Of Men and Monsters

18

She had dropped into it, still hanging from the rope, the cage had appeared empty. Once on his feet and master of his own, motions, he had begun to turn about leisurely. And then that swift, determined patter behind him, a little softer than it should sound when a warrior ran …

Eric whirled, a careful smile on his face, the beginnings of a peaceful greeting on his lips. And he found himself unable to speak.

Because there was a girl charging at him, a stark naked girl with a great mass of light brown hair that spiraled down in one direction to her shoulders and then in the other direction to her hips. And there was a spear in her hands, quite a heavy spear with the longest point Eric had ever seen. The point was aimed at his belly. The girl was coming fast.

Pure reflex. Eric realized that he had parried the spear upward with one of his own spears.

The girl drew back a pace, set herself and lunged again. Again Eric knocked it away but barely: he felt it go past his throat by half a handsbreadth.

Again she came back. again he parried, again and again and again. He felt as if his mind were giving way—this was like a nightmare you had back in the burrows after a full meal and a big celebration. How could a woman be carrying a weapon? How could a woman be attacking a-warrior in direct combat?

She was not going to give up. She was absolutely set on killing him, that was certain. Her eyes were narrowed intently and a red bit of her tongue projected thoughtfully from a corner of her mouth. She held the spear tightly, looked him over for a vulnerable, undefended area, then lunged once more. Eric, using his spear as a club, warded off the thrust.

How could he stop her? He couldn’t counterattack—there was the danger of hurting or killing the girl. Alien-Science or Ancestor-Science, whatever you believed in, you always accepted as axiomatic that a nubile woman, a woman of child-bearing age, was untouchable with a deadly weapon, was automatically holy. A warrior who killed such a one ceased to be human: even if he were a chief, his tribe would declare him outlaw.

But she was liable to get through his guard sooner or later. And he couldn’t try to take the spear away from her. He’d have to let go of his own spears in order to do that, and the moment be stopped parrying her thrusts she’d run him through.

Meanwhile, all he could do was protect himself. And she was so damned determined! They were both breathing heavily to the rhythm of weapon hitting against weapon. Eric jumped as the girl’s long spearpoint missed his eyes infinitesimally.

“Almost got me that time,” he muttered.

The girl stopped in the middle of a lunge. She teetered a moment, barely holding her balance, staring at him with widened eyes.

“What did you say?” she breathed. “You said something.”

Eric stared back, wondering if she were insane. Should he take the chance now, while her mind was busy with some unexpected problem, should he drop his spears, leap at her and try to take her weapon away?

“Yes, I said something,” he told her, watching the spear in her hands carefully. “So what?”

She lowered the spear and stepped back a few paces, strain going out of her face. “I mean you can talk. You have a language.”

“Of course I have a language,” Eric said irritably. “What the hell do you think I am—a Wild Man?”

The girl answered by flinging her spear aside and dropping to the floor of the cage. She lowered her head to her knees and rocked herself back and forth.

Eric walked away and retrieved the spear. He slung it, along with his own weapons. When he came back to the girl, she was sobbing. And, puzzled as he was, it was evident to him that the sobs were relief and not pain or sorrow.

He waited. Now that she was disarmed, he could afford to be patient. If she turned out to be crazy after all, he’d have to decide what to do with her. Sharing a cage with nobody but a murderous lunatic was a very disagreeable prospect. On the other hand, even a crazy woman was still sacrosanct…

She stopped crying finally and wiped her eyes with the back of one arm. Then she leaned back, locked her arms behind her head and grinned at him cheerfully. Eric felt more disturbed than ever. This was a real odd one.

“Do you know,” she said, “that’s exactly what I thought you were. A Wild Man.”

Eric was astounded. “Me?”

“You. And I wasn’t the only one who thought so.”

He looked around the cage. There was nobody else in it. This girl was a lunatic beyond any doubt.

She had followed his glance. She chuckled and nodded. “No, I’m not referring to anyone in the cage. I’m referring to that fellow up there. He thought you were a Wild Man too.”

Eric looked up along the line of her pointing thumb. The Monster who had brought him still stared down into the cage, the enormous purple eyes unwinking, the prehensile pink tentacles perfectly still. “Why? Why should he—it—think I’m a Wild Man? Why should you?”

A part of him was deeply outraged. To be mistaken for the mythic, terror-inspiring Wild Men—that was too much! You frightened naughty children with stories about hordes of semihuman, hairy creatures who had sunk below the level of language, below the level of weapon and artifact, who had lost, long auld lang synes ago, the universal burrow taboo against cannibalism. You hazed gagling young apprentice warriors with tales of vast, ravaging mobs that came out of nowhere and fought your spears with teeth and nails, mobs that fought not for victory, for territory or for women, but for the ripped-off arms and bloody, broken haunches of their antagonists. And when you asked an older warrior how could there really be such a thing as Wild Men, since nobody you knew had ever seen them, he told you that they were a plague peculiar to the back burrows. Wild Men, he would tell you as he himself had been told by the warriors under whom he had studied, Wild Men did not live in Monster territory and they did not live in the burrows. They lived in another place entirely, a place called the Outside. And when you asked him to explain or describe this Outside, he’d shrug and say, “Well, the Outside is a place where the Wild Men live.” You’d go away, proud of your maturity for having at last realized that Wild Men were strictly horror-story stuff, as improbable as any of the other burrow legends of lurking creatures: the blood-sucking Draculas, the packs of vicious police dogs, the bug-eyed men from Mars, and, worst of all, the oil-seeking wildcats who drilled for all eternity from one burrow to another.

But Wild Men were not merely the stuff of legend; they were the material of curses and opprobium. A severely retarded child might be called a Wild Man, as might a warrior who disobeyed his band leader or a woman who was expelled from the Female Society. When someone in the tribe perpetrated a particularly ugly crime and managed to escape to distant burrows before punishment, you said: “May the Wild Men get him. He belongs with them.” A Wild Man was anyone who had failed the test of humankind.

But what right did this girl have to pass such a judgment on him? She couldn’t possibly know that his own people had declared him outlaw. And she herself—look at her!—a woman in Monster territory where no woman had a legitimate reason to be—she was a fine one to go around insulting people.

“So that’s the primary reason I thought you were a Wild Man,” the girl was saying. “Because the big fellow did. He’s already deposited two Wild Men in here with me. Luckily, he dropped them in one at a time. I was able to kill each of them the moment they landed, before they could collect their faculties and see how pink and edible I was.”

“You mean—There really are such things as Wild Men?”

“Really are such things as Wild Men? You’ve never seen one? Sweet Aaron the Leader, where are you from?”

From Mankind, Eric started to say, with his old, stiff-backed pride. Then he remembered how it sounded to Strangers—he had learned a lot lately. “I’m from a front-burrow tribe,” he said. “A rather small one. I don’t think you’ve heard of us.”

The girl nodded. “A front-burrow tribe—that would explain your unlaced hair. And anyone with hair hanging loose is somehow related to the Wild Men as far as the Monsters are concerned. They seem to know enough about me to suspect I’m female—one of the few fully human females they’ve ever caught, I guess—but because my hair hangs loose they keep hauling Wild Men in here for-me to mate with. And it’s gotten pretty hectic, let me tell you! The way I feel about myself, a mate for someone maybe, a dinner no. I’d been conditioned to expect nothing but Wild Men, and the moment I saw you with all that flopping hair, I said to myself, Rachel, here we go again. If I’d had any sense, I’d have paid some attention to the fact that you were carrying spears and knapsacks and all kinds of fully human equipment.”

“Your name is Rachel? Mine’s Eric, Eric the Eye.”

She scrambled to her feet and held out a small hand warmly. “Hello, Eric. I’m Rachel Esthersdaughter, Rachel for short. It’s good to have someone to talk to. A front-burrower,” she mused. “Naturally, you’ve never seen Wild Men. They practically never get to the front burrows—it’s too far from the Outside for their comfort. But my people have to be battling them back to their wide open Spaces all the time. The Monsters have apparently been picking up a Iot of them, though, for experimental purposes; they must have traps all over the Outside. Hey, look.”

Eric followed her gaze upwards. The Monster who had brought him was swinging ponderously around and moving off.

Rachel giggled. “Ah-h, how sweet. He feels he’s made a match at last. He wants to leave the lovers alone. First time in a long while he hasn’t had to remove a corpse from this cage immediately afterward.”

Feeling awkward and embarrassed, Eric inquired: “What made him decide that everything is all right?”

“Well, first, the fact that I didn’t kill you, of course. Then he sees us shaking hands. I don’t think they know any more about us, really, than we know about them. They probably think the act of shaking hands is it. You know, Love’s Old Sweet Song, one mad moment of passion, my soul shudders and my senses reel,”

Eric felt his face turning red. He’d never come across any woman as direct and as casual as this; it was particularly disconcerting in combination with the unbound hair that denoted an unmarried state. He tried to change the subject. “You’re from the Aaron People, Rachel, aren’t you?”

She had started to walk away from him to a corner of the cage. Now she turned back. “How did you know? Front-burrowers rarely reach our base… Oh, I remember. I called on Sweet Aaron the Leader.”

“That was part of it. And there was your name. In the cage I came from, there was a man of the Aaron People with a name like yours. Jonathan Danielson.”

She clutched at his arm. “Jonny? Alive?”

“He died just before I was taken out of the cage. He said that someone called Saul Davidson had also been captured alive, but the Monsters dissected him.”

Rachel’s eyes shut tight. “Ooh. Saul was my cousin. He was my favorite cousin. We were thinking of asking permission of the Aaron to mate after we came back from this expedition.”

Eric patted her hand which was digging into the muscle of his arm. “Well, the other news I got from Jonathan Danielson is not too good either. He said all fourteen members of the expedition were killed. One blow from a Monster’s foot.”

Shaking herself, the girl straightened. “Nonsense. I was part of the expedition, and I wasn’t harmed. I know of at least three others who were captured and used for experiments. Jonathan Danielson was a bad, bad leader, like all our men in this kind of situation—they’re too scholarly, they’re not able to handle action and emergencies. He didn’t see what happened to the rest of us because he was in a blind panic at the time.”

“A band leader who panicked? I never heard of such a thing.”

She took a deep breath and the wild, merry grin came back to her lips. “There are more things between the front and back burrows, Eric, my friend, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” She punched at him lightly. “Now, don’t get mad—I’m honestly not making fun of you. Your face gets all squooshy when you get upset. Come over here: I want to show you what I mean.”

In the corner of the cage, a great expanse of material was laid out. Every few handspreads, there was a pocket from which one or more unfamiliar objects protruded. It was very similar to the skirt worn by Jonathan Danielson and in which his face had been wrapped when he died. Except, Eric realized, this was much, much larger and rather like a cloak than a skirt: its owner would probably be several times more consequential among the Aaron people than Jonathan Danielson.

“Is this yours?” he asked with cautious respect.

“Mine, all mine. My head goes in that hole and I wear it all around me. It’s waterproof.”

“Waterproof?”

“Yes. Water runs off it without it getting wet. I’ve worn it on trips to the Outside where water falls on you from the ceiling. It’s also a sort of portable laboratory. You see this intriguing object?” Rachel had pulled a contraption out of one of the pockets. It was a rod folded in sections which she proceeded to open to its full length; at the end of the rod, a few wires attached it to a couple of small cylinders. “Now this device was the whole purpose of the expedition, not so much the device itself as the testing thereof. A group of us in the Female Society developed it and we had the idea it might neutralize the green ropes that the Monsters use. As you probably know, the ropes are based on the principle of protoplasm affiliation.”

Eric coughed and nodded gravely. “Like the Monster doorways that reverse the principle. Protoplasm rejection.”

Rachel pointed a delighted forefinger at him. “Right! Well, neutralizing protoplasm affiliation is something my people have been trying to do for a long time—and right now it’s more important than it ever was. They sent us off, one woman scientist and thirteen men who were supposed to protect her, they sent us off to find out if the thing would really work. And it worked. It worked only too well.”

She put the device back in its pocket and stared at it for a moment before going on. “We made it through the burrows all right, and all the way into Monster Territory without a casualty. Which is pretty good going for the Aaron People, I’m ashamed to tell you. We encounter a Monster the moment we get here to the lab, and little Rachel steps out to expose herself in the great good cause of scientific research. The Monster lets down a rope to grab me, I apply our neutralizer to it, and it works! The rope turns dark, goes all limp—no adhering capacity, no capturing quality, nothing. Cheers, you know? Applause from the multitude, V for victory, hooray for us and all that sort of thing. As far as I’m concerned, we’ve accomplished our mission: let’s be on our way and bring the glad tidings home. Besides, this Monster territory is not what I’d call cozy. I go stepping off, back to where the expedition is hiding, very happy over the fact that the Monster is all upset and rattled. He’s dropped the rope and is examining it with a stupid expression on his silly face. He doesn’t connect its failure in any way with Rachel, and, for the moment, he isn’t the slightest bit interested in Rachel. Or in her thirteen little protectors. They, unfortunately, have other ideas.”

“Jonathan Danielson was a brand-new band leader, and he was itching for glory,” Eric suggested. “He saw the chance of bringing a trophy home—a deactivated Monster rope, something that had never been paraded in the burrows before. I don’t know if I can blame him.”

“I can. Let me tell you, I can. It was a direct violation of our original marching orders which were to get back as soon as possible with information that was vital to the future of our people. But what’s a woman going to do? Once she’s completed the heavy thinking, she’s got tb follow the leadership of the men and obey their instructions in operational matters. Sexual differences are sexual differences, and who am I to put obstructions in a nice straight burrow? So, there I was, halfway back to the safety of the wall when Jonny Danielson gallops past me followed by the rest of the expedition. They all have those heroic masculine looks on their faces. Me—I just stop and watch. They run to the rope that’s lying limply on the floor and they’re about to pick it up. They’re not too worried about the Monster, because we can see it’s not carrying another rope—and who ever heard of a Monster picking up humans without a green rope? Those tentacles on the neck are just for fine manipulation. But I’m looking at those neck tentacles, and what I see scares me into absolute fits. Those tentacles are the wrong size and the wrong color.”

Eric remembered what Walter the Weapon-Seeker had told him. “You mean they were short and reddish, instead of long and light pink.”

“That’s exactly what I mean. Hey.” Rachel Esthersdaughter twisted her head at him appraisingly. “You know an awful lot for a front-burrower.”

“Well—” Eric shrugged. “I’ve been around and I’ve kept my ears open. Especially lately. But I thought those short-tentacled Monsters are the least dangerous. They’re the ones who run and panic when a man goes directly at them.”

“If they have a place to run to. This Monster was too close to the wall—not by our standards, but, you know, in terms of the big, big steps that they take. And the men of the expedition were coming at it in a great semicircle. It panicked, all right, but it didn’t run. It threw back its head. One tremendous, ear-splitting bellow—you never heard so much quantity of sheer fear packed in a single noise! I saw Jonathan Danielson freeze where he stood.

And then he went into panic! Instead of realizing what had happened and leading the men back immediately, he threw his spear away and began to run back and forth in a crazy zigzag pattern, yelling his head off. The men looked from him to the Monster, not knowing what to do next. Some followed him, others kept on going for the rope. Suddenly the Monster kicked out. It was a blind, fearful kick, more like a twitch than a kick, but when it was over there were smashed and bleeding men all over the floor. And then other Monsters came hurrying from all directions and grabbed up anyone who was still alive. I was too upset myself—panic again, or just plain shock, I don’t know—to think of using my neutralizer on the green rope with which they took me. By the time it occurred to me, I was too high in the air.”

“Sure. You’d have been killed if you’d made the green rope let go of you. Then they brought you here.”

“Then the Monsters brought me here,” the girl agreed. “And now, Eric, they’ve brought you here. To share this cage with me.”

19

Eric moved a short distance away from the cloak of many pockets. He squatted ceremoniously, placing his hands on the floor and bowing his head. This was the position he’d seen assumed by band leaders high in the councils of Mankind when they wished to consider a matter carefully. And there were many significant details in Rachel’s story to turn over in his mind.

First, it was now overwhelmingly clear that Strangers, however superior they might be in knowledge, were not worth a damn as expedition leaders—compared, that is, with the warriors of his own people. They knew so incredibly little of elementary precautions (Arthur the Organizer letting one of his men walk into a trap immediately after leaving the piece of Monster furniture—and remember the execrable march discipline all the way to this place?). And, as commanders, they were downright dangerous when something unexpected happened (Arthur’s absolute funk upon arrival in the cages of sin, Jonathan Danielson’s inexcusable hysteria, a hysteria stimulated by nothing more substantial than noise, but which had cost the lives of almost all his followers). You might make a useful rule out of it: the further back in the burrows you went, the poorer the quality of the leadership in any emergency situation—when you got to the Aaron People, the back back-burrowers, so to speak, you had band leaders capable of committing their men to any imaginable idiocy. The closer you got to Monster Territory, possibly because of the unremitting, day-to-day dangers of existence, the more likely you were to find in any given warrior the caution, the alertness and the adaptability that a man had the right to demand of his superior officer. And Strangers seemed to recognize this too: it had been easy for him to take command of the cage away from Arthur. Imagine a Stranger warrior as young as Eric taking over, in a similar position, from his uncle, Thomas the Trap-Smasher!

On the other hand, looked at with a different set of values, the rule reversed itself. The deeper into the burrows you went and the further from Monster Territory, the more complex the technology, the more extensive the knowledge and the more powerful the conceptual daring. Eric had always known that his tribe had traded off its excess food and occasional Monster artifacts to other peoples in the burrows to the rear for the finished spearheads and soft knapsack material which it was incapable of making for itself. Only recently had he learned of the existence of men like Walter the Weapon-Seeker, always on the lookout for strange Monster goods which could be turned to effective human use, and Arthur the Organizer, with his dream of a United Burrows practicing the new religion of Alien-Science. And now the Aaron People,capable of developing equipment which could combat and immobilize the Monster’s own weapons—this was truly carrying the fight to the enemy of Man!

If someone, someday, could ever fuse the two, the battle courage and cleverness of front-burrow tribes with the knowledge and imaginative valor of the back-burrowers, what glories might humanity then accomplish!

He looked up at Rachel. She had been studying him for some time. Her arms were crossed on her chest and her eyes were staring down at him intently.

“Do you know?” she said. “You’re not at all bad-looking.”

“Thank you, Rachel. This neutralizing device—you say the information about it was vital to the future of your people. In other words, it’s part of a plan to hit back at the Monsters?”

“Of course. But so is everything that human beings do these days. Do you have a mate?”

“No, not yet. What kind of a plan? I mean, is it an approach through Alien-Science or Ancestor-Science?”

She fluttered her left hand impatiently. “In the Aaron People we have nothing to do with either of those superstitions. We gave them both up a long time ago. Our Plan to hit back at the Monsters is real and entirely new. It’s different from anything you’ve ever heard of, and it’s the only one which will work. How come a healthy, handsome young warrior like you doesn’t have a mate?”

“I’ve only been a full warrior for a short time—I just passed my initiation ceremony. If your plans are neither Alien-Science nor—”

“Is that the only reason for your not having a mate? The fact that you’ve just celebrated your initiation ceremony?”

Eric rose with dignity. “There are—well, some other reasons. But that’s a personal matter. I’d rather not discuss it. What I am interested in is this Plan your people have to hit back at the—”

She smiled and shook her head. “Men and women. Practically two different species. If it weren’t for sex, they’d have nothing in common. Now I can’t tell you any more about my people’s strategy with the Monsters—I’ve talked too much already—but what I do want to canvass with you is the subject of mating. Mating, and nothing but mating, is our agenda, as far as I’m concerned. Mating, the pros and cons, the shades, the nuances, all about mating. What are those other reasons, Eric? I have to know.”

He hesitated. “I’m a singleton,” he said at last. “An only.”

“A what? A singleton—Oh. You mean you weren’t part of a litter. Your mother had just the one child—you. And the girls back in your tribe were afraid the condition might be hereditary. Well, that’s not what I call a problem. Anything else?”

“No, nothing else,” he told her angrily. “How can you say it’s not a problem? What’s worse than having no decent litter potential?”

“Many, many things. But let’s not go into them. Among the Aaron People, you may be interested to know, small litters are quite prevalent. Twins are about it for the average woman. For the very largest litters you have to go to the Wild Men whose women never come up with less than six at a birth. I think it has something to do with the amount of genetic distance from our ancestors. Or, perhaps, the differing infant mortality rates. But me, I’ll be quite satisfied with a singleton delivery—especially here, with no midwives from the Aaron People to help me at the confinement.”

Eric gaped at her. “Confinement? Here? You mean what you’re thinking about—what you’re suggesting—”

“My dear barbarian stalwart, I am not thinking and I am not suggesting. I am proposing. I am proposing an alliance betwixt me and thee, from this day forward, to have and to hold, in sickness and in health. Do you accept my proposal, or do you not accept my proposal?”

“But why? You’ve never seen me before—you don’t know anything about me—we come from different peoples. Look, Rachel, it’s not that I’m trying to raise objections. But—but, I haven’t been in the cage long, and you’re moving kind of fast. Too fast for me to understand you. There must be a reason.”

“Yes, there is. In fact, there’s more than one reason, Let’s skip lightly over the fact that I’m not getting any younger and a girl has to think of her future. Let us also merely note in passing that your appearance pleases me and your personality pleases me and that you don’t seem to have any vicious characteristics. All well and good, but not crucial. The following, however, is crucial.”

She moved closer to him and took his hand. Eric felt excitement begin to build inside his body as he appreciated the girl’s nakedness now. All his life he’d been surrounded by girls conventionally naked. But it was different when you realized that very shortly you and she …

“The important reasons,” Rachel said softly, “have to do with saving lives. Your life, and probably mine. There were three other boys from the expedition up here with me originally. I saw them taken out, one by one, and I saw them being—each one was—oh, you know. You’ve seen it.”

“I know, all right,” Eric told her fiercely. “I saw what they do to us.”

“Once they took me out, and I thought it was the end. But after passing me from one green rope to another—four or five Monsters were in a huddle over me—they returned me to the cage. Sammy Josephson—he was the last one left here—Sammy suggested that they might know I was a female and, well, something of a rarity in Monster territory. We talked about it, but before we were sure or had worked out any conclusions, it was Sammy’s turn.

What they did to him—oh-h! I think that was the worst of them all.”

She shook her head heavily from side to side. Eric found himself squeezing her hand. She smiled at him tremulously, nodded, and went on: “And then came the succession of Wild Men, followed by you—all with long, unbound hair, just like mine. It’s apparent that the Monsters do know I’m a female, and that they’re trying to mate me. Now, Eric, I don’t particularly want to cooperate with them in their search for knowledge about human behavior, but on this point and by this time, I’m more than willing to let them have their way. If we don’t, they’ll take you out of here eventually and tear you apart in an experiment. And they’ll probably get tired of waiting and do the same to me. The best I have to hope for, once they remove you, is more and more Wild Men coming in here with their fangs all shiny and that gleam in their eyes which says, ‘Food! On two delicious legs, the way it should be!’ I’m tired of fighting and killing. That’s a man’s job. You be my man and do it for me.”

Eric adjusted his knapsack straps self-consciously as he absorbed her analysis and her final entreaty. She was right. Given the situation, the only sensible thing was to let the Monsters know they were satisfied with each other and were mating. And he’d fallen into pure luck—Rachel constituted a fantastic prize, far beyond his wildest dreams of a mate. A girl with this much knowledge would outrank anyone in the Female Society of Mankind—probably in most Stranger Female Societies as well. That would automatically mean a tremendous boost to his own rank, if he ever got affiliated with a specific people again.

All well and good. But he was a man and a warrior. And mating was a serious business: it must be conducted with dignity, and according to tradition.

“Turn around,” he ordered. “Let me look at you.” Rachel obeyed with complete docility, as he knew she would. Front-burrow or back-burrow, Aaron People or Mankind, there could not be that much difference in the customs of humanity. A man’s Right to Examine was everywhere the same.

She stepped away a pace and turned round and round slowly, spreading her hair high behind her with the backs of her hands so that the lines of her body could be completely visible: This also brought her breasts up a bit more prominently: they were by no means the largest breasts he had seen on a girl, Eric noted, but they were pretty enough and would probably do. And while her thighs and hips were a shade too narrow as well, he had to remember that the demands of a singleton birth—the greatest probability here—were much smaller than those of the multiple deliveries a husband usually had to take into consideration.

On the other hand, she had an absolutely lovely, well-shaped rump, which, within the limitations posed by the narrowness of her hips, left nothing to be desired. And her face—he let go of the rump, turned her around again and took hold of her chin with the thumb and forefinger of his right hand—her face was infinitely appealing. Large, glowing brown eyes above a small, impudent nose, a soft mouth full of femininity that held an uncertain smile forever imprisoned at its corners, warm, beautifully curving cheeks, a high, white forehead, and, finally, clouds upon clouds of brown hair that was certainly of decent, adequate length. While her face was the least relevant portion of a woman’s attractiveness, Eric had always had certain weaknesses in that respect which he had admitted only to himself. He was glad her face was the best part of her. Add to the face that truly first-class rump, consider that neither her hips, thighs nor breasts were outright failures, throw in the well-stocked mind which provided a magnificent dowry and thus substantial advancement for her man in any conceivable tribe—yes, Eric had to admit that Rachel was a treasure worth shedding blood for.

It would hardly do to tell her so, of course. Members of the Male Society must always maintain a certain essential diplomatic reserve toward members of the Female Society.

He moved back, folding his arms slowly and emphatically on his chest to indicate that the Examination was over.

Rachel relaxed, letting out a huge breath. “Are you satisfied?” she inquired with exactly the proper amount of anxiety. Eric was terribly pleased: he’d been afraid from her jocular manner of speaking that she knew nothing at all of formal behavior.

“I am satisfied,” he told her, using the decorous phrases of the courtship formula. “You please me. I want you for my mate.”

“Good. I am glad. Now I claim the Right of Invitation. You may not approach me sexually for the first time until I give you leave.”

“That is your right,” Eric agreed. “I will wait for your call. May it come soon! May it come soon! May it come soon!”

And it was over. They stood apart and grinned at each other self-consciously, observing mutual individuality return as the ritual prototype was sloughed off. Above them, below them, around them, lay the white vastnesses of Monster territory, the transparent cages in which fellow humans awaited fate and the Monsters’ pleasure. But here in this cage, they were mate and mate, Eric and Rachel, two separate people who would become one, when the girl felt the time was ripe to beckon.

Suddenly Rachel giggled. “I was so nervous! Were you nervous?”

“A little,” Eric admitted. “After all, from start to finish, it was a pretty fast mating. One of the fastest I ever heard about.”

“I hope we didn’t leave anything out, Eric.”

“No, we didn’t leave anything out. Nothing that was important, anyway. Except,” he suddenly remembered with annoyance, “except for a condition I wanted to make. Something I wanted you to agree to do before we went through the ceremony. Then I got so caught up in the ritual responses that I forgot all about it.”

“Your tough luck,” she sang out and began a mad little dance around him. “Too late, too late! Agreements before the mating—never after.” At the angry expression on his face, she stopped and took his hands. “I’m only joking, Eric. I have too much of a sense of humor for my own damn good. Among my people, there is a saying: “Most children are born with a wail. Rachel Esthersdaughter was born with a laugh. And she’ll probably die with a laugh.’ You tell me what you were going to ask, and I’ll do it. Whatever it is. Anything.”

“Well” Now that he had come to it, Eric found difficulty in the phrasing. He didn’t know if a man had ever asked a woman such a thing before. “I want you to teach me. I want you to teach me everything you know.”

“You want me to—you mean, you want an education?”

“That’s it, Rachel, that’s what I want,” he said eagerly. “An education. Knowledge. I don’t expect you to tell me the secrets of the Aaron People’s Female Society—I’m not asking you to break any oaths. But I want to know what at least the average man in your people knows. About the Monsters, about counting, about the history of our ancestors. How Alien-Science came to be, how Ancestor-Science came to be. How Strangers make the things they do, what the things are used for. How—What—I don’t even know what I want to know!” he broke off miserably.

“But I do,” she said gently touching him on the face with an open, caressing palm. “And I’ll be very willing to teach you, Eric, very willing indeed, darling. Don’t you worry about my Female Society and its secrets: engineering is the last thing we’ll get to. Do you want to start now?”

“Yes!” he exclaimed, his eyes shining. “I want to start right this moment!”

“Then sit down.” She lowered herself to the floor and took some writing implements from one of the pockets of the nearby cloak. Eric squatted beside her. Now that he’d been able to put it into words, he found himself filled with a hunger such as he’d never known. The hunger for food, the hunger for sex—they were nothing like this. This was a singing hunger that filled your mind and made it want to hear more and more and more of the song.

Rachel looked at him quizzically for a moment. “What a way to begin a mating! With scratcher and repeatable slate. If my friends back in the Aaron People ever heard of this! If your friends—But Eric, seriously, I’m very pleased. That was the only thing about mating with you that really bothered me: you being a front-burrow barbarian. In our terms, of course, and who are we to say that our terms are right? But it did bother me. I’ll teach you everything I know. Where do you want me to begin?”

Eric leaned towards her, his whole body tense. “Begin with protoplasm. I want to know all there is to know about protoplasm.”

20

Pursuing knowledge, Eric discovered, was like running through the burrows. The corridor you were traveling kept forking off into two or three others. Most of the time, you could only see a little ways ahead; suddenly, you came around a curve into a confrontation that astonished you.

Astronomy, for example, was such a confrontation. At first, it seemed utterly useless: a body of arcane, almost incomprehensible data, unrelated to anything at all real. You learned astronomy by rote, associating the various strange names with little circles scratched out on the repeatable slate.

First there was Earth, Earth which was to be won back from the Monsters. Earth was some kind of ball which hung, or revolved, or wandered in something that was called space. Earth was a planet, and there were other planets in space; there were also stars and comets and galaxies, dust and gas and radiation, all of them likewise in space, most of them incredible distances from Earth.

Eric kept repeating the names of planets and astronomical objects which meant nothing to him, which simply accumulated in his head like so much fuzz, until one day he stumbled on the trick of analogy. If you thought of Earth like a warm, safe corridor that you were in just before you opened the door to Monster territory, well then, opening the door was like soaring off Earth. Monster territory with its alien environment and incredible dangers would be space, and on the other side of it you might find another doorway leading to a strange new burrow-that would be another planet, or another star.

All right, that helped, it made it a bit more understandable; but certainly no more pertinent or useful.

Then came the confrontation in Eric’s mind—and he gasped as he came around the curve.

He remembered the conversation with Walter the Weapon-Seeker while they were on expedition to this place. Walter had talked of a boy in his band who had wondered what lay outside of Monster territory itself, what it was that compared to the Monster burrows as the Monster burrows compared to the human ones. Walter had dismissed the ideas as too much for the human mind to contemplate. But it wasn’t! Here, here in astronomy was the answer. A much larger place, Earth, lay outside and all around Monster Territory. And a much, much larger place, interplanetary or interstellar space, lay outside and all around Earth. The Monsters, in terms of what they ultimately inhabited, were as trivial, as insignificant, as infinitesimal as any human beings.

.And were human beings truly insignificant? They hadn’t always been. Eric thrilled with the pride of belonging to a race that had worked out a system of recorded signals as clever as the alphabet, that could take ordinary numbers and squeeze them into unrecognizable shapes, pulling out a piece here, a piece there…

“No, Eric, no!” Rachel announced definitely, flinging her scratcher down on the cloak near which they were sitting. “There’s no point in discussing this any further. You’re trying to push me into an explication of Homer’s method and synthetic division—and I absolutely refuse. My math isn’t that good in the first place, and after all, sweetheart, this is supposed to be a survey course and no more. You’re a glutton: you absorb and absorb and absorb. Sometimes you frighten me. You could go without sleep for days, couldn’t you?”

Eric nodded. He felt as if he were on a war band foray. Who wanted sleep when you were filled with the excitement of what you might capture if you only kept going? But women, he remembered, were different. They never seemed to feel that particular excitement.

He considered his mate carefully and with tenderness. She did look tired. Well, they had been at their lessons almost from the moment they had opened their eyes. “Do you want to go to sleep, darling?”

“Ooh, I’d love to!” she said, her voice throbbing tragically but her eyes still grinning at him. “I’ve been thinking of nothing else. But I can’t. You’re the man and the leader here. You have to declare it night.”

“I do,” he said. “Night. Let’s sack in.” He lay back on the hard cage floor and watched her put the writing apparatus away in the proper pocket of her cloak. Eric thought to himself how graceful she was, how very, very desirable. And how much she knew! Much more than she had taught him. This synthetic division, for example, he pondered as she nestled her head into his shoulder—how would you do it? Was it at all like ordinary long division? If it was—

Yes, he thought, while he was opening his eyes and about to declare it day, yes, the pursuit of knowledge was like a trip through an unexplored section of the burrows. Once in a while, you’d say, “That little corridor off there—where does that one lead?” And your teacher would say, just like your band leader had when you’d been an apprentice warrior, “I don’t know, and it’s not important right now: pay attention to where we’re going.”

Eric paid attention, and he learned. He learned some chemistry, some physics, some biology. He learned about chlorophyllous plants which he had never been near in his entire life and about one-celled animals which had been around him and about him all through his life but which he had been unable to see any more than the plants.

“And your people really have? Through those microscope things?”

“Not microscope things, Eric—microscope thing. We have exactly one set of clumsy, hand-ground lenses. In the time when our ancestors owned the Earth, they had—oh, they must have had dozens. But they were an advanced, technologically oriented civilization: it was no trick for them to make two, three, even five microscopes at once. I mean that—don’t look dubious—I’m not trying to feed you myths and legends. These were people, remember, who had achieved space travel themselves before the Monsters arrived, not interstellar flight, as the Monsters had, and not colonization as yet of other worlds, but they were making their way from planet to planet of their own system in ships that were almost as wonderful and complicated as those the Monsters suddenly turned up in. Our tragedy was that all the peoples of the Earth had at their disposal no more than about ten space ships—simple interplanetary exploring craft—when the Monsters came pouring out of the stars with an invasion fleet of thousands. Another century of development, maybe only fifty years, and we’d have had a space navy that wouldn’t have been brushed aside by the first Monster patrol to arrive in the solar system.”

Eric smiled and stared through the bottom of the cage at other cages suspended in the white vastness where human captives lay sleeping or walked about restlessly. “The suddenness of the attack…” he quoted.

“What?”

“Oh, it’s part of the catechism I had to learn as a boy—from the Ancestor-Science faith I was brought up in. I remember how shocked I was when my uncle said it was all garbage. I was so upset! But then I learned to live with the idea. You know, that it was garbage, a flock of nonsense imposed on us by our elders to keep us from asking questions and learning the truth about our past. And now, here I am again, learning that the people who have searched out more records concerning our ancestors than anyone else in the burrows—they have no more to say, basically, than that, as to why humanity succumbed. The suddenness of the attack… It makes me wonder whether any beliefs are true. Or—I don’t know—whether all beliefs are true.”

“Hey, there.” Rachel reached up and grabbed a handful of his hair. She pulled his head back and forth gently. “Just a little education and you feel you’re ready for metaphysics.”

“Is that metaphysics?” Eric asked, delighted to have rediscovered an ancient human technique all by himself.

The girl elaborately ignored his question. “You have a lot of hard facts to learn yet,” she went on, “you old Eric the Eye you, even if you do gulp down information like so much drinking water. Maybe all beliefs are true—in certain ways, for certain people, at certain times. They wouldn’t be beliefs if they didn’t contain some significant core of reality. Like the stories that have come down tous of a group of our ancestors who believed that man was getting too much above himself, and that the arrival of the Monsters constituted a judgment, a judgment from some supernatural force to obliterate our civilization. They felt that space travel and atomics were just the last straw, and that once we developed those, the supernatural force was compelled to write us off. Well, you know something? They might have been right.”

“They were? How?”

Rachel slid the repeatable slate, covered with scientific diagrams, back into a cloak pocket. Then she walked to the wall of the cage near which they had been sitting and leaned against it, rubbing her forehead against t’-e smooth, cold surface. She looked very tired.

“In a couple of ways, Eric. You take your pick. First, religiously. It’s always possible that there was—or is—such a supernatural force, capable of coming to just such a judgment. And when you look at how puny, how ridiculously tiny, our species appears today, scuttling about the dwelling places of the Monsters, it does seem that back then, in our last great period, we did get slightly above ourselves. Now, if you ask me why—to use some ancestral phraseology—we should be cast down and the Monsters raised up, I tell you frankly I don’t have the least idea. I only say that if you postulate a supernatural force, you are not necessarily postulating a mode of thought understandable by human beings nor necessarily sympathetic to their aspirations.”

Eric rose and stood beside her. He leaned against the wall With his back, not taking his eyes off her, completely fascinated by the concepts which her pretty mouth was shaping. “Nor,” he suggested, “do we necessarily postulate a mode of thought sympathetic to Monster aspirations.”

“Perhaps. But what do we know of Monster aspirations, of the way they live with each other, compared to the ways human beings have always lived with each other? They might be, among themselves, decent and brotherly creatures—and how would we find out? We know as little about them as they know about us. They don’t even seem to consider us intelligent, to connect us with the planet-wide civilization they destroyed centuries ago. Well, who knows? In their eyes, maybe it wasn’t a real civilization, maybe we look more natural to them in our present state. And us? We don’t understand the first thing about them after I don’t know how many auld lang synes of observation—what kind of government they have, if they have a government, what kind of language they have, if they have a language, what kind of sex life they have, if they have a sex life.”

“What they originally used the explosive red blobs for, why some of them will rush and trample us and others will panic and dash away,” Eric added, thinking of the practical problems with which he had been grappling at the times when Rachel had been asleep and he had paced back and forth in the cage by himself. “All that you’re saying, though, is that they’re different: they’re not provably better. Maybe this supernatural force thought so, but then I’d argue with it: I’d question its assumptions. On what other basis did our ancestors—this group of them who believed the coming of the Monsters was a judgment—on what other basis could they have been right?”

Rachel smiled at him, her eyes a tiny distance from his face. “You’d argue with the supernatural force, would you, Eric—you’d tell it that it was wrong? I’ll bet you would: I can just see you doing it. You’re the sum of everything that was ever good and bad about the human male. The second basis is moral; you might say it derived from an abiding and justified sense of guilt.”

“Justified? What kind of guilt?”

“Certain beliefs, as I said… somewhere, in each, there’s a significant core of reality. Man was lord of the Earth for a long time, Eric, and for that long time he was guilt-ridden. All of his religion and all of his literature—the literature that was written by sane men and not madmen—was filled with guilt. If you put the legendary part aside and just look at the things he really did, he had reason to be. He enslaved his fellow men, he tortured and humiliated them. He destroyed his fellow civilizations, he demolished their temples and universities and used the stones to build outhouses. Sometimes men would trample on women and mock their hurt, sometimes women would trample on men and mock their hurt. In some places parents would keep children in chains for all of their growing up; in other places children would send useless parents out with orders to die. And this was with his own species, with homo sapiens. What did he do with species that were brothers and with whom he grew to maturity? We know what he did with Neanderthal man: how many others lie in the unmarked graves of anthropological history?”

“Man is an animal, Rachel! His duty is to survive.”

“Man is more than an animal, Eric. His duty comprehends more than survival. If one animal feeds on another and, in the process, wipes it out, that’s biology; if man does the same thing, out of overpowering need or mere caprice, he knows he has committed a crime. Whether he’s right or wrong in taking this attitude isn’t important: he knows he has committed a crime. That is a thoroughly human realization, that it cannot be dismissed with an evolutionary shrug.”

He moved away from the wall and strode up and down the cage in front of her, opening and closing his hands uncomfortably, clasping them together and pulling them apart. “All right,” he said at last, coming to a stop. “Man murdered his brothers all through history and his brother species all through prehistory. Suppose I don’t dismiss it. What then?”

“Then you examine the criminal’s record a bit more thoroughly. What about the other species—those you might call his cousins? I’ve told you of animals he domesticated: the ox, the ass, the horse, the dog, the cat, the pig. Do you know what is covered by the word domestication?

Castration, for one thing, hybridization, for another. Taking the mother’s milk away from her young. Taking the skin away from the body. Taking the meat away from the bones, as part of a planned economic process, and training one animal to lead others of its kind to slaughter. Taking the form away from the creature so that it becomes a comic caricature of its original self—as was done with dogs. Taking the purpose away from the generative powers so that it becomes a mad, perpetual factory of infertile eggs—as was done with hens. Taking its most basic expression of pride and turning it into drudgery or sport as was done with horses and bulls.

“Don’t laugh, Eric. You’re still thinking of man’s survival, but I’m still talking of man’s very ancient moral sense. You do all those things—to your fellow creatures, your fellow species, your fellow men—you do all those things for millennia upon millennia, while you are examining the question of good and evil, of right and wrong, of decency and cruelty, you do all those things as your father did, and his father before him, and do you mean to tell me that whatever plea is made to justify you—by science, by philosophy, by politics—you are not going to feel forever and omnipresently guilty as you stand shivering and naked in your own awful sight? That you’re not going to feel you have accumulated a tremendous debt to the universe in which you live, and that the bill may one day be presented by another species, slightly stronger than yours, slightly smarter, and very different? And that then this new species will do unto you as you have done unto others from the beginning of your life on the planet? And that if what you did when you had the power was justified, then what will be done to you when you no longer have the power is certainly justified, is doubly, triply, quadruply justified?”

Rachel flung her arms out as she finished. Eric looked at her pounding, sweating bosom. Then he followed the direction of her bowed head and stared once more at the transparent cages filled with human beings that dotted the white space beneath them, cages here, cages there, and cages into the furthermost distance.

21

Eric learned many things. He learned about love, for example. He learned about the Aaron People.

Love he found very, very sweet. It started with lust and then became much more complicated. Some parts of it some of the best parts—were downright incomprehensible.

He marveled that Rachel Esthersdaughter, beside whom he was still little more than a bare ignoramus, should defer to his decisions in all matters more and more every day—once she had made the initial decision of giving herself to him. He marveled at the delight she showed in deferring to him, and at the admiration and pleasure she displayed in everything he said and did, he, a brash barbarian who had only discovered from her recently—and then with open-mouthed astonishment—that the burrows in which he had spent most of his life were no more than air spaces in the insulating material with which the Monsters protected their homes from the unpleasant chills of Earth.

He wondered constantly at other changes in her, the way her mad, wild humor seemed to dissolve in his embrace, the way her flashing grin would be insensibly replaced by an intense, caressing smile and her customary twinkle by the most searching of looks in suddenly serious brown eyes. Those looks tore at his heart: they seemed to express a hope that he would treat her well, along with a calm acceptance of the fact that it was entirely his decision to treat her well or ill—and that whatever his decision, she would cheerfully abide by it.

He was entranced by the differences in her body, not the differences he had always noted between man and woman so much as the unexpected ones: the smallness of her fingernails, the otherness of her skin texture, the incredible lightness of her vast length of brown hair.

“Most of the Aaron People have your kind of coloring, don’t they?” he asked, holding her hair in his right hand and winding froths of it round and round upon his forearm.

Rachel snuggled closer and rubbed the top of her head up and down along his arm. “Most,” she agreed. “We’re a bit inbred, I’m afraid. It’s been pretty much the same genetic pool for generations. We don’t capture many women from other tribes and our Male Society rarely initiates an outside warrior.”

“But they would take me? I mean, if we ever made it back to them?”

“They would, darling. They’d have to. I have too much knowledge and training for my people to lose. And they wouldn’t get me again without you. ‘You take my Eric,’ I’d tell them, ‘you take my Eric and make him feel nice and welcome and loved or I’ll get so unhappy that I’ll forget everything I ever knew.’ That’s what I’d say, and there wouldn’t be anything at all to worry about. Especially these days, with their plans about the Monsters and my very specialized and useful set of facts.”

“These plans, Rachel: can’t you give me some idea what they are? Hitting back at the Monsters in a new and different way—it’s so exciting, but every time I try to figure out what they could be—”

She rolled away abruptly and sat up facing him. “Eric,” she said, “I can’t, and by now you know better than you ever did before that I can’t. Don’t keep asking me. It’s a secret that has to do with the future of my people. I’ve been entrusted with it, and I can’t discuss it with anyone who isn’t a member of my people. When you are, you’ll know—and you’ll also be a part of the Plan.”

Eric held up his hand in the gesture of peace. “All right,” he begged, smiling. “Sorry and never again.” He waited for her to come back to his arms, but she continued to sit a distance away, in thought.

“You were talking about making it back to my people,” Rachel said at last, still looking off in the white distance, through the transparent walls of the cage. “Have you thought of how we might do it?”

“Escape, you mean?”

“I mean escape. From this cage.”

“No, but I have a couple of ideas. One that I think might be good. It needs a lot of working out.”

Her eyes swung back and met his. “Work it out then, darling,” she said in a low, steady voice. “Work it out soon. We’re liable to be pressed for time.”

They sat and stared at each other. Then Rachel rose and Eric did too. She came into his arms.

“I haven’t wanted to say anything—I thought—I wasn’t certain. I am certain now.”

“You’re pregnant!”

She nodded, placed her hands on either side of his face and kissed him slowly, softly. “Listen, darling,” she whispered, her cheek against his. “Any method of escape is bound to involve a certain amount of gymnastics. And at some time in the not too distant future, little Rachel is going to be a lot less limber than she is now. She’s going to be very clumsy about climbing from one place to another—and she’s going to be awfully slow if any running has to be done. If we make a move, it has to be well before that.”

Eric held her tight against him. “Those damned Monsters!” he swore. “Their damned laboratory! Their damned experiments! They are not going to get my child.”

“It could be children,” Rachel reminded him. “You may be a singleton, but a real litter is still a definite possibility.”

“There’d be no escape, then,” he said soberly. “You’re right: we’ve got to get out of here before you give birth. The sooner the better.”

Rachel pushed herself away from him and turned aside. “Yes,” she whispered, mostly to herself. “It was one thing to save our necks by giving the Monsters what they wanted: a breeding pair. But to give them the results of the breeding—”

“Stop it, Rachel! We’re not at that point yet.” And Eric moved off to make yet another circuit of the cage, yet another examination of Monster territory as it was visible through the transparent walls and floor. He had to be a warrior again, watching for an advantage, looking for a soft spot at which to aim an attack.

All of the plans for escape he had discussed with Jonathan Danielson and Walter the Weapon-Seeker had been inadequate; but here there was a new factor, something that had been nibbling at his mind for weeks. So far it had been only a nibble, not a bite. He concentrated on it demandingly, impatiently, both outer and inner eyes wide open.

There were no more lessons, at least none where the studies were guided wholly by the girl. Now he sat at her feet and asked her questions, pulling her back and forth in the areas of knowledge that corresponded to the places where he felt the nibbling sensation in his mind.

“Rachel, I must know about every single item in the pockets of your cloak. That small, pointed thing, for example—”

“You told me once what your people think this entire Monster dwelling looks like. Could’ you draw a picture of it for me—”

“Can you cut up a few small sections of the cloak? Can they be sewn together? You said you had some kind of adhesive, didn’t you—”

“Rachel, darling, can you tell me in simple, noncomplicated language what you know of the principles behind the various vehicles our ancestors used? Automobiles,boats, airplanes, spacecraft. Whatever you know about them, whatever you can explain—”

Sometimes he amused her. Sometimes he almost terrified her. Always he ended by exhausting her. “There is a difference between men and women,” she would mutter as she fell back finally, locking her arms behind her head and closing her eyes. “And now I know what it is. Women have to rest. Men don’t.”

Truly, Eric seemed to have no need of rest. He would prowl up and down the cage in long, springy, nervous strides, shaking a single fist over and over again, as if he were trying to hammer an idea open in mid-air. Or he would sit in a corner, staring down at a Monster going by—but while he sat and stared, his whole body would vibrate, faster, faster, faster. Or he would get involved in experiments: experiments with the properties of some piece of equipment in the cloak, experiments that could be conducted only when food was being dropped in, or only when the cage was being flooded and washed, or only when one of their immense captors had, come by to look them over.

In the beginning, Rachel worked with him and tried to help him—that is, when she could find out what it was that he was investigating: frequently he had no idea of the goal himself. But more and more she tended to leave him to his own researches. She would answer the questions he suddenly snapped at her, giving him relevant data or her carefully considered opinions. Otherwise, she was content to lie and watch him work, smiling at him fondly whenever he turned a look murky with concentration in her direction. And more and more, she spent her time stretched out at full length, dozing.

He understood, even though it was infuriating not to have the full, alert services of her well-stocked mind. First, he was her man: she had put herself and their mutual problem in his hands—and she trusted him. But more important, something was at work that he had seen many times before among the females of Mankind: pregnancy usually created a certain placid euphoria in a woman; it was as if her thoughts were pledged exclusively to the helpless thing growing slowly within her body. With Rachel it was starting early.

Eric understood, but the understanding only made him more frenzied, more restless, more probing and determined. It was up to him and him alone whether his family were ever to wander in the burrows as free creatures—-or whether they were to be forever caged and at the mercy of the Monsters’ agony-filled investigations. He would escape, he told himself, beginning yet another new line of experimentation. He would. He would.

One day there was an interruption. A Monster came by and dropped Roy the Runner into their cage.

At first, Eric had scrambled for a spear as the strange human, released from the green rope, had struggled to his feet near where Rachel sat, both hands over her mouth and her eyes wide with fear. Then he recognized Roy and called out his name. All three of them relaxed and exhaled prodigiously. They grinned weakly at each other.

The Monster, satisfied after a period of watching that no mayhem was to be committed, rumbled its tremendous bulk away on other business.

Eric had told Rachel about Roy. Now he introduced the Runner to his mate. Roy was enormously impressed. A woman of the Aaron People, willingly, without coercion … His voice, when he began telling the history of the other cage since Eric had left, was low and almost greasily respectful.

“After they took you out, we didn’t have a leader for a while—the men had lost the habit of following Arthur the Organizer. He’d lost something also: he wasn’t very eager to give orders anymore. So I tried removing my head straps and letting my hair hang free again. You know, to look like you. I figured if I looked like you, maybe the men would take orders from me as if you were giving them. Only it didn’t work. Walter the Weapon-Seeker took over for a while, until the—”

“That’s it, Eric,” Rachel broke in. “The loose hair. That’s why they brought him here.” She tumbled the hair at her neck with the back of a hand. “The loose hair. You, me, the Wild Men. The Monsters don’t know I’m pregnant. They’re still trying to get me mated.”

Eric nodded, but Roy the Runner looked very puzzled and stared first at one and then at the other of them. “Go on, Roy. I’ll explain it all later. How many of the expedition are left?”

“Practically none. About six, besides me. And not all in those Monster experiments, either. A lot of them died in the fighting.”

“Fighting? You started fighting among yourselves?”

The tall thin Runner shook his head impatiently. “No—what was there to fight over? Lots of food and no women. What happened was the Monsters put a whole flock of strange men in our cage, men like you’ve never seen or heard about. I mean not Wild Men even. Little brown men, about half our size, but strong, strong as hell. They didn’t use spears. They had clubs and something they called slingshots. It was hard to understand them. They talked—I don’t know, they talked funny, not like other human beings at all. None of the Strangers had ever seen men like them before, not Arthur the Organizer, not anybody. They had names like Nicky Five and Harry Twelve and Beelzebub Two. All of them had names like that—it was crazy.”

A small noise from Rachel. Eric looked at her. “I know about them,” she said. “They’re not from this house at all. They’re from another house, the one next to ours. Naturally, another house—they’re almost a totally different breed of humanity. Men from my people have visited them and brought back some strange, strange tales.”

“What does she mean ‘another house’?”

“A Monster house,” Eric told Roy. “All of us Mankind, the Strangers, the Aaron People—we all live in the walls of one particular Monster house. Actually, we all live in just one wing of that one house. In the other wings, there are lots of other peoples, some like us, some different. But people who live in another house entirely have to be very different from us. They’ve been breeding away from us for centuries, and their language and culture have been changing.” At the Runner’s bewildered expression, he said: “All right, Roy, I’ll explain that later, too. Don’t worry about it now. These men came into the cage and started fighting?”

“They did, from the moment they arrived,” Roy answered, relieved to get back to a matter that was familiar and somewhat understandable. “They were screaming, just as we were, when the Monsters dropped them into the cage. Then they calmed down: they stopped screaming and they started fighting with us. They didn’t like anything we did. They said we didn’t even know how to eat: the only right way to eat, according to them, was stretched out at full length on the floor of the cage, face down. And you weren’t supposed to touch the food with your hands—you had to eat it off the floor. There were lots of other things: the way we slept, the way we talked, the way we moved our bowels. Everything had to be done their way—they were like lunatics! Day after day we lived in opposite corners of the cage with sentries posted while we slept, and every time we were fed—or watered—or anything—there’d be a full-scale battle in the middle, spears against clubs and slingshots, and three, four corpses for the Monsters to dispose of.”

“Finally, though, you beat them?”

“Nobody beat anybody. What happened was the Monsters brought up a big sort of buzzing machine and put it over the cage. From that time on, whenever you felt mad enough to kill someone, you got a terrible pain in the head, and it got worse and worse until you thought you’d go clear out of your mind. The moment you stopped thinking about killing, the pain disappeared. Let me tell you, Eric, we got to be friends, us and those strange little brown men! We got to be friends, no more arguments, no more battles, no more killing—just the Monsters taking a man out every once in a while and tearing him to pieces. You know, good times again?”

Eric and Rachel smiled grimly.

“That’s what I expected was going to happen to me when they pulled me out today. Eric, was I glad to see you! I thought you’d been sewered a long, long time ago. They took Arthur the Organizer out only two days ago. He was lucky: they dropped some black powder on him and he was dead fast just like that. But Manny the Manufacturer—”

Eric held up a hand to stop him. ” Pm not interested in that,” he said. “Tell me: you said that sometimes there were three or four corpses to dispose of while the fighting was going on. Were they all taken out of the cage together?”

The Runner screwed up his eyes and thought back. “I think so. Yes. Yes, they were all taken out of the cage at the same time. Once a day, whoever was dead, down would come the green ropes and out they’d all go together.”

“And whatever they were wearing, whatever spears or clubs might be lying across their bodies—that would go out too?”

“Sure. You saw it. Remember the guy that Walter said was from the Aaron People, the one who died the day after we arrived? They took him out with his skirt wrapped around his face just the way we had placed it. That’s the way they dumped him into the black hole—that’s the way they do it with everyone who dies in the cage.”

“The Monsters do seem to have a thing about death,” Rachel mused aloud. “Or at least death as it has to do with human bergs. Their interest in us is strictly in viva, as the ancestors would say. But what difference does that make to you, Eric? Once we’re dead—”

“Once we’re dead, we have a good chance to stay alive,” he told her. “And I’m not being funny. Roy, do you want to escape with us?”

After one startled stare, the Runner bobbed his head emphatically. “Do I! Any plan you have, no matter how dangerous it is, count me in. The way I see it, there’s no real future here for an ambitious young man.”

“The plan I have is very dangerous. An awful lot of things can go wrong, but it’s absolutely the only way out of the cage that I can see. All right, let’s get started.”

Under his instructions, they went into action. He drove them both the way he’d been driving himself, doggedly, unremittingly. And the work went fast.

But once Rachel looked up and asked anxiously: “Aren’t you taking a lot for granted, Eric? You have inference piled on inference. We don’t know that much for certain about the construction of Monster houses.”

“If I’m wrong, we’ll be killed. And if we stay here?”

Rachel put her head down, sighed, and went back to her task.

Another time, it was Roy who exploded. He was learning and growing, too—and becoming less deferent. “Look, Erik, you have no reason to believe these things work. Even Rachel—who’s from the Aaron People—even she says she’s never heard of these things before.”

“Yes, she has. She knows them under another name= the Archimedes principle. And I told you, I’ve experimented with them. I’ve experimented with them over and over again. They’ll work.”

When they were almost finished with the construction, they began timing the approach of the Monster who fed them every day. Eric’s plan was complicated enough: if the strains upon them were not to be too great, they had to initiate their operation shortly before a feeding time. And it was necessary for them to store food and drinking water. Who knew when they would come close to these essentials again?

Rachel looked at her torn and shredded cloak, the equipment from its pockets scattered about the floor of the cage like so much litter. “The only thing,” she said in a low, miserable voice, “that I find really painful, darling, is your destroying my protoplasm neutralizer. The work, the research, that went into that gadget! And it was the whole point of my being sent into Monster territory. To go back to my people without it, after all this—”

“If we get back to your people,” Eric told her calmly, working away at a folded section of the rod-like device, “the most important thing you can tell them is that the neutralizer works. Once they know that, they can build others like it. Meanwhile, we have nothing else we can turn into a really strong hook. And without a strong hook—even if everything else works right we don’t have a chance.”

The Runner came across the cage and stood beside him. “I’ve been thinking, Eric. You’d better tie the hook to my hands. I’m at least as strong as you. But you’re smarter: I think you’ll do better with the opening. I promise to hang on with all my might.”

Eric finished twisting the rod of the protoplasm neutralizer into a serviceable hook. Then he sat back and thought. He nodded. “All right, Roy,” he said. “That’s the way we’ll do it. But don’t let go!” He put the uncurved end of the hook into Roy’s hands: the Runner gripped it firmly. Then Eric tied the device to Roy’s hands, running more straps from it around his arms, back across his shoulders. The hook had become almost a part of Roy’s body.

Now they tied themselves and their equipment to the remains of the cloak. The two men adjusted their forehead glow lamps for the last time. Eric put Rachel between himself and the Runner, lashing her first to Roy’s waist and then to his. “Hang on to Roy’s shoulders,” he advised her, “just in case the straps go. I’ll be hanging on to yours.”

When he was through, they were three people who formed a bound-together unit, at the furthest end of which was Roy the Runner holding a long hook that was tied to his hands as an extra precaution. They heard the Monster approaching with the food, and they lay down clumsily.

“Here we go, everybody,” Eric told them. “Play dead!”

22

There was no shower of food into the cage. Instead, there was a long, almost unbearable pause in which they sensed the startled Monster was examining them.

They had agreed to keep their eyes tightly closed—as well as their limbs stiffly extended—until they were out of the cage and well on their way. For all they knew, Monster vision might be acute enough to detect their pupils moving. It also might be able to detect respiration, but here they had to take their chances. “Either we try to hold our breath as long as possible,” Eric had pointed out, “and run the risk of a large, noisy gasp just when it’s watching us most carefully, or we breathe as softly and as gently as we can. Tell yourself that you’re asleep. Try to relax and hope we get away with it.

But it was hard. Moment after dangerous moment, it was hard to lie there perfectly still and not open your eyes for just one fast look at was happening directly over your head.

At last there was a sensation of movement in the cage: the coldness of the green rope twined about their bodies, fusing itself to their flesh. A jerk, and they rose upward as a unit, their equipment knocking and slapping against them. Now real self-control was necessary; the experience of leaving a solid floor was terrifying enough, but panic began to screech and gibber behind eyes that could not see because they were squeezed shut.

The worst moment of all came when the Monster held them high in the air for a prolonged scrutiny. The ugly stink of alien breath grew overpoweringly strong—apparently the creature’s head was very close to them. They had to appear limp and yet maintain control of their diaphragms. Eric hung on to a last inhalation, keeping his chest absolutely motionless. He hoped the others had done the same.

What was being felt by that enormous hulk of flesh? Disappointment over a promising experiment that had gone wrong so abruptly? Was the feeling at all similar to the one which humans knew? And would the disappointment be sharp enough to cause a change in the routine all three of them had observed the Monsters go through on such occasions?

“The Monsters do seem to have a thing about death,” Rachel had said. They did: once a human captive appeared lifeless, they were interested only in disposing of him. A vital part of Eric’s plan was based on this attitude; suppose curiosity about the causes of death and the changes inside a human body—suppose curiosity became dominant in the creature’s mind. Eric fought hard to control a shudder. He failed. Beside him, in the circle of his arms, his mate’s warm body shuddered in response.

Apparently having reached a decision, the Monster lowered them a little and set off.

Eric felt he could now venture a careful squint. He opened his eyes slightly, keeping his body, legs and arms as stiff as ever. Visibility was poor—not only were they spinning about at the end of the green rope, but the great bladders tied to each of his shoulders rolled from side to side and intermittently got in front of his face.

It was a long while before he could see for certain that they were being brought to the huge white table surface upon which dissections took place. So far so good. In the middle of the white surface was the dark hole at which his entire scheme had been directed. Would they be torn apart investigatively on the surface, or would they be dropped, casually and immediately, into the disposal hole, as they had hoped and planned they would? At this moment, after weeks of meditation on Monster behavior by himself and after days of reviewing the project with Roy and Rachel, it suddenly seemed too much to expect. He had been an idiot—they would never get away with it! How could he, Eric, have anticipated the thought processes of a Monster!

For that matter, how could the Monster fail to notice the odd equipment with which they were festooned, so unlike that of any other human captives it had ever seen? How could it fail to wonder at the three of them being tied so closely together? Better to untie themselves right now and be prepared to run in different directions as soon as they were deposited on the table top—one of them might survive, might escape. Bound together they’d be completely helpless!

Eric grappled with himself and managed to return to sanity. He must remember the Monsters ignored all human artifacts. He had seen that proven out dozens of times, and Rachel, from her vaster knowledge, had assured him that no exception to the rule had ever been observed. The Monsters seemed to see no relationship between the equipment men carried about and the possibility of intelligence. It was not just that human artifacts and Monster artifacts were so utterly and essentially different. Men were no more than pests as far as the Monsters were concerned, scuttling, unthinking pests peculiar to this planet, pests who nibbled at Monster food and damaged Monster belongings. The things that men wore on their bodies or conveyed from place to place were the accumulations of vermin, the debris, the litter, of creatures rather low on the evolutionary scale. The Monsters apparently saw no connection between the men who bred inside their walls and the once-proud owners of the planet they had brushed aside centuries ago.

Nor was Monster ignorance on this subject at all remarkable, Eric thought bitterly. When you thought of the cultural abyss between the space-wanderers, the poets and philosophers that Rachel had described in her history lessons—and the blinking, fearful things among whom he had been reared …

No, the plan might work or it might not, but bolting to another one at this point would be bloody suicide. They would find out soon enough.

As he grew relatively calm again, Eric heard the harsh breathing of his companions and realized that pretty much the same thoughts had been going through their minds: they too had been thinking of cutting themselves loose from each other and preparing to make a run for it once they got to the white table surface. He was recalled to his responsibilities as commander.

“Easy, Rachel. Take it slow, take it slow, Roy,” he whispered lightly. “Everything’s working out fine—couldn’t be better. Get ready to go into action.”

He didn’t dare turn to look at their faces, but the tone of his voice seemed to help. Short, convulsive breaths grew softer, gentler. And he remembered where the words had come from. These were the identical reassurances which his uncle, Thomas the Trap-Smasher, used to chant to the members of his band as they came face to face with battle-danger. Perhaps all military commanders, through-out human history, had used the very same words.

And now they were directly over the great expanse of white table. Eric felt his stomach shift and cower inside him. What was the Monster going to do with them? Was it going to The Monster did exactly as he had figured it would. It lowered the green rope to the dark circle of disposal hole—and released them. If they were dead, they were garbage.

They plummeted down, holding tightly to each other. The hole seemed to widen enormously as they fell toward it.

Just as they dropped beneath its surface, there was a blast of sound. Roy the Runner had screamed. It was not a scream of pain. It was a scream of pure despair, of horror, of overwhelming misery. And, in a flash of sympathetic horror, Eric understood it.

Despite all their preparation and all their discussion, the same mad thought had been pulling against its strap in the back of his own mind, and he had fought hard to keep it from breaking loose. They were going down, if his calculations had been correct, they were going down into the sewers of Monster territory. Only dead people went into the sewers. They were going down to where the dead people were.

What avail were hours or even days of rational, intelligent talk about the use of Monster plumbing as an escape route—what avail was conscious decision against the dread that had lain buried in one’s subconscious since childhood, since one had seen the first corpse ceremoniously sewered? The moist, rotting legions of the dead inhabited the sewers, and the dead were vicious, the dead were nasty. They would allow no one to return who made the same grim journey that they had made.

That was what Roy had remembered at the last moment. Not the sewers as a possible line to freedom which the adult Roy was eager to investigate; but the sewers as-a cemetery of time itself from which the child in Roy still shrank back in ultimate loathing. And he had lost control of himself. He had screamed.

It almost cost them everything, that scream.

The green rope whipped down into the hole after them. Craning his neck upward, at the rapidly receding whiteness in which the Monster’s pink tentacles were framed, Eric saw the rope come to the end of its length a little more than a man’s height above their heads. He saw it grow thin and dwindle in size, still twitching for their flesh, as they continued to fall.

Something hit them a tremendous wallop. It was as if they had smashed into the floor after a drop from a cage high up in Monster territory.

The water, Eric realized, a few moments after impact, as he struggled back to awareness. They had hit the water.

Instinctively, he had held his breath and tightened his grip even further on Rachel. And the straps that lashed them together were holding! Beyond the woman, he could feel her hugging Roy as they plunged down, down, down through the cold wetness. At least they were still together.

This much of his plan had worked. Now it was up to the bladders he had designed. A pair were tied to each of them at shoulder height. They were made of the water-proof material of Rachel’s cloak, filled with air that had been blown into them and sealed with an adhesive the Aaron People had developed for mending garments.

“But Eric,” Rachel had demurred. “It’s never been tested in those conditions—under so much water and pressure for such a long time.”

“Then we’ll test it,” he had told her. “We’ll find out how good an adhesive it really is. Our lives will depend on it.”

Their lives depended on additional factors as well. On their falling far enough to enter the main sewer pipe, for example. Otherwise, their bladders would take over and pull them back to the surface of the water in the disposal hole where they would be helpless. The Monster could then pick them out at its pleasure.

They were still falling through the water, but they were falling more and more slowly. When could they breathe again? Down they went and down, and still there was nothing but water all around them. Eric began a slow slide away from consciousness. He dug his fingers deeper into Rachel’s arms. His chest was exploding …

Suddenly, the quality of the water changed—and so did their direction. They shot off to one side in the midst of an incredible turbulence, going round and round each other, first this way, then that, up, down, up—and, at last, they stayed up.

They were in the sewer pipes, and they had surfaced.

The bladders kept their heads on top of the swiftly running current. Eric groaned air into his lungs; he heard Rachel and Roy doing the same. Oh, breathing was good, so good! The fetid air of Monster sewage was really delicious.

“It worked!” Rachel gasped after a while. “Darling, it worked!”

He forbore to tell her that it had only worked up to now. The third part of his plan was coming up. If that didn’t work out right, everything they had achieved would be useless. Where did the Monster sewers empty? Rachel had suggested the ocean or a sewage disposal plant. He’d rather not find out.

“Are you all right, Roy?” Eric called, being careful to lift his chin so that none of the water got into his mouth.

“I’m fine,” the Runner yelled back over the booming roar of the current. “And I’ve got the hook ready. You tell me when.”

They were skimming down a pipe whose diameter, Eric estimated, must be about one-half the height of an average burrow. The curving top of the pipe was only a short distance above their heads—-a little less than an arm’s length.

A difficult command decision was involved here. The only way they could get out was through a pipe joint. Assuming they could open one from the bottom—and though Roy and Rachel had agreed with him that it was possible, they’d both looked as dubious as he felt—the selection of the joint upon which they’d make their attempt had to be a matter of fairly careful timing. It would be useless to try to open one that lay within the boundaries of Monster Territory: there would be nothing but hard, immovable flooring above it. Once the pipe had entered the walls and begun running through them, it would be surrounded by the insulating material which human beings knew as the burrows. There, any given pipe joint might well be used for garbage disposal and burial of the dead by a tribe living in its neighborhood—and the tribe would have cut an opening in the burrows floor immediately above the joint.

Uncovering a pipe joint from the bottom would be an incredibly difficult and exhausting piece of work; if, at the end, they found a solid floor above them, they would have to enter the water again very tired and very discouraged. Logically, they should therefore make their attempt later rather than earlier. They should wait until they were certain beyond any doubt that they were back inside the walls.

On the other hand, the water was viciously cold, and being burrows creatures, long removed from the Outside, they were not at all used to cold. Furthermore, they kept passing the mouths of tributary pipes which belched more filth—and more water—into the main channel along which they were hurtling. This had two results: it kept raising the level of the water they were in closer and closer to the curving pipe top overhead—and it kept increasing the speed of the current. The first was frightening enough, but the increased speed might shortly make it impossible for Roy to catch on to a pipe joint with the hook that was tied about his hands and arms. And if Roy failed, they’d never get out.

No, Eric decided, he’d better take the very next pipe joint they passed. The result would be a matter of luck—and he had come to feel he could trust his luck. It was certainly much better than his father’s: he had managed to get out of Monster Territory, alive and with his mate.

Ile turned his bead and peered down the pipe in front of them, examining its top with the beam from his forehead glow lamp. There, above the wild splashes of water and the somersaulting chunks of offal and rubbish, was that it—a dim patch that seemed to be rushing swiftly in their direction?

Eric narrowed his eyes and strained to see. Yes. It was a joint.

“Roy!” he sang out and brought his arm in a wide motion over his head, pointing with his whole hand. “Do you see it? We’ll take that one.”

The beam from the Runner’s glow lamp crept along his own and focused on the patch in the pipe top, now only a short distance away. “I see it,” Roy called. “Get ready. Here we go.”

He swung his hook up as they sped under the joint, catching an edge of it. For a moment they paused, swinging from side to side in the noisy, cascading water. Then they were on their way again. The hook had slipped out.

Roy cursed himself bitterly. “I didn’t get a grip on it! I almost—damn it, I didn’t get a good grip on it! I should be sewered alive.”

In spite of their predicament, Eric found himself grinning. That was exactly what was happening to the Runner! But he didn’t bother to point it out. “My fault,” he told him instead. “I didn’t give you enough warning. I’ll let you know earlier next time.”

But he was worried. The cold from the water had begun to numb his body. The other two were no doubt losing sensation as well: that would make it more difficult for Roy to hold on with his hook. How had the ancestors ever been able to survive low temperatures in the Outside? According to Rachel, some had even thrived on it and taken recreation especially in cold weather. What heroes there must have been in those days!

Well, he was no hero: he found the cold crippling. And it was getting worse every moment. Also the current was observably much faster than when they had started. If Roy managed to hook the next pipe joint, Eric decided, he couldn’t be expected to cling to it for long. They’d have to move very fast indeed.

With this in mind, he reached down to his waist strap and pulled out the knife he’d taken from Jonathan Danielson’s body in the first cage a long, long time ago. He cut the thongs that bound him to Rachel. Now, only his arms were holding them together, but he’d be able to do his part of the job much more rapidly.

“How are you, darling?” he asked, suddenly conscious of the fact that she had been silent for some time. This was a pregnant woman, after all. She didn’t reply. “How are you?” he demanded more urgently.

“I’m cold,” she said in a low, dull voice. “Eric, I’m cold and I’m tired. I don’t have much left.”

Frantically, he turned his head again to scan the top of the pipe. The next chance would be their last. He’d better give Roy plenty of opportunity to prepare. And this time Roy had better—

The moment Eric saw the faint trace of a patch in the distance, he called out and pointed. The Runner located the joint, set himself. “I won’t let go—I promise you!” he said between clenched teeth.

As the joint passed overhead, he thrashed wildly with his legs, rising slightly out of the water. He slammed the hook into a crack that ran along an edge of the joint—and twisted it. The curved end of the hook slid and locked inside the joint.

“Up to you, now, Eric,” he gasped. “Go ahead!”

Rachel was still tied to Roy, but Eric, depending solely on his grip, was almost torn loose by the suddenness of their stop. It was by one hand only, a hand slipping up her arm to her throat, that he still held himself to her. He threw the other arm around her again and pulled himself close.

Then, reaching past her to Roy, he hauled himself up and over both of them, clambering across their madly jerking bodies until he stood on the Runner’s shoulders. These were wet and slippery, but he was able to grab the middle of the hook with his left hand and steady himself. He whipped out his knife and went to work, ferociously, on the joint. Under him, the Runner fought for air, as with Eric’s full weight upon him, his face would go slight-; ly below the level of the water, slightly above it, then slightly below again.

Eric knew exactly what he had to do. He had been over this sequence in his mind dozens and dozens of times. He had been reviewing it while in the water, while looking for. a joint in the distance, while climbing over Rachel to stand on Roy’s shoulders. He had to reverse the process of opening a joint that he had used when standing on the floor of the burrows.

It should work.

On the burrows floor, you first tugged the covering plate to the right. Therefore, operating from underneath and using the knife, Eric pried it to the left. He switched the knife to the other side and pried to the right. Now, at exactly the right moment, while the heavy plate was still sliding, pull down on the knife handle, making the knife into a lever—and pray it doesn’t break!

The plate moved upward. Eric let go of the hook with his left hand and grabbed the edge of the plate through the open space he had created. He pushed with all his might. The plate rolled off to one side.

He pulled himself out of the water and through the open joint. Crouched uncomfortably now on top of the pipe, he had flooring directly above him. The question was, what kind of flooring—Monster territory or of theburrows? And if it were burrows flooring, had there been human beings nearby to cut an opening through it?

There had, and he slumped for a moment in abject relief as he saw the familiar outlines of a slab. They could get out! Again he jabbed his knife in the thin space where edge met edge and used it as a lever. Once the slab lifted a bit, he put his shoulders under it, bracing his feet on the pipe—and straightened, pushing up. The slab rose and fell away from the opening, rattling the floor with its weight.

Eric, standing fully upright, could see curved walls and low ceilings all around him. The blessed, blessed burrows!

He scrambled back down and lay on the surface of the pipe, reaching through the joint. The Runner’s face was bluish and Rachel’s head lolled limply against his back. “Can’t help—you much,” Roy panted from the water. “You’ll have to—all by yourself, if you can. I’m—I’m finished.”

Eric got his hands under Roy’s armpits and tugged. The Runner and Rachel came up easily about halfway, but there, with no more water to buoy them, they became suddenly far too heavy for him to lift any more. He held on desperately. Then Roy made a last effort. He got his elbows, still tied to the dripping hook, over the top of the pipe and heaved. It was just enough to make a difference. Eric was able to pull them both on to the pipe. They rested for a moment, then Eric and Roy together dragged themselves and Rachel through the opening to the burrows floor.

There they lay, exhausted.

But Eric was a commander—and a husband. He had responsibilities. He forced himself upright and cut Rachel loose from Roy, Roy loose from the hook. Then he addressed himself to his mate.

Her appearance frightened him. She was barely breathing, and her body was cold, very cold. With his own teeth chattering, he began rubbing her body furiously. He massaged-her chest, he worked her arms back and forth,’ he chafed her feet. “Rachel,” he called in agony. “Rachel, Rachel darling!”

After all this, to lose her!

Her eyelids fluttered open. “Hello, sweetheart,” she said weakly. She took her first deep breath. She took another and managed a smile. “Hello,” she said again in a voice a bit more like her own. “We made it!”

“We made it!” Eric joyfully agreed. He hugged her and kissed the paleness from her face. Then he put the joint cover back in place, and returned the slab to its socket in the floor. He was paying respect once more to. the human housekeeping habits of the burrows.

“Take my equipment, Roy. Rachel, put your arms around my neck. I’m going to carry you.”

“Where?” the Runner asked, picking up Eric’s gear and getting heavily to his feet. “Why do we have to move?”

“Because we don’t know what kind of tribe may use that particular sewer opening—or how soon they’re liable to use it again. We’re going to get a distance away and find a safer spot before we begin resting.”

Rachel was fairly heavy now, and Eric’s weariness hurt all along the calves of his legs and the muscles of his shoulders. But he couldn’t ask her to walk so soon after the experience she’d undergone. She went to sleep, nestling her head against his chest.

He didn’t go far—just a few burrow turnings, past a couple of intersections. “This is where we’ll sleep.” he said, putting Rachel down carefully. “I hereby declare it night.”

“We made it out of Monster territory,” Roy marveled. “Out of the Cages of Sin, out of the sewers themselves. We’re alive and safe and warm.”

“And we have no idea,” Eric reminded him, “where the hell we are.”

23

Coming awake, Eric paused for a while and thought before announcing the dawn. He caressed his wife as she lay against him, her head on his right shoulder, her mouth nuzzling his chest. Rachel still looked very tired. He decided to stay in this spot and give her another day of rest.

But, once she was up, she wouldn’t hear of it. “I know what you’re afraid of. You’re worrying about a miscarriage. Darling, if it didn’t happen yesterday, it’s not going to happen. We women of the Aaron People are just as hardy as the females of any front-burrow tribe.”

“There’s a long journey ahead. Many, many days of travel.”

“All the more reason to start immediately, dearest. We don’t have food for many, many days. And we can’t spare the time for a detour into Monster Territory to pick up more. I’ll be all right. If I find I’m giving out, I’ll start drooping immediately. I promise not to push myself—I’ll droop noticeably and emphatically, all over the burrows floor.”

Roy, who had come up and squatted near them, said he agreed with Rachel. “It’s not only going to be a long journey, Eric. It’s liable to be a meandering one, full of false starts and wrong turnings and going back along the way we came. You said last night you didn’t know where we are—it’s going to be even harder to find out where we want to go. I say let’s start now.”

Knowing they were right, Eric nevertheless fought to give Rachel a little more time. First, of course, they had to have breakfast. After that, he ordered their equipment checked and inventoried, their food supply examined for possible damage from the lengthly submersion. He sent Roy off to empty their canteens and then refill them with fresh water from the pipes that always ran parallel to the sewer system. And, finally, he asked for the map that Rachel carried and insisted on examining it thoroughly for clues as to the route they might take to their agreed-upon destination—the burrows of the Aaron People.

Roy was very much excited by the map: he’d never seen one before. Having returned with the canteens, he lounged behind Eric and stared respectfully at it, trying to understand how this odd network of lines could be considered a picture of the burrows in which a man traveled with walls on either side of him and fought or avoided enemies. Eric answered his questions patiently and in great detail: every explanation, every digression, meant that much more rest for Rachel. The girl napped on the floor a little distance from them, her face still somewhat haggard and her hands clasped on a belly that was just beginning to look rounder than normal female plumpness.

But as soon as the Runner understood that the place where they were now was not to be found on the map at all, he lost interest. He moved away and began putting his equipment into expedition-readiness, tightening straps, examining his knapsack for any badly frayed area, assembling his spears in front of him and choosing the one he wanted most readily available in the back sling.

“It’s like all the other stuff of the Aaron People,” Eric heard him grumble. “Just like the rest of these Strangers. They have things that sound great, that are wonderful to look at—only, please, if you don’t mind, we can’t use it right now. It’s not good in this spot, we’ll use it tomorrow, we’ll use it next week. Damned mouth-warriors and their phoney gear. Maps!”

Eric was irritated and wanted to remind him of the Aaron People gear that had helped them escape from Monster territory: the waterproof cloak they had used to make bladders, the protoplasm neutralizer that was the only piece of metal among them long enough to be bent into a hook. And how long was it since Roy had been so pathetically imitating Stranger dress and Stranger habits of speech?

But the three of them would have to stay close and depend on each other in the long, difficult journey that lay ahead. A commander, Eric had noted long ago, observing his uncle, did not allow himself to get into arguments, unless they involved a direct challenge to his authority or some other form of danger to the group he led. Besides, Eric suddenly smiled to himself, Roy’s griping really meant only one thing: he was back in the burrows and feeling like a warrior of Mankind again.

So did he, he realized. And it was good to be practicing your trade again. Until they reached the Aaron People, at any rate …

He jumped to his feet, then, to get away from the thought that had begun crowding in on him. “All right, everybody,” he called, in the ancient band call whose last meaningless phrase was supposed to have come all the way down from the ancestors: “Let’s hit the road!”

A few moments later, they were going down the tunnel in single file, Eric in the lead and Rachel in the middle. Since their experience of the day before, he found himself constantly aware of something he had taken for granted all of his life: the warmth of the burrows. It was warmth, he knew now, that the Monsters needed and created for themselves. But it was certainly very comfortable for human beings, too. Man and Monsters, he was beginning to understand, had surprisingly many similar needs.

Where was he leading this tiny band? They were completely lost, in totally unfamiliar and therefore very dangerous territory, yet Eric had an idea. He was an Eye, and an Eye should know the way anywhere he found himself—even if he’d never been there before.

At every branching burrow, he paused and took a good long look, first at the sides and in the distance for Any’ lurking enemies, then at the floor. The floor was most important. Once in a while, he would decide a branch looked promising and turn off into it, the other two following and wondering.

The trouble was, he couldn’t expect to see what he was looking for: it was more a matter of feel. And for this, this feel, his feet were more useful than his eyes. His feet had to find the way. He tried to see with his toes, to watch with his heels, to peer with his soles. He was looking for any information about the floor of the burrow that his feet could give him.

When they stopped finally for sleep and the only big meal of the day, he pulled out the map and studied it. And he was studying it again the next morning, when he awoke Roy and Rachel; he was memorizing this picture of a burrows network far distant from the one they were in. He could see that it didn’t make sense to either of them.

“What are you trying to find, darling?” Rachel asked at last, when, after much cogitation, he led them up a branch burrow and, after shaking his head suddenly, turned around and led them back again to the intersection.

“I’m looking for a slope in the floor,” he explained. “Any slope, no matter how slight. Your people are known among Strangers and Mankind as the furthest-back burrowers, the bottommost burrowers of all. Whenever Walter the Weapon-Seeker or Arthur the Organizer talked about the Aaron People, they told how they had gone down to them. Never across to the Aaron People, as when they visited each other’s tribes; never up to the Aaron People, as when they traded with Mankind; but always down. It’s the only general direction I have. To get to the bottommost burrow, I have to find and stay on a gradient.”

“And if you do,” she asked from behind him, falling into step once more, “what then? We may get down to the level of the Aaron People’s burrows, but they might be ten or twenty days’ march on either side of us. We won’t even know which side.”

“There,” Eric shrugged, “I’ll be counting on my luck. My luck’s been good. And I’ll be counting on the map. You see, at that point, the map—”

He froze, flinging up his arms for silence. Rachel and Roy stopped simultaneously in mid-step, staring over his shoulder.

There was a sentry ahead of them. The man was leaning against the burrows wall, facing in their direction, a spear trailing down from his hand to the floor. The light from his forehead glow lamp burned directly at them.

Why didn’t he give the alarm? Eric and Roy both now had spears in their hands. Why didn’t the, sentry try to beat them to the throw?

“He’s dead,” Rachel breathed. “Don’t you see? He’s standing there, but he’s dead. He’s been dead for days. You can smell him.”

And they could. Across the intervening space, there drifted the unmistakable odor of a corpse.

The man had died suddenly, while on duty. And he had not been sewered.

Very cautiously, one slow step at a time, they crept up to him. His eyes were open and steadfast, fixed on the tunnel he was supposed to guard, but a gray film had formed over them. His body too was gray: a gray liquid seemed to have oozed out of the pores of his skin and covered the powerful biceps, the alert face, the strong warrior’s chest.

Eric looked him over, vaguely puzzled by something he could not quite place. The weapons, the equipment, the clothing—all were slightly alien, and all were, at the same time, tantalizingly familiar.

They went past the guard, walking on the balls of their feet, ready to break and run back at the slightest hint of active danger. After a while, the tunnel broadened into what Eric recognized as a central burrow, a large, high-ceilinged chamber very similar to the central meeting-place of his own people. Here, at last, they could relax and walk about easily, without fear of attack.

The central burrow was filled, from one end to the other, with nothing more hostile than corpses. Long-dead corpses.

Everywhere, men, women and children stood or sat like so many statues that had been carved to exemplify the full range of human activities. An old crone squatted at the magic of food preparation. A warrior lay on his belly watching her, a corner of his mouth twisted in anticipation. A mother had turned a small child over her knee and had her hand raised, high and angry, over his naked rump. A young man, lounging against a wall, was smiling ingratiatingly at a young girl going by, who, while totally oblivious of her admirer, apparently had no way of passing him other than cutting in close enough to brush against his folded arms.

All had succumbed to the same unexpected flash of death. All were covered with the same gray liquid from head to foot.

Seeing them here assembled, Eric understood what had been so familiar\ about the sentry. This was clearly a front-burrow people. The differences were minor and subtle ones, but he was standing in the midst of a tribe very much like Mankind. A little further along the wall, no doubt, but they were almost exactly as far from Monster territory as his own people. Their artifacts were as simple, their family and social life the same.

And there, sitting comfortably on a mound, surrounded by three women and benignly overseeing his tribe’s activities, was an indubitable chieftain, as fat of body and as craftily stupid of expression as Franklin the Father of Many Thieves. Only the face was different.

Somewhere, nearby, there was probably a youngster who had been preparing to go on his first Theft…

Rachel turned from a body she had been scrutinizing closely. “This gray, moist skin,” she announced. “I know what causes it. A homicidal spray the Monsters use. But I’ve only seen individuals who’ve been caught by that spray. Never a whole people.”

“Well, the laboratory we were in, the experiments—The Monsters seem to be a lot more serious than they ever were about getting rid of us,” Eric suggested.

The girl nodded grimly. “Very serious; indeed. Eric, we’ve got to get to my people soon. Not for our sake—for theirs. They have to know what’s happened here. It’s urgent.”

“All right, sweetheart. I’ll do my best. Is it safe to use any of the food in this place? I’d like to carry away as much as we can.”

“Let me look around. Eric—don’t you or Roy touch one of these bodies. That gray liquid can make you very sick. On contact.”

Eric watched her opening food containers and sniffing at them gingerly. He was amazed at the strength of the feeling that billowed inside him: a tremendous warmth, a tremendous complacence.

At this moment, he felt for the first time that she was truly his wife. She had taught him a large part of what she knew. She had mated with him, and he had poured love into her body. She had conceived his child and was carrying it now inside her. But until he had stood in a great central burrow and seen her examining food to see that it was fit for him to eat—as all the wives of Mankind had done from his earliest memory—until now there had been something important that was missing. Now there was nothing missing: he knew he was married.

It was like Roy screaming when the Monster dropped them down the disposal hole that led to freedom. The scream hadn’t begun then. It had been born long, long before.

A baby’s first impressions are the adult’s last conclusions—with an adjective or two added from a lifetime of experience.

When they left that great central burrow, the cemetery of a whole people, Roy was uncommunicative for a long time. He didn’t even join the discussion by which they decided that to sewer this many human beings was utterly beyond their capacity. Eric thought he knew what was on the Runner’s mind. Before they went to sleep, he told him of the similarities he had noticed between this tribe and Mankind.

“I keep thinking of Franklin and Ottilie and Rita the Record-Keeper,” Eric told him. “I kept wondering if this spray had been used on them, if they were all standing around at this moment—everybody we knew—gray and wet and stiff and dead.”

Roy lay back on the floor. “Mankind’s dead,” he muttered. “It’s dead to me, anyway. I don’t give a damn about Franklin and Ottilie and the rest.” He turned over on his side.

But the next morning, when Eric awoke, Roy was sitting up, his hands clasped around his knees. He was staring at Rachel. There was a peculiar expression on his face which Eric found hard to analyze.

It’ was not at all like desire, but it had an uncomfortable intensity. Was the Runner thinking of his own mate, back in Mankind? Had he too observed Rachel selecting food—and had it reminded him of his own wifeless, completely outlaw state?

Eric didn’t like it. As he led off after breakfast, he was unpleasantly aware of two situations: Rachel was immediately ahead of Roy where the constant sight of her would likely aggravate whatever was bothering the Runner; and he, Eric, was ahead of Rachel, his back an easy target for a spear cast by an angry, brooding man.

He thought of placing Roy in front of him: as a commander, that was his privilege. But Roy was no Eye, and an Eye was needed to find the way. Damn Roy! Trouble among themselves was the last thing they needed. Eric kept going, alert for any unusual noise behind him.

As a result, he almost led his command directly into destruction. He’d been so intent on what was going on to his rear that he’d failed to be properly aware of the sounds ahead. But as he was crossing an intersection, he heard them clearly. He shot one startled glance off to his left and immediately cupped a hand over his forehead glow lamp to obscure the light. He scrambled backward, shoving Rachel and Roy into the shelter of the branch from which they’d come.

“Wild Men!” he whispered. “A tremendous pack of them coming this way. Get your knapsacks off. We’ll have to make a run for it.” He wondered how fast Rachel could run. She’d barely been keeping up.

“Let me do it,” Roy said, slipping out of his overloaded knapsack swiftly. “You two stay here.”

Before they could stop him, he had darted out to the intersection with his forehead light uncovered. He looked off to the left, stiffening as if he couldn’t believe what he saw. Then he threw his arms over his head and screamed. He screamed like one gone mad with terror.

The Wild Men heard him and saw him. They bellowed a wall-shaking hunger call in reply.

Roy turned and ran off to the right, screaming as he went. A moment later, the Wild Men roared past the branch in pursuit.

24

Eric and Rachel had flattened themselves against the left-hand wall. They clung to each other, afraid to breathe, as the horde thundered past the intersection. If only one of these horrible creatures glanced in their direction, they were done for. They’d never be able to get out of their knapsacks in time, to pick up any speed.

But with live meat visible up ahead, the Wild Men concentrated on that alone. From time to time, they threw their heads back—it seemed in perfect unison—and screeched out a repetition of their hunger call. The rising and falling notes bounced savagely off the walls around Rachel and Eric and made their muscles go rigid with terror spasm. That was the main purpose of the call, Eric realized: to freeze the prey in his tracks. It also served to encourage the slower members of the pack and keep them aware of the hunt’s direction.

He’d never seen a Wild Man before, but one look down the corridor had been enough to tell him that the legends had all been true and that Rachel’s experiences in the cage had been fully as ugly as she had said. They were as Rachel had described them: a chilling throwback to some original version of the primate horde, and yet with overtones of an all-too-human mob. The mass of hairy bent-over figures, their fingertips dragging along the floor, shambling along in a tight pack shoulder to immense shoulder—somehow even the Monsters weren’t as upsetting. These things were foul.

Since there were children among them—tiny bits of shrilling ugliness who bounced past as much on the knuckles of their hands as on their splayed feet—the pack had to consist of both males and females. Yet it was almost impossible to tell one from the other. Perhaps the shorter were female. But short and tall, they all looked alike: they all had vast tangled quantities of head hair—and they all seemed to have beards.

They poured past the intersection in a run that was part roll, part hop and part fast walk, and that had a surprising amount of speed to it. Many of them were holding grisly lanterns: torn-off heads which still had the glow lamps of warriors bound above the eyes. But they carried no weapons, they wore no clothing. They merely pounded on the floor with their fists as they ran and reiterated the slobbering screech of their call. And they exuded an enormous, collective stink that seemed to fill the burrows with its fog.

When the last bellowing straggler had scuttled by, anxiously considering its chance of getting a bite of the distant meal, Eric and Rachel each took an opposite strap of Roy’s knapsack and, heavily loaded themselves, began carrying it back down the tunnel in the direction of the last place they had slept.

There wasn’t much chance they’d ever see Roy again, but if he escaped from the Wild Men, this was the only possible place for him to meet them. They got there, unloaded themselves and sank to the floor in each other’s arms.

If was time for food, but neither of them even thought of eating. Food reminded them of the Wild Men—and the Wild Men’s hunger.

Eric folded his arms and leaned against the wall near which Rachel was sitting. His ears were alert for any sound indicating the approach of Wild Men, but there was a deep, painful puzzle in his mind. “I’ve never seen anyone do that before,” he said. “I’ve heard of such things, but only to save a tribe or a mate and children. And I thought—I was worried about Roy. He was so upset, so angry.”

“He was miserable, darling. The closer we were getting to my people, the more he was brooding about his position once we arrived.”

“You mean that he’d be nothing but an ignorant, front burrow savage? I’m facing the same problem. I try not to think about it.”

Rachel made a face. She lifted a foot deliberately from where the sat and kicked at his leg—hard. “You’re my mate,” she pointed out. “The husband of Rachel Esthersdaughter will automatically be a personage among The Aaron People. And you’re not an ignorant savage any= more. At least, you’re not ignorant,” she added with a tiny, warm smile. “But Roy—he felt he had no skills, no knowledge, which would be useful where he was going,’ nothing to set him off and give him hope of winning a mate. He’s had nothing, really, ever since he joined us in the cage. All the planning was yours, all the leading was yours. You pointed the way to every action and did whatever was important. And you were the one with a mate. Roy was feeling that he was just an extra—not at all necessary.”

“He was sure as hell necessary in that escape from the Monsters. You’d never have been able to hook the sewer joint, Rachel, and hold on long enough for me to open the thing.”

“But you never told him that, darling. Did you? And if Roy thought about it at all, he probably decided that any full-grown man who happened to be along could have done just as well. Roy wasn’t necessary: nothing about Roy himself was necessary to anything we’ve done.”

She was right, Eric decided. One hell of a commander he’d turned out to be! Leading and directing were only a’ small part of the command function, his uncle used to say—it was like making love without caresses.

And now there were only two of them again. How long would it be wise to stay here before giving up on Roy? How long would it be safe?

They heard footsteps coming toward them.

Rachel rose and stood behind Eric, who unslung a spear. The footsteps came closer, grew louder. Roy trotted around a curve in the tunnel.

“Roy!” they yelled, and ran at him with open arms. Rachel hugged him, covering his face with kisses. Eric pounded his back, grabbed a fistful of hair and pulledhis head back and forth. “You old Runner, you!” he car-oled ecstatically. “You crazy old heroic Runner, you!”

When they finally let him go, Roy shook himself and inquired mildly: “Where’s the food? I built up a bit of an appetite.”

Catching sight of his knapsack, he strode over to it, opened it and squatted to eat. There was a jauntiness in the Runner’s bearing that Eric hadn’t seen for many a sleep period.

They sat down next to him. “What happened?” they demanded.

“Nothing much,” he said with his mouth full. “I led them around and around and around. Then I put on some speed and lost them. Most of the time I’ve been spending has been to get back here.”

“You’re wonderful!” Rachel told him. “You’re absolutely wonderful! People will make up songs and stories about what you did.”

“Oh, I don’t know, Rachel. The whole thing wasn’t much of a sprint for a Runner. For a real Runner, that is.”

“And that’s what you are,” Eric said earnestly. “The best damn Runner in the whole twisting burrows! Where did you lose them?”

Roy grinned. “Remember that tribe yesterday? The poisoned people?”

They nodded.

“I led them back there. ‘You want to eat people?’ I said. ‘Here you are. Some people. Eat them.’ I hope they get a bellyache they’ll never forget.”

After the meal, it was a while before they started on their way again. They wanted to continue downhill, but it would be stupid to go back to where they had met the Wild Men. Eric had to find a gradient that ran in a slightly different direction.

He’d been turning an idea over in his mind. Now he took a small quantity of food and squeezed it into a ball. He rolled the ball up and down several corridors.; When it rolled freely away from them, he picked it up and followed along the slope it had revealed.

In the next five days, they came across two more exterminated tribes. The situation in each was the same as in the first they had encountered, except that, from th greater abundance of material objects and handicrafts generally, Eric knew that in his own section of the burrows he would have labeled them “Strangers.” Death had caught these men and women in mid-gesture also; here and there, a laughing child stood poised on one leg, forever immobilized in its play.

But there were individuals who looked frantic, or horrified. And on the further outskirts of these burrows, they found gray statues in running attitudes, whose backs were: to their own central burrow. Apparently, there had been some warning not enough.

They replenished their supplies of food and water at each place. No living thing came across their path, until—a full sleep period past the last of these tribal cemeteries they saw half a dozen people at the far end of a tunnel. The other group tossed a few spears which fell harmlessly short, and then fled, shrieking.

Refugees from a poisoned burrow, it was obvious, since there were women among them. Refugees fearfully roaming the corridors in a group too small to put up any effective resistance against Wild Men or tribal enemies. Essentially respectable people who had been catapulted into the position of outlaws by the Monsters’ pest control program.

“Alien-Science!” Roy commented heavily. “A religion that sets itself up to study the Monsters! Are we suppose to learn how to do things like this?”

“Is Ancestor-Science any better?” Rachel asked him “You know, Roy, there was a place the ancestors had that they called Hiroshima.” She told him about it.

When she had finished, he walked in silence for a few moments. “So they’re both filthy. Then what’s the answer?”

“The answer lies in a totally different direction. Wait till we get to my people. You’ll see. A new kind of answer, a new way of—” She broke off. “Eric, what is it?”

Eric had stopped at an intersection formed by five branching burrows. He walked back slowly, retracing their footsteps to the previous intersection. This one was formed by three branching burrows. He pulled out the map, Rachel and Roy crowding around him.

“Do you see?” he said, pointing to tightly packed and crossing lines at the very edge of the map. “I think this is where we are right now.” He smiled at Rachel, flourishing his education. “Terra cognita, if you know what I mean.”

For a moment, they were all excited. Then Roy said: “There could be lots of places where a five-branch follows a three-branch.”

“No, Roy, there aren’t very many five-branch intersections in the burrows. You know that. And damned few three-branch ones. Most intersections are a simple cross-through of two tunnels that make four branches. I think we’ve arrived. We’ve been on the map for some time.”

“Well, if it isn’t the Aaron People!” Roy called out, walking up to a section of tunnel wall and holding out his hand in greeting. “How are you? and how are all the little Aaron People?” He came back to them. “Filthy snobs,” he said. “They wouldn’t speak to me. They cut me dead.” He dodged the mighty punch which Eric swung.

But Eric was right, it became more and more evident. Every tunnel they passed through after this curved the way the map said it should; every intersection now occurred at exactly the right place and forked off in exactly the right manner. Finally, Rachel told Eric to put away the map. She knew the way and could lead them.

They came to an especially long, straight corridor.

Three men stood guard at the end of it, two of them armed with long bows and the third with a crossbow. Eric recognized the weapons from Rachel’s description of them back in the cage. Such arms could only be used in defense of Aaron People territory. Warriors were forbidden by law to carry them elsewhere; this was partially to prevent their falling into the hands of other tribes who might copy them, and partially to avoid alerting Monsters who might be able to construe these complicated devices as signs of certain human intelligence.

As they came closer, the guards fixed arrows into their bows.

“I’m Rachel Esthersdaughter,” the girl called out, stopping a cautious distance away. “Remember me? I went on expedition to Monster territory. Jonathan Danielson was our leader.”

The man with the crossbow was evidently the officer in charge. “I recognize you now,” he said. “All right—keep coming. But, if you can speak to them, tell those Wild Men behind you to keep their hands high over their heads.”

Roy spat angrily. “Wild Men! That’s pretty big talk from warriors with such itsy-bitsy spears.”

“Take it easy,” Eric cautioned him. “Those itsy-bitsy spears can go through you faster and smoother than the longest one you ever saw.” Still, it was hard to avoid becoming furious as he raised his hands into the air. Wild Men—it was worse than he had expected. And among these people he would have to live from now on. He was glad that Roy would be with him: someone besides Rachel would consider him human.

As they reached the guard post, Rachel pointed to a contraption that ran along the wall—a string telegraph, Eric realized. “Put me through,” she said to the officer. “I want to speak to the Aaron.”

“The Aaron? You mean the guard commandant.”

“I do not mean the guard commandant,” she told him imperiously. “I mean the Aaron. I want to speak to the Aaron direct. And you’ll put me through immediately, if you know what’s good for you.”

The man stared at her. Then he walked to the string telegraph and began to pull on it in a series of rhythmic, staccato jerks. When he had finished and let go, it immediately began to jerk out a reply, tinkling, in the process, a tiny hammer and anvil to which it was attached. Rachel and he nodded when it had stopped, she in triumph, he with eyebrows raised and very respectfully. “All right,” he said. “You’re connected. Please feel free to use it as long as you like.”

Rachel apparently felt free to use it very long indeed. While she worked away at the instrument, pausing every once in a while to hear a question or a response, Eric, still with hands achingly high above his head, took the opportunity to study his guards.

They all wore the skirts he had seen on Jonathan Danielson, short skirts with many, many small pockets. And their hair was tied in the back, Stranger fashion. Besides the bows with which they were armed, and the quivers of arrows, they each carried a single spear in a rather beautifully decorated back-sling. But the spear was far too heavy to be used for anything but very close infighting, Eric judged. They looked very much like each other—like Jonathan Danielson—like Rachel. These people were inbred!

He found their warrior discipline highly questionable. Depending on the power and swiftness of their weapons, admittedly unique in the burrows, they were standing far too close to the prisoners. One or the other of them was constantly glancing at Rachel and trying to follow the conversation over the string telegraph. From time to time, all three of them would be looking at the girl. Two fast, tough warriors, like Roy and himself, might be able to take them, even from this position.

The Runner, thinking the same thoughts, nodded at him. Eric grinned.

Rachel called the officer of the guard to listen as the telegraph tinkled out a last response. “You two men,” be said to Eric and Roy, in a relatively friendly voice. ” You can lower your arms and do whatever you like. The Aaron says you are honored guests of our people, and I’m to serve as your escort. Anything you want, you ask me.”

They walked past the guard post, leaving the other two men still on duty. “Well!” Eric said to Rachel, “This is more like it!”

She threw her arms around one of his and squeezed it. “I wanted you to come into our burrows as a free man and a proud one. That was the main reason I asked to speak to the Aaron, darling. But it turns out there are other reasons that make it a very good thing that I did. Our people were hardly hurt at all by the spray, but we know now we have to make our move very soon.”

“The Plan, you mean? The Plan to hit back at the Monsters?”

“Yes. it goes into action immediately. There’s a ship on the roof.”

Eric came to a dead stop while he considered what she had said. “The roof” had to be the roof of the whole enormous Monster dwelling. And “a ship” meant only one thing: a spaceship. Could an entire spaceship—one large enough to transport dozens and dozens of Monsters—could it be accommodated on the roof of a single house? And wouldn’t it destroy the house when it took off? He asked Rachel.

She shook her head impatiently. “They don’t use rockets as our ancestors did. As far as we know, the ships that take off from the roof are combination lifeboats and ferry launches. We have good reason to believe they rendezvous with a mother ship somewhere near Pluto. They enter the mother ship and travel to the destination with her.”

“But then—your Plan—”

Rachel kissed him. “I turn off here. I have to go to the headquarters of the Female Society and help assemble our neutralizers—now that we know they work. Everything has been set to go for a long time: we’ve been held up for lack of an effective neutralizer. I’ll see you later in the Aaron’s burrow, darling.” She stopped on the verge of darting up a side corridor. “Feel free to ask the Aaron any question you want, Eric. I’ve made him understand what a dear, wonderful genius you are!”

And she was gone toward a slight glow in the far distance.

A few moments later, they came to a huge slab which completely blocked off the corridor, wall to wall, floor to ceiling. The guard officer jerked out the password on the string telegraph which, at this point, entered a wall. In reply, the slab moved smoothly up into the air, disappearing into a snug socket that was cut out of the ceiling.

Eric heard Roy gasp—and agreed with him. The technology of these people! No wonder the homicidal spray had not wiped them out.

The slab slid down behind them, and they found themselves standing before a series of enormous burrows, each one larger than the great central meeting place of Mankind. Monster territory dwarfed these burrows, it was true, but Monster territory alone.

Hundreds of fat glow lamps hanging from the ceiling lit the place. Crowds of people moved about in these burrows, along the floor and along galleries which ran overhead. Any given crowd was the size of the whole population of Mankind. Eric sensed that there were more of them about than usual, and that they were moving faster than they normally did. There was a feeling of hurry, an urgency in the air. People seemed to be packing goods and assembling in groups, both according to some prearranged plan.

He asked the guard officer if this were so. “Yes,” the man said, pulling at his lip and sighing. “We’ve began drilling at it ever since I was a kid. And today it stops being just a drill. It’s like the difference between real battle and a parade. You guys know what I mean.”

“I wouldn’t like to leave a home as comfortable and as safe as this,” Roy told him.

“Well, it’s not safe anymore. That’s the point. The Monsters have been reaching out for us: they’ve been getting closer and closer. And the Plan—the Plan is the Plan. You people came back with the last vital piece of information.”

It took them a long time to reach the Aaron’s burrow, and Eric bad learned a great deal before they got there. He had passed rows of cages filled with rats that the Aaron People had managed to preserve for research connected with the Plan. He had never seen rats before. “As pests, they were indestructible,” Rachel had told him. “As food, the legends say, they disappeared overnight.”

He waited, highly disturbed, while the strong looking old man, whose cascades of unbound white hair poured down to his shoulders, gave a few last orders to the throng of subordinate officials. “That should be it for a while,” the Aaron said. “Don’t bother me unless there’s a real emergency—Mike Raphaelson will handle everything else. I want to speak, to the man who made this day finally possible for us.” He gestured at Eric with his outstretched hand, causing the officials to turn in the direction he pointed with startled, but nonetheless warm, smiles. Off to the right, where he was standing with the guard officer, Roy waved proudly and encouragingly.

“Now then, Eric the Eye, Eric the Only,” the Aaron half-sung to himself, picking up a document from the large table in front of him and studying it. “Eric, who successfully planned and led the only escape from Monster cages ever achieved by a human being—let me ask you this: are you willing to join our people? Of course you are, of course you are,” he went on before Eric had a chance to say a word. “Rachel Esthersdaughter is your mate, and you have no people of your own. You’ll be initiated into the Male Society a few days after we’re under way. I’ll be your sponsor. We don’t have a Theft for a test of manhood, as your tribe does—we have an Achievement. Your Achievement, of course, will be the escape. Quite an Achievement. After the ceremony, you’ll say a few words. No dance of triumph, or anything like that: just a short speech. It’s customary to recite the details of your achievement—very superficially, you understand—then to thank everybody, then to sit down. Any questions? No, of course not—it’s simple enough. Now, once you’re officially a member of our people, I don’t see why I couldn’t—Yes, I think I will.”

As he bent over the table, scribbling a note into a corner of the document, Rachel Esthersdaughter, accompanied by several members of the Female Society, came out of a passageway nearby and stood behind him, Rachel, like the women with her, was again wearing an enormous neck-to-ankles cloak whose pockets were filled with equipment. She twinkled her eyebrows at Eric.

“The neutralizers all ready to be used?” the Aaron asked, not looking up from the document. “Good. You know your posts—move off. Rachel: you, of course, will stay with me at headquarters, wherever headquarters happens to be. Now, tell me, girl—I’m thinking of making this man of yours a section leader—do you like the idea? Fm sure you do. The leadership of Section 15 was vacant once you told us of Jonathan Danielson’s death. Young man, do you think you can handle the lives and destinies of almost two hundred people? There will come a time when you will be alone in that position, when you will be exclusively in charge. Rachel will be your executive assistant, of course. I’ve put you down for it, and we’ll settle the whole matter some time after your initiation. Let me see: we’ll need the approval of a Council of the People, as well as the members of Section 15. No problem, there. To move on, however—”

“I don’t think I can do it, sir!” Though Rachel had shut her eyes in a wince, he was pleased and astonished to find that he had actually managed to cut in.

The Aaron was even more astonished. He looked up from the document, turned around and studied Eric. Evidently, he was rarely interrupted. His flow of thought was listened to, taken as orders and acted upon.

“Eric, my boy,” he said, clearly annoyed. “Please do not waste my time with modest noises. I am grappling with a major transition in the life of an entire people; I cannot be deflected for the purpose of administering first-aid to your ego. You commanded a group as large as this in the cages of the Monsters. You have been educated by Rachel, here, one of the finest minds among us. Anything else you need to know, I’ll teach you myself, on the way. And if you’re concerned about your front-burrow back-ground, let me tell you this: in terms of our ultimate destination, the final goal of our plan, that background fits perfectly. You are an Eye, which none of us ever—”

“Pardon me, sir!” Eric broke in again. “But that’s the reason I don’t feel I can do it. It’s not my capacity for leadership I’m questioning—it’s the Plan. Let me explain,” he said hurriedly to the Aaron’s terrifying frown. “I didn’t have any suspicion as to what the Plan was until I got here. I thought it was some combination of Alien-Science and Ancestor-Science, a new way of hitting back at the Monsters. Then, when I heard about the ship, I had the Wild idea that you people were going to take it over, to use their own weapons against the Monsters. All right, it was naive of me—I admit it. But what you’re actually planning has nothing to do with hitting back at the Monsters. You’re just running away from them.”

The frown slowly disappeared from the old man’s face. He nodded, as if to say, “Oh, that problem.” He hitched himself carefully up on a corner of the table and thought for a bit. “Try to understand me, Eric,” the Aaron said at last, in a totally different kind of voice. “Try to understand me: put your preconceptions aside for the moment. Alien-Science, Ancestor-Science—we were the first to believe in each of them, here in the Aaron People, and we were the first to discard each of them, many auld lang synes ago. The Plan we have in mind does combine both Alien-Science and Ancestor-Science, but that is purely accidental. The Plan, we have come to believe, is the only real and valid way in which man can hit back at the Monsters. We are not running away from them, even though our position here has become more than a little untenable. We are running amongst them—directly amongst them, do you hear?—where we can hit back at them most effectively.”

“Hit back at them how? As vermin?” Eric asked bitterly. “As vermin, stealing odds and ends from them for the rest of our existence as a race?”

A gentle, compassionate smile appeared on the Aaron’s deeply lined face. “Eric, what do you think you are? What do you think you’ve learned to be best all through your life in the burrows? Do you think you could change tomorrow and go back to planting crops or tending cattle—as your ancestors did? And if you could, would you want to?”

Eric opened his mouth and shut it again. He did not know what to say. He did not know what to think. Rachel slipped her hand into his and he found himself gripping it desperately.

“That’s why we feel our Plan is thoroughly realistic. Our Plan recognizes a fact, Eric: that there are probably more people alive on Earth right now, living in the huge houses of the Monsters, than ever before in human history. And there’s something else about human history that our Plan recognizes.”

Clasping his arms on his chest, the Aaron shut his eyes and began rocking himself back and forth. His voice changed once more, this time to a kind of chant. “Man shares certain significant characteristics with the rat and cockroach: He will eat almost anything. He is fiercely adaptable to a wide variety of conditions. He can survive as an individual but is at his best in swarms. He prefers to live, whenever possible, on what other creatures store or biologically manufacture. The conclusion is inescapable that he was designed by nature as a most superior sort of vermin—and that only the absence, in his early environment, of a sufficiently wealthy host prevented him from assuming the role of eternal guest and forced him to live hungrily, and more than a little irritably, by his own wits alone.”

25

Nine days later, Eric stood on a ramp leading up to the Monster spaceship and, by the light of the moon, checked off on a repeatable slate the 192 members of Section 15 as they mounted past him on the way to embarkation.

He would never have believed it was possible to move literally thousands of men, women and children—the entire population of the Aaron People—so rapidly and so smoothly over such a vast distance. They had come from the very bottom burrows, over a route that went around and around in a gently ascending spiral through the layers of insulating material that packed the walls, all the way to a topmost hole that opened on the roof itself. They had lost not a single individual by accident or in battle, though they had passed across the territories of a hundred different tribes. Heavily armed men had seen to that, heavily armed men and experienced diplomatic officials who knew exactly when to negotiate, when to threaten and when to buy. Flying squads of trained emergency workers had swarmed to the scene of anything at all unusual; scholars and scouts had cooperated in selecting, from maps made long ago for this very journey, the best approaches and the most economical shortcuts.

It had been an incredible experience, an amazing performance by a whole society. But it had been in preparation for at least a full generation. Every one of the Aaron People had known exactly what to do.

He would never have believed what the Outside looked like—even after all that Rachel and the others had told him—until he had stood on the roof in the screaming sunlight and seen what it meant to have no ceiling at all, to be unable to observe a wall anywhere. At first, he had fought the terror—rising in his throat like a flood of vomit—simply to preserve his standing in the eyes of his section; but as he heard the whimpers behind him and realized that there were no sturdy explorers among his followers, only homebound artisans and their families, he had forgotten his own panic and gone among them, cheering and chiding and making suggestions. “Then don’t look up if it’s so upsetting.” “Take care of your wife, you—she’s fainted.” “When you feel you just can’t take it anymore, try kneeling and putting your hands on the floor of the roof. It’s there, and it’s solid.”

Still, that first day had been pretty bad. The nights were better: there wasn’t nearly as much open space to be seen. They traveled across the roof mostly at night, partly because they found it easier and partly because the Monsters seemed to dislike the night and were rarely abroad in it.

Now, they were embarking at night, climbing wearily up a ramp which led to a hold in which cargo was stacked. They were hurrying too: according to the records kept by the Aaron’s planning staff, the ship was due to leave very shortly.

Out of the corner of his eye, as he crossed out the names which their owners announced, he could see his wife, Rachel Esthersdaughter, a dozen or so paces up the ramp from him. She and ten other members of the Female Society were manipulating the unfolded sections of their neutralizers over the writhing orange ropes which lay across the ramp at regular intervals. These orange ropes were the reason that the Monsters felt so secure about leaving their cargo hold open and the ramp down. Unlike the green ropes back in the Cages of Sin, the orange ropes repelled protoplasm violently. It was impossible for a man to approach them in any way without being knocked flat on his back, at the least. Sometimes, they had killed those who got too close. But now the orange ropes wriggled and were harmless.

Eric remembered a comment he had heard at a section leader’s meeting the night before. “The Monsters develop their penetrating spray, and we develop our neutralizer. Everybody makes a breakthrough. Fair’s fair.”

Roy came up the ramp, waving his hand to indicate that the last of the section had preceded him. Eric checked his list: yes, every name was crossed out, every name but Rachel’s. He put the slate under his arm and followed the Runner. Behind him, the leader of Section 16 took his place on the ramp and propped up a slate full of uncrossed names.

As he passed Rachel, Eric lingered for a moment and stroked her arm tenderly. “You look so tired, darling,” he said. “Haven’t you done enough on this job? You’re pregnant.”

Holding her neutralizer in place, she leaned over and kissed him on the cheek. “There are five other pregnant women on this ramp, Eric, or hadn’t you noticed? I’m on my last shift. I’ll be joining you in the ship very soon.”

At the entrance to the hold, where the crowd was still sorting itself out, a young man wearing the brassard of an expeditionary policeman had a message for him. “You’re to join the Aaron up ahead. He’s with the men assigned to cutting a hole in the wall. I’ll take over your section.”

Eric gave him his slate. “When my wife comes, please send her directly to me,” he asked. Then he signaled Roy to follow and walked along the path indicated by men stationed every thirty or forty paces. Around them, on every side, were great containers piled up to the ceiling. The place was brightly lit, as he now expected Monster territory to be. Monsters left the lights on while they slept.

He arrived at the wall just as the sweating men finally pulled the slab they had cut out away and to one side. A great mob of people had been watching anxiously. It was getting close to dawn, and everyone knew it.

The Aaron was sweating, too. His eyes were red-rimmed. He looked as if he had just about passed the point of complete exhaustion. “Eric,” he said, “this is where we need you most. There are no maps from this point on. In there,” he pointed at the hole, “only an Eye can lead us.”

Eric nodded, adjusted his forehead glow lamp and stepped through the hole.

He looked about him. Yes, the usual tunnels and corridors. It would have been most unpleasant if the Monsters had not employed their basic insulating material in the walls of their spaceships. Here men could live as they were accustomed to live.

Calling back through the hole, he reported the information to the Aaron. A huge sigh of relief went up from the crowd outside. “Good enough,” the Aaron said. “Go on ahead—you know what you have to find. We’ll be enlarging the hole.”

Eric started off. Roy the Runner came through the hole after him, then a series of the youngest, most agile warriors. They formed a single line, constantly enlarging itself from the hole.

He did know what he had to find, but, as he looked for it, past unfamiliar tunnels and completely unknown intersections, he was troubled by an odd factor he had great difficulty in pinning down. Then, as he came around a curve, and into a larger burrow just big enough to provide a temporary though extremely tight meeting place for all of the Aaron People, he understood what was bothering him. The odor—or rather, the absence of one.

These burrows were virgin. Men had never lived and died within them.

“Good enough,” he said. “We can camp here until the take-off.” And he posted sentries. No need really, but discipline was discipline.

Roy carried the message back swiftly. In a little while, people began to arrive: first expeditionary policemen, who set off areas for each section, then the sections themselves. Rachel came in with Section 15; by that time, the place was getting pretty crowded. The last one in was the Aaron—two husky policemen carried him on their shoulders and had to push hard to make their way through.

They could all hear a distant thumping by then. The Monsters were moving about and working on the machinery.

The Aaron put a megaphone to his lips. “Now hear me, my people!” he called out in a tired, cracked voice. “We have accomplished our Plan. We are all safely inside the burrows of a spaceship which is about to depart for the stars. We have plenty of food and water and can stay out of sight until long after the take-off.”

He paused, took a deep breath before going on. “This is a cargo ship, my people. It will make many stops, on many worlds. At each stop, one or more sections will leave the ship and stay in hiding on the planet until their numbers have increased substantially. After all, anywhere that Monsters can live, humans can. Anywhere the Monsters have a settlement, men will thrive. Anything the Monsters provide for themselves, we can probably use. We have learned this on Earth—and we have learned it thoroughly.”

The floor began vibrating as the motors went on. They felt the ship shake and start to move.

The Aaron lifted his arms above his head. People everywhere fell to their knees. “The universe!” the Aaron cried ecstatically. “My people, henceforth the universe is ours!”

When the ship had stopped accelerating and they could move about freely, Eric and the other section leaders collected their groups and led them to adjoining burrows. Men paced off the areas that their families would occupy. Women began preparing food. And children ran about and played.

It was wonderful the way the children adjusted to the acceleration and the strange, new burrows. Everyone who watched them at their games agreed that they made the place feel like home.