which turns 'co-operation' into the same sort of word fetish that 'democracy' was less than a hundred years ago--co-operation _without_ charity, without patience, without courage and always, always, without self-knowledge."

Dorothy still watched him with sober upturned eyes. "Ed told me once his father was a pilot in the Collectivist Army during the Civil War."

"I know." Wright smiled at her in bashful half apology. "Some of the old wounds still bleed too, I guess. I generally manage to keep my political mouth shut when he's listening, if I can. Not that Ed could be accused of still fighting the war that ended before he was born.... Relax: I think they're coming."

Paul joined Wright and the giant at the barrier, but Dorothy stayed a moment with the sick, feeling their wrists, murmuring something close to Ann's ear, although the girl could not respond. "Past the fever stage, I believe," she said. "They're all breathing well. No chance they'll be out of it before night, I suppose...."

The pygmies were still some distance away, slipping along the edge of the woods in plain sight. There were only three--the two women and one bowman; perhaps the others were paralleling their course inside the forest--perhaps a hundred others were. Wright whispered, "Have we anything that would make a respectable gift?"

Mijok was rumbling in misery and fright. Dorothy came over holding a locket. "This--you remember, Doc--a matron at the Orphanage gave it to me. I used to imagine it could be a portrait of my mother--"

"But my dear--"

The brown girl shook her head. "This ship-metal wedding ring Paul hammered out for me--that's the only Earth jewelry I want to keep. This face that might be like my mother's--Oh, Doc, I'm getting to be a big girl now. Besides, Lucifer will have plenty of pretties for us later on. And Doc--let me do this, will you? They've got a woman leading 'em, so--wouldn't she be less afraid of another woman? I'll uncover, so she--" Dorothy shrugged out of her jacket. "Please, Doc? I'm scared, but--"

Wright glanced helplessly at Paul. "We--"

Dorothy said quickly, "_My_ decision." Holding the locket up for the sun to gleam on it, she walked into the meadow and waited in the brightness. Paul's hand sweated on the rifle stock. He saw Wright patting Mijok's arm, heard his restraining murmur: "Quiet, Mijok--keep your shirt on, Mijok, old man--man...." Mijok searched the face of his god with a mute desperation and remained as he was.

The pygmy woman halted fifty feet away in still-faced musing. As Paul had seen through the binoculars, she was elaborately tattooed and young. The pause was long. Dorothy stepped nearer to the place where Wright had left the bones, displaying the locket, her open left hand waving down at her body to demonstrate that she carried no weapons. For the first time Paul realized she had left her holster belt behind.

The blue-skirted woman shrilled a word; her two followers fell back. She thrust the blunt end of her spear in the ground and came forward steadily until she was only a few feet from the woman of the twenty-first century; mask-faced, she met Dorothy's smile with a long scrutiny. Now and then the green eyes shifted to study the clearing, the lifeboat, the quiet shapes of Paul and Wright. And Mijok. Perhaps she stared longest at Mijok, but by some heavy discipline her face refused to tell of anything but dignity and caution.

She spoke at last. It was complex, in a tone like the piping of a tree frog. There were pauses, studied inflections, no gestures: her seven-fingered hands hung limp against the blue grass skirt. The closing words seemed to have a note of questioning and of sternness; she waited.

Dorothy's contralto was startlingly deep in contrast: "Darling, I would like to know where you picked up that perfectly adorable wrap-around, only I don't think it would suit me. I'm, to put it frankly, a shade too hippy for such. In case you're wondering, I'm a female sample of man"--she touched herself and pointed to the pygmy lady--"man--"

"Oh!" Wright whispered. "Good girl, good--"

"--and it does seem to me us girls ought to stick together, because"--she held out the locket--"well, just because. And anyway look: I have only ten toes, fastened on to the ends of my feet, and if I had more, Heaven knows (just count 'em and _see_ how each grows!) I'd have trouble in keeping them neat. Pome. There now, sweetie pie, please take it, huh?" And she opened the locket--Paul remembering in lessening panic how much the unknown portrait did resemble her--and held it face out to the woman of Lucifer. A tiny palm came up dubiously; Dorothy placed the locket in it. "It won't bite, baby." The pygmy woman turned it about, puzzling at the hinge. Dorothy stooped to demonstrate the mechanism a few times. "I'm Dorothy, by the way, more widely known as the Dope, which is a title of uncommon distinction among my people, achieved only after long study of the art of saying the right thing at the wrong time, burning the bacon, and preserving at all times an air of sweet and addled dignity--Dorothy...." She indicated herself plainly and pointed, with questioning eyebrows.

The tree-frog voice, with no sternness, but a hint of friendliness: "Tor-o-thee...?" She imitated Dorothy's motions. "Abro Pakriaa--"

"Pakriaa."

"Abro Pakriaa." There was sternness again in that correction.

"Abro Pakriaa...."

Wright muttered, "Royalty, I believe. Don't dare do any coaching. Trust Dot's instinct. Ah, here we go--"

The pygmy woman had taken off her shell necklace. She crushed the dainty blue and yellow against her upper right breast; she set it for a moment on her shining hairless skull, and then offered it. Wright sighed, shaken, "It _had_ to work--exchange of gifts--a universal--"

When Dorothy dropped on one knee to take it, the mask relaxed for the first time in a wintry smile. Over the proud bald head went the chain of the locket, and Abro Pakriaa watched Dorothy put the necklace on--fortunately it was long, even drooping a little below Dorothy's throat. A flutter of red hands seemed to mean that Dorothy was to stand back; another motion brought forward the woman who carried the hide, her face a chip of red stone. The hide was unrolled, and the bones placed on it. There was more intricate speech, with touching of the locket and graceful, apparently kindly waving of thin arms. Dorothy responded: "Four score and seven years ago...." She went on to the end without mirth or hesitation, fondling the shell necklace, giving the words the power of music that belongs to them even apart from knowledge of their meaning. When she was silent, Abro Pakriaa motioned the woman with the hide to go and held up her two hands clasped together, the Chinese salutation. She waited till Dorothy had done the same and strode away, recovering her spear without a backward look, vanishing under the trees.

Dorothy collapsed in the shadow of the barrier. Tentatively she groaned: "How'm I doing?"

Wright snarled; "Suppose you know that damn bowman had an arrow trained on you the whole time?"

She glanced at him, lips quivering. "I was kind of aware of it."

"Can I," said Paul, "touch the hand that touched the hand--"

"Oh no. I ain' gonna 'sociate with no common scum no mo'."

Mijok stared in wonder at their sudden paroxysms of hysterical laughter. He rumbled in doubt. Then the contagion caught him. Whatever his own interpretation might be, he was bellowing, hammering his chest, rolling over on the moss and scattering handfuls of it while he roared.

He did not sober until he saw Wright drawing pictures on the earth--three stylized but obvious human figures, one small, one medium-sized, one large. Only the middle one had five fingers. Wright gouged a circle around all three. He said, "C'm'on, Mijok--language lesson."

7

The trail was obvious only to the pygmies, through a border region of meadow and forest that was full of dappled light, a warm hurry of life feeding, struggling, wandering. Aware of his own power and readiness, able now to enjoy the shifting scents and noises of this new trail, Paul watched Ann's quick slenderness and the swing of Spearman's solid shoulders. They, and Sears Oliphant, had emerged unharmed from the illness. During a week unmeasurably long in retrospect, all six of the party had found the ease and sureness of physical acclimation. Their bodies rejoiced in the hot clean air of day and the moist moderate nights; the only rebel was the Earth-born brain--grudging, frightened, trailing, making endless reservations and timid of shadows. In Sears Oliphant it was an almost open battle between a brave and curious mind and flesh that could not hide its wincing from pain and danger. His "Oh my, yes" had a tremor which angered himself and oppressed his natural garrulity.

When Ann Bryan had drifted out of the sleep of illness, Ed Spearman was petting her hands, sponging her forehead. Paul had seen something happen in Ann at that moment, like an innocent putting forth of leaves when winter is not surely gone. Ann had never taken a lover. On the ship, not so much unawakened as unwilling, she had rejected all that; Spearman, making no secret of wanting her, had not been insistent. Nor had he seemed outwardly much distressed, but (at a time when Earth-harbored youth of his nature would have been in their liveliest and most demanding prime) he had buried himself in _Argo's_ technical library to the point of red-eyed exhaustion, a desperation of unceasing study in the technologies that Captain Jensen would have helped him explore if Jensen had lived. Ann had read other matters after the violin strings were gone, read and daydreamed. If she'd wept (and Paul thought she had) she had done it alone, in that pocket of a room sacred to herself. To the others, she was a passionately silent adolescent turning into a tiredly silent woman, who made too much point of doing her own work and asking for nothing.

Yes, Ann was different now. The thin beauty of her face, vivid white under heavy black hair, was still too quiet, but with a troubled radiance. During this long week she had talked much with Dorothy--talk superficially inconsequential, but Paul assumed it had a meaning below words, as if Ann had only just realized, probably without envy, that the brown girl was a thousand years older in heart and mind.

Beyond Ann and Spearman were the six bowmen of the escort, bodies bright with a sour-smelling oil, grouped around Abro Pakriaa at a deferential distance. The princess wore Dorothy's locket. "Abro," Paul had learned, was best translated as "princess" or "queen." A flame-red flower behind her ear caught sunlight from the early afternoon. Five others were following Paul--women, with skirts of every tint but Pakriaa's blue, taller than the men, carrying spears with blades of a white stone resembling quartz. The men were unvaryingly soft, rounded in contour, lacking the women's tough-sinewed vigor. It was plain, merely from the manner of Abro Pakriaa and her spear bearers, that among this people to be a woman was to be a leader and soldier, no doubt a hunter and head of the household by virtue of size and strength. In muscular power, a male pygmy was to a female as the weakest of Earth's women was to the toughest male athlete. These of the bodyguard were soldiers of a sort: the bows were small, the arrows only big darts. The bowmen never spoke except meekly in response to some patronizing word of the princess. Pakriaa's height topped forty inches; none of the bowmen was quite three feet tall. Paul's fingers itched for brush and palette. They were available in the lifeboat. The fact that he had not even unpacked them he blamed on a preoccupation with the daily work needed for mere survival, but there was a deeper reason: perhaps a fear of finding his moderate ability vanished if he should once try to hint with oil at the welling profusion of color and line that was Lucifer. Now he found himself trying to measure the quality of Pakriaa's rich copper against the softness of leaves that were burnt umber, malachite green, saffron, purple, and he thought: _I must be recovering. Wake up, ego, and look around._

Spearman was carrying rifle and automatic; Paul had preferred to leave his rifle behind; Ann, hating firearms, had only her knife.

Abro Pakriaa had entered the camp at noon, her fourth visit in the week. Her gloomy majesty unchanging, she had indicated that she wished them to come to her village. But Dorothy had turned her ankle the evening before and it still pained her. Wright, no doubt hungering more than any of the others for a sight of Pakriaa's way of living, had fretted and bumbled and elected to remain with Dorothy and Sears, urging Paul needlessly to remember his anthropology. Sears, sweating out a microsection of a water insect from Lake Argo, had flapped a fat hand and boomed: "You be sure 'n' telephone, damn it, if you're staying for dinner, hey?"

Remaining uneasily close to Wright, as he did whenever the pygmies appeared, Mijok had said carefully, "Telephone?"

"Word without meaning," said Wright gently, patting the huge arm. "Noise word for fun."

The attitude of Pakriaa's people to Mijok suggested the studious ignoring of an indecency. They would not harm the ugly animal, their manner said, so long as he was the property of the important sky people....

Life was generously abundant in this thinner forest. Things buzzed and flew; Paul noticed a few webs cunningly extended before burrows in the humus. Ann's ocean-gray eyes glanced back, brave and uncertain. "Those girls are too quiet. Paul, how much _do_ they know of our language?"

"Not much." He moved up to walk on her other side. "Doc and I have made only those two efforts to swap languages. A lot of that time had to be wasted on theirs, a dead end for us."

Spearman grunted, "Why? They've got a civilization, as Doc says."

"Our voices are wrong. Pitch effects meaning for them. You've noticed there's no pitch difference between their male and female voices. Their language is tied to one section of the scale; a full octave of it is above the range of even Ann's voice. They can shape our words though, if they're willing. Basic English may appeal to the princess when she condescends to take it seriously."

"They could have picked up more than we suspect. They could have been eavesdropping outside the camp."

"No, Ed. Mijok would have known and told us."

"Yeah--Fido. Can hardly speak freely in front of him now."

"Don't think anything you wouldn't want him to hear."

"Paul, I swear, sometimes you're worse than Doc." But Spearman wanted to cancel the ill temper of the remark, and added: "You know, I thought _I_ knew something about Basic English--we all had drill enough in it. Beats me, the things Doc can do with it--the man's a wizard."

Paul was silent with unappeased annoyance. It was true: Mijok appeared to be a natural student too, already far beyond Basic English in a week of keen listening. "Nan," Paul said, "how did you like Mijok's humming when you were singing for us yesterday evening?"

"Good." She flashed him an almost cheerful smile. But when Ann spoke of her singing--and in the singing itself--there was, in spite of her, an aching wordless reminder of the violin gone silent. Her voice was sweet but without strength or resonance, and she took no ardent pleasure in using it. Her love was the violin--covered as well as might be in the comparative safety of the lifeboat, waiting for a distant day. If the day ever came (Sears had already dissected out, dried, and oiled some long leg-tendon fibers of a deerlike animal in a humble experiment aimed chiefly at Ann's morale)--if the day came, there would still be no piano, no answering of other strings, no splendid cry of brass. Crude wood winds, perhaps, sometime.... "Yes, he was good," said Ann, smiling. "Organ point in the tonic, and right in our own scale. Once he even upped to the dominant. Instinct, huh? Sounded good, Paul, even with you trying to fill in the middle."

"Hell, I didn't think you heard me," Spearman snorted.

"You kind of stood out," she said, "because Mijok was much better on pitch, my good man. It did sound hollow without something to fill in. He was on A-flat below the bass clef and no fooling.... _Why_ haven't we seen other giants?"

"We got something on that this morning. I guess it was while you were in swimming. Each giant male has an inviolate hunting territory, and they don't trespass. Definite breeding season: the month before the rains. That was five or maybe six red-moon changes ago. Mijok wasn't too clear on the count--doesn't like mathematics much better than I do. The women go where they please, in small groups, with the children who still need care, but I gather the males are expected to stay in their own private grounds until the Red-Moon-before-the-Rains."

Spearman wondered: "Will the pygmies have a season too?"

"Doubt it. Probably like us--except that women are the bosses. The clothes suggest a continuing sex consciousness."

The pygmy leaders halted. A murmuring explained itself as the music of a stream. Paul consulted his memory of the map made from orbit photographs and of his one solo exploration flight in the lifeboat. There could be few such flights: the charlesite, even with the surplus salvaged from the wrecked boat, must be hoarded. Ann and Ed had flown over the lake on the day after their recovery, searching for any sign of _Argo_. Returning, Ed's face had been a leather mask of grief, and neither had wanted to talk of it. Later they explained: the lake was a profundity of secret blue; a shelf of sand or possibly white stone ran out some yards offshore, under water marvelously clear, and ended abruptly. Beyond it, where _Argo_ must have fallen, no bottom could even be guessed at; the lifeboat's camera confirmed the presence of an abyss that would have thwarted the most complex twenty-first-century machinery.

This stream, Paul knew, came from the western hills, flowing east and slightly north until it entered the lake northeast of the clearing called home. Another creek joined it east of the spot where they now stood, and Pakriaa's village--if the parallel lines did represent its location--was not far upstream from that junction.

Worn boulders rose above noisy water. The stream was twenty yards wide, sluggish even here in the shallows. A steppingstone crossing.

Nearly all the rivers on the map passed through jungle for most of their length; numberless smaller streams would be hidden from the sky. There was grassland for fifteen to twenty miles on the eastern side of every range of hills. The prevailing winds were from the west; perhaps a dryness in the lee of the hills favored the grass. The broadest stretch of such open land lay east of a rugged coastal range seventy miles to the southwest; some of the mountains in that seacoast formation were mighty enough to hold a blur of snow at their summits. The base of the coastal range was narrow--hardly more than twenty miles. From this the peaks shot up with incredible sheerness to great heights of bare rock that glittered in morning sun like black and red glass. This grandeur, like nothing known on Earth, was clearly visible from the camp above the near hills, especially at midday, when the mists were gone.

And ten miles offshore from that dizzy range, Paul remembered a mountainous island. On his solo exploration two days ago, with the lifeboat's panoramic camera and a head full of puzzled dreams, he had soared above it, noting a peninsular strip of red sand at its southern end, sheltered mountain valleys--one framing a jewel of lake. In the north was a white beach where landing should be easy, and this was protected by a low headland of red cliffs running out to the very tip of the island. Surely a place to carry in the mind, it seemed to invite human living as did no other near region in this continent of Lucifer. Wright thought so: he listened to Paul's description and named the island Adelphi....

North of the camp, the range of low western hills dwindled to rolling land and was lost in a tremendous expanse of unbroken jungle, which ended only at the shore of one of the great lakes four hundred miles away--an inland sea fourteen hundred miles long. Sixty-odd miles to the south there was that large cluster of parallel lines in jungle, and beyond it the forest gave way to more open ground, prairie, red desert, and bare mountains.

Abro Pakriaa dipped her spear in the water; she lifted a handful, letting it trickle away while she spoke a rippling invocation; then she was lithely crossing on the stones after the bowmen. The bottom was pale sand with varicolored pebbles.

Beyond the stream, Pakriaa followed a path a short way and pressed into undergrowth. Spearman grumbled, "Good path for once, and we have to--"

"Path's probably booby-trapped. She expects us to know that."

"Hell...." It was difficult passage, stooping on a trail meant for little folk; it ended at a ditch six feet wide and five deep. The ditch made a right angle, both lines stretching away straightly as far as the eye could go; the inner side of the ditch was heaped with dry sticks and bundles of grass. Pakriaa trilled orders to an old black-skirted woman with a whip, in charge of a gang of four women and three men, all totally naked. They were struggling to shove a movable bridge into place across the ditch--two logs bearing a mat of vines and bark. It was grunting work for them, and when the end of the bridge was in reach, Pakriaa's escort made no motion to help. Spearman started to; Paul interfered. "We'd lose face. Those are slaves. Women tied together at the ankles--one of the men a eunuch. Look at the brands on their cheeks. Nan, you're the dominant sex--try to look more like the president of a women's club."

Her finely modeled face had dignity enough, he thought, if she could keep the worry out of it.... The old woman in the black skirt bowed arrogantly to Pakriaa; the slaves cringed, with the hating stare of the trapped. All were scarred and young except for the eunuch, who was wrinkled and flabby. One female had a recent chest wound; the effort at the bridge had made it bleed, but she ignored it. Paul saw Spearman's face settle into lines of poker blankness and thought: _Good_. _And if, to patience and courage, he could add (I hear you, Doc) charity and self-knowledge--Oh, be quiet, critic, be quiet._...

Trees had been felled--some time ago, for the stumps were rotted--and the spacing was such that the tops of the trees left standing provided a gap twenty feet wide, the entire length of the village. There would be two other such gaps, visible from the sky as parallel lines, admitting full midday sunlight but shutting out the omasha. "Nan--let's try to learn something about that big settlement in the south--the other parallel lines."

It was surprisingly easy to convey the question to Pakriaa with the help of signs, but her response when she understood it was a shrill snarl and shaking of her spear, a repetition of a name, "Vestoia," which seemed to be the place, and of another name, "Lantis," a name that caught in her throat and made her spit. Paul said, "We make faces at the south too, and do it fast." It seemed to appease the princess: she even smiled.

The area bordering the ditch had been left wild, a barrier of vines, brush, untended trees. Inside were orderly rows of plants, some broad-leaved, resembling beets, some bushy; another type was rangy with cosmos-shaped blooms of startling emerald green. Near the row of trees was a path which Pakriaa followed; under the trees stood grass-thatched structures. Paul counted thirty, well separated, before the princess left the path, and no sound came from them. The trees were mostly of the same species, thin-trunked towers with dark serrated leaves, blazing with scarlet blossoms like the one Pakriaa wore. They were the source of an odor like frangipani which filled the village, heady and sweet but clean. It was no primitive agriculture in this part-sunny corridor: rich darkness of earth was drawn up about the plants; there was not a weed in sight. And there was no trace of the strangling purple vines.

Pakriaa's male attendants had slipped away; her spearwomen accompanied her through an opening into the next corridor, where her people were waiting for her, the soldier women in three formal ranks. There were about fifty in each rank, and here again were dyed skirts of every color but the regal blue that was Abro Pakriaa's. Small faces maintained the flat indifference of the unliving copper they resembled.

Pakriaa's intricate oratory flowed over them. More than two thirds of the stiff soldiers were gashed with recent wounds, ranging from scratches to lost hands or breasts or eyes. Some had deep body wounds so ugly it was amazing that they could stand upright, but there seemed to be no evidence of infection and there was no wavering in the lines while Pakriaa declaimed. Her right hand soared with spread fingers. The lifeboat? The name Torothee occurred; when it was repeated the women swayed with unchanging faces, murmuring it in unison like a breath of wind. Pakriaa faced her guests. Tears were not unknown to her; laughter might be. She clenched and relaxed her hands, the fourteen fingers rising and falling until Paul lost count of the motions--more than twenty. She pointed to the soldiers, repeating the display more slowly and only ten times; then one hand rose alone with the thumb curled under. Paul muttered, "I think she's saying only 146 are left after the war, from--maybe three hundred."

Pakriaa laid her spear at Ann's feet. Paul advised: "Give her your knife, same way." Pakriaa took it and placed it across the spear and stood back, motioning to Ann to do the same. When the three had withdrawn, Pakriaa still made impatient gestures. Paul whispered, "Ed, you and I are trifling males. We stand further back."

"We do like hell," said Spearman in his throat.

"We do, just the same. It's nothing but ceremony. Safety's off on my .38. We can handle anything. Stand back."

Ed Spearman stood back, muttering. At a shrill summons from Pakriaa, a shuffling procession swung out from the tree shadows. These were all men, decrepit, ancient, dirty; some limped and two had empty eye sockets and one, from a pathological fatness, could barely waddle. They were striped and splotched with paint in elaborate designs, mostly of white and yellow, and their skins, either with dirt or age, had darkened to dull mahogany. They formed a hobbling circle around the crossed knife and spear; each grotesque, as he passed the weapons, spat on them and scattered on them a handful of earth until the place became a low mound. As they did this, they muttered and howled and squeaked, performing precise evolutions with twiddling fingers. They carried white thigh-bones like clubs, and shell ornaments jangled on their raddled throats and ankles. It was, on the surface, a simple ceremony of peace and friendship, but the casual contempt of these male witches cast a foulness over it. Their sidelong glances at the strangers were poisonous with furtive malignancy. "Medicine men," said Paul under his breath. "Distant equivalent of the wise women in some patriarchal groups. Ed, we stay on the good side of those loopy scarecrows, or it's just too bad." And with a certain hunger he studied the mask of the man who had never offered the relaxation of friendship, wondering how far it was physically possible for Spearman to accept a world in which engineering science was the dream and crude survival the reality.

The ceremony ended in a dribble of anticlimax. The hideous old men merely shambled away from the mound toward the shadows after a ceremonial whoop that caused the soldiers to relax. But they did not quite go. They huddled and squatted under the trees. They stared. They spat and scratched and consulted together. Some of the green eyes were close-lidded, veiled; others were wide, making no effort to conceal a hatred compounded of jealousy and fear. The fat monster nursed his obscene belly between scrawny knees and whispered a stream of information into the close ear of a witch with empty eye sockets, and the whispering dark lips wore a destroying smile.

8

Abro Pakriaa motioned her guests to be seated before a large building; the fibers of this structure were dyed the blue of her skirt. The soldiers stalked about in a show of nonchalance. Young men and naked children had come timidly from the houses. The youngest children were disproportionately tiny, large-headed but no bigger than house cats. Perhaps childbirth for this race was no more than a passing inconvenience. There were many pairs of obviously identical twins. The children stayed near the protective men, all but the older girls, who ventured somewhat closer.

It was a village without laughter. No scampering, no horseplay, no evidence of any tenderness except between the men and the smallest children. Curiosity burned in all of them, but its overt expression was limited to the dead-pan stare.

Pakriaa entered her blue building alone, greeted by a flutter of voices from within, and she was gone several minutes. When Pakriaa had seated her guests, most of the ancient painted males had shuffled across the clearing--even the fat horror whose walking must have been pain--to settle in the shadows on the other side and continue their baleful watching. Paul noticed that even the spear-carrying women skipped clear to give them elbow-room and never looked directly at them. The fat witch found a place to squat that gave him a clear view of all three visitors; as he gazed he sucked toothlessly at the knob of his thighbone club.

The houses were lightly framed of wood, with walls of interwoven fiber two thirds of the way to the eaves, joints bound and roofs thatched with the same material, a design similar to what Paul remembered from a year spent in the Republic of Oceania. The modern citizens of that many-islanded republic, Paul recollected, still preferred the ancestral savage building pattern to stone or plastic; it suited the climate and the friendly, unpretentious way of life. But none of the buildings here was raised on supports: snakes and vicious insects were evidently no problem. There were no domestic animals, apparently no parasites nor self-evident diseases; except for wounds and the dirt of the old men, the pygmy skins looked clear and healthy. There were not even any bad smells except the mildly disagreeable oil the males used to anoint their bodies.

Pakriaa returned, with her make-up on. She had flowers behind both ears, and one tied by its stem to Dorothy's locket. Heavy white circles were drawn about the lady's eyes and breasts and navel; blue bracelets dangled at her wrists; her skirt had been replaced by an innocently unconcealing fringe of shells--similar to snail shells, Paul thought. Pakriaa's anklets of wooden beads were orange. The top of her bald head was robin's-egg blue. Two males, with the brand marks that must mean slavery, followed her with a seat--a block of wood, cleverly carved with stylized animal figures. It brought her face on a level with Ann's. Ann said politely, "Why the hell can't I be handsome too?" And Pakriaa inclined her head. A boy without the slave brand came with a wooden bowl; Pakriaa sipped the greenish liquid and offered the bowl to Ann. Spearman rumbled. Paul said, "Protocol. You gotta, Nan, but don't offer us any--we're meek males."

Ann swallowed some; her eyes watered; she repressed choking. "Alcoholic, I do mean...."

Feasting followed--a laborious hour of it, as food arrived without pause in the hands of branded men from the other side of the sheltering trees. Wood smoke drifted from that direction, and a hum of voices. All the dishes included meat cut in tiny cubes--stewed, fried, boiled, or smothered in unknown vegetables. Only one course was aggressively horrid, carrion swimming in peppery sauce, clearly a favorite of Pakriaa's, for she belched wonderfully and patted her stomach in self-applause. Ann remarked, "Another go at that and I start looking for another planet."

In time even Pakriaa had had enough. She clapped her broad hands. Greasy-mouthed and bulging, the soldiers formed a swaying, stamping line. Spearman burped helplessly. "All that inside, and they can dance?"

Ann suggested: "Maybe it helps...."

It was an hour-long narrative dance, vastly monotonous, a picture of war. Some of those most cruelly wounded pranced into solo pantomimes bragging of how the injuries had been received. In climax, a straw figure of a woman was dragged to the center of the clearing: an image carefully made, brightly painted, the face hideous, the sexual features grossly exaggerated. Shrilling what seemed to be a name ("Lantis! Lantis!"), the soldiers swarmed on this effigy, squealing, stabbing, defiling, tearing it into shreds, which they carried away as treasures or mementos.

When the soldier women had finished in yawning exhaustion, a crowd of dainty men performed another sort of dance, purely an erotic show, indicating that the role of the male was seductive, half infantile, submissive all the way. Occasionally a soldier pulled a dancer out of the line, slapping his face until he stopped the squealing that was evidently required of him, and wandered away with him; but most of the soldiers were too tired, gorged, or wounded to be interested. Later, some twenty soldiers formed a group, and men brought them babies to be nursed, morsels of humanity, quite silent, far smaller in proportion than Earth's newborn. The mothers' arms were careful and competent, without tenderness; they held the infants two at a time, examining them shrewdly, often exchanging them with other soldiers. There were a few cooing demonstrations of affection by the men toward these infants, demonstrations which the soldiers ignored. Ann whispered, "I could spend a lot of time hating these little devils."

"Try not to."

"I know, Paul, but--"

"At least they have a civilization." Spearman was arguing with himself. "A potential technology. That's good gardening. Good tools, weapons."

"Nan, see if you can ask Mrs. President to show us the town."

Pakriaa caught on swiftly and was delighted....

The first of the tree-sheltered areas contained all the dwelling houses, dulled by the splendor of Pakriaa's. Ann was invited to enter this blue palace, Pakriaa making it clear that the men must not follow. Ann emerged, red-faced. Later, when it would not be so patent that she was talking of Pakriaa's house, Ann said, "Couldn't make out much detail. Dim, and no lamps burning, though I think I saw some clay things like old Roman lamps. Clean, funny perfume smells. I met--her mother maybe. Incredibly old anyway, and almost black. Their skin must change color with age."

"Dirt more likely," Spearman said.

"Not a bit of it. Very clean. Just a dry little ghost in a fancy room of her own, with a--a male slave manicuring her toenails. We haven't seen any old women out in the open."

"Sheltered and reverenced, maybe," Paul said. "Natural."

"Her Highness has a--I suppose you'd have to call it a harem. Ten little husbands, or maybe eleven."

"What a girl!" said Spearman.

Ann was amused, though her cheeks were flaming. "I was offered one."

"Hope you explained the rejection implied no lack of merit."

"Tried to, Paul. I think I got over the idea that there was a taboo involved--something like that. Her Majesty didn't insist...."

The ditch enclosed the village. One side of its square paralleled the river, not more than thirty feet from it but making no connection. It would have been easy to flood the ditch, but that was evidently not the intention. When Ann conveyed curiosity, Pakriaa was astonished that anyone could be ignorant of its function. "_Kaksma!_" she said, and pointed west. "Kaksma...!" Convinced at last that Ann's puzzlement was genuine, she drew a picture on the earth, with such vigorous art that she herself feared the image and drew back. It was a profile view of an animal larger than a rat, long-headed with a hump on the back. She had given it a tiny eye and a forward-thrusting tooth nothing like a rodent's; the forefoot was broad and flattened, a digger's foot. Giving Ann only a brief time to study it, Pakriaa spat on the image and wiped it out with a violent heel. She muttered an angry incantation and pointed to the dry wood heaped by the ditch, while her dancing fingers told of flames that would defend the village....

In the second tree-sheltered area were the industries. Men, not slaves, glanced up from the shaping of earthenware vessels. They had no potter's wheel, only their hands, but there was a kiln of baked earth. Pakriaa called a favorite over, hugged him, and sent him back with a pat on the rump. He was quite old, toothless, and giggling. They passed a row of dye pots, three women braiding fiber into flat sheets, a square of ground with part-finished spearheads, arrow points, other devices, a rack where deerlike hides were stretched in some curing process. "They sleep on those," Ann said, "and use 'em for rugs. The palace was full of 'em...."

In the rear of the village was a stockade of stripped logs, guarded by two soldier women. In the space before it, but facing away from it so that the painted eyes brooded over the village, stood a monstrous wooden idol, eight feet tall, raised on a low platform. Pakriaa led her guests before the image and knelt. It was necessary to do the same, and Ann imitated her gracefully enough. As he knelt himself, Paul saw in a backward glance that three gangling male witches had followed and were observing every motion with a rigid malevolence. It was difficult to kneel with his back to them; Spearman, he hoped, had not seen them.

The idol was exaggeratedly female, with huge carnivorous teeth indicated in white paint. A slot representing the left hand carried a nine-foot spear upright. The right arm, a natural branch of the log, reached forward and spread into a rugged table; more wood had been neatly joined to make the table five feet long, but the whole gave the effect of a swollen accepting hand, and it was foul with bloodstains old and new. Pakriaa's long murmured prayer repeated the name Ismar many times. At the end she seemed satisfied; her glance at Ann was almost a smile. Paul saw that the witches had drifted away, but the pressure of their watching remained.

Pakriaa now took them into the stockade. It seemed to Paul that the guards were scarcely needed....

These naked men, women, and children had no danger in them. No life. They moved and functioned as if in life: walked, spat, scratched, yawned; a woman nursed a baby mechanically; a man strolled to a trough in the center of the compound and ate a handful of damp stuff like poultry mash, then rubbed his side against the wooden edge as a pig might. Beyond such elemental motions there was no life. A woman followed a man for several paces; both flight and pursuit were dull, unfinished, a fumbling response to a sluggish stimulus. They paid no attention to Pakriaa and the strangers. The slack emptiness of their faces denied the possibility of any thought more than a flurry in response to physical need. They were all over-plump; some of the females were scarred, but the wounds were old and healed. Paul could see no anatomical differences between them and their lively free kindred. A drug...?

Pakriaa walked among them like a farmer in a flock of chickens. She lifted a young girl, who made no effort to escape, and showed her to Ann with contented pride, pinching a fat thigh and middle. The child was limp, unexcited, mumbling a mouthful of the mash. Fighting back a retching, Ann muttered, "Paul, when can we get out of here?"

Abro Pakriaa caught the tone. She tossed the little girl away and led them out of the stockade. She seemed hurt rather than angry--disappointed that her important friends had shown no admiration at this thriving industry....

The soldiers had gathered again in the clearing, but now there was a waiting, a tension with the descent of twilight, and a gloom. A long fire had been built; Pakriaa's wave at her guests appeared to mean that they should sit where they pleased. Ann had not been able to convey the wish for an escort home, and Pakriaa's mind was plainly filled with some other, graver concern, having no more time for hospitality. Pakriaa entered her blue house. While she was gone, the soldiers seated beyond the fire scattered handfuls of earth in synchronized motions and the witches grouped behind them set up a monotone of chanting. Pakriaa returned wearing a white skirt, bare of all her paint and jewelry; she walked back and forth along the line of the fire, praying, until daylight was wholly gone. At her call, old men, neither painted nor grotesque, carried out burdened hides and laid them open beside the fire: white bones, broken weapons, skirts, loincloths, necklaces, arrows, little earthen pots and wooden bowls, many images of clay. The soldiers threw themselves face down, their foreheads on their arms, and wailed.

Spearman's voice was tortured with perplexity: "Eat some, mourn for others. Murder them and love them--"

"Yes, they're human."

"Oh, shut up, Paul. What do you mean, human? These animals?"

"Human mourning, isn't it? Listen to it."

Ann spoke with held-in fury: "At least we're not cannibals. There may still be war back on Earth, but after all--"

"Better to murder in groups of a thousand at long distance? Just listen to it, Ann...."

It was music, becoming after a time the only thing existing under the red moon and the delicate unceasing dance of blue fireflies. It was the music they had heard on the first night in the jungle, a pouring forth of lamentation, wonder, supplication, whatever the spirit may feel in the contemplation of death and its troubling counterpart. A music that was meant to go on unchanging as the song of tree frogs for the thirteen hours of a night of Lucifer.... Pakriaa took no vocal part in the ritual, but sat alone, guarding the relics of the fallen. From time to time small man shapes carried new fuel to the fire. And there were stern sidelong glances from the princess: she had not forgotten her guests. Once or twice Paul caught himself dozing off, dragged into a partial hypnosis by the endless lamentation....

"Paul?"

"Yes, Nan. I'm awake." He saw Spearman's head jerk upright.

"Doc asked me yesterday--if I would bear him a child."

Spearman's arm sought for her gently. "Why bring that up now? Can't think with all this damn caterwauling."

"I--did get to thinking.... Everything we used to live by--it's so far away. Paul, you're close to Doc. You understand him, I guess."

Two troubled faces were turned to Paul in the mystery of firelight. A glance from Pakriaa conveyed annoyance at the sound of voices. "Dorothy told me she wants Sears to be the father of her second. It won't take her away from me. Not natural perhaps, but right under the circumstances. Some of the most important laws and customs can't be started by us. They'll be established by our grandchildren, if we can have them."

"I know." But her upward look at Spearman's worried, half-angry face said that her decision would be made by him, no other.

"He mustn't talk. The queen no like...."

It might have been an hour later that Paul saw Spearman's head sag down on his chest. Ann leaned against him, but his arm around her had gone slack. Paul searched for the cause of a sense of danger that prickled his skin. Not the witches: they were grouped as before, chanting a faint counterpoint to the soldiers' wailing. No--it was Ed Spearman himself, and Paul came broad awake in a certainty of what would happen. Too late. Spearman's head twitched, and his unconscious throat let loose a resonant, uncompromising snore, a snore that had been famous on the great ship _Argo_. Sears Oliphant had always claimed that if only Ed could be harnessed in sleep to the reaction chamber.... But this was not going to be funny....

Pakriaa leaped up and shrieked a raging order. The wailing ceased. The soldiers were staggering upright, grabbing spears, forming a circle of violence around the guests before Spearman could even rise. He gasped, "Wha's matter?" and ten pygmy women were hauling him away by wrists and ankles, clear of the ground.

Paul shouted. "Don't fight 'em, Ed! Keep quiet!" Two soldiers were clinging to each of his own arms, there was a ring of shivering spears around him, and others had dragged Ann out of sight, but she was screaming as if they could understand: "Don't hurt him! He didn't do anything! Let him go!"

Without twitching his hampered arms, Paul moved slowly against the circle of spears. They had no quarrel with him, he sensed, but only meant to restrain him: it was at least the only action worth a gamble. The spearwomen stepped backward away from him. The whole circle moved in slow motion, following where Spearman had been carried--through the tree shelter, on across the next clearing, and into the space before the looming god.

Ed had not been able to snatch his rifle; he still had his holstered automatic. Paul could not see Ann, nor Pakriaa. He could see Spearman's face, a concentration of craft and fighting fury. The pygmy women lifted him and flung him on the table before the idol. He was ready. He bounced like a great cat, gained his feet, and twitched out the pistol, which banged once--at the huge blade of the idol's spear. The stone blade crumbled; the crash of the little gun made his captors wince back in shocked reaction. Then Ed Spearman stooped, grasped the reaching wrist of the idol, and heaved upward with the whole of his strength.

The god swayed, groaned like a thing of life, and toppled over, squashing one of the howling witches--a blind one--like a red bug.

The village dropped into total silence. Paul could see Ann now. The pygmies had let her go. The whiteness of her face had more than terror in it: it had exultation, a glory of excitement and wrath. Paul's own captors had lurched away; his automatic had slipped into his hand without conscious effort; he searched in desperation for something that might restore his friends to steadier sanity. "Walk," he said. "Walk, don't run, to the nearest exit...."

The pygmies allowed it. The god had fallen. They even stood back, too profoundly dazed for any thought or protest.... At the edge of the village Spearman jumped in the ditch, reached for Ann, swung her up on the other side. "Did anyone bring a flashlight?"

"Oh, I--I did," said Ann, and began to cry. "Brought flashlight--'stead of gun...."

Paul stayed in the rear. "They won't follow, I think. Not for a while."

The stooping passageway was hard to find. But when they won clear of it there was the guiding sound of the stream. Paul held the flashlight on the line of stepping stones until the others had crossed. Ann was still weeping in reaction. "We'll never win. It's all madness--the ship, everything. All human beings are crazy, crazy--"

"Hush, dear," Spearman said. "We got out, didn't we?"

Now, where was the trail? A madness of groping, blundering, where there was no path, no guidance, and even their little thread of light a mockery and confusion.

Abruptly, ahead of them, there were other lights, then voices--Mijok's soft rumbling, Wright's clear outcry: "There they are! All three, Mijok--"

Paul ran to him. "The others--Dorothy? Sears?"

"Right as rain, son," Wright mumbled. "Except Dot's been frantic about you since we heard the shot. We left Sears practically sitting on her--well, figuratively. Women are odd, you know: they don't like shots in the night when the best boy friend is out on the tiles."

"Had a little trouble. They may come after us--don't know...."

Ann was quiet. Paul saw her white hands starfished on the gray of Mijok's chest. She said, "Mijok, I'm tired and sick. Will you carry me?"

Spearman groaned: "Ann, what--Use your head...."

But Mijok knelt at once to make a cradle of his arms, and Christopher Wright said, "Why not? Why shouldn't we need each other?" Mijok went ahead with her on the blind trail.

Paul heard Spearman choke: "I would have carried her." It was not meant to be heard. Paul looked away, hearing also the deep precision of the giant's voice exploring the mystery of words: "You are my people. I will not ever be much time far from you."