Andre Norton (ed) (24 page)

Grevan grimaced uneasily, because that phrase
did describe the Group's position here, in one way or another. Never once, in
the eight years since Central Government had put him in charge of what had been
a flock of rebellious, suspicious and thoroughly unhappy youngsters, who
weren't even sure whether they were actually human beings or some sort of
biological robots, had the question of escaping from CG controls been openly
discussed among them. You never knew who might be listening, somewhere. The
amazing thing to Grevan even now was that—eight weeks travel on the full fury
of their great ship's drives beyond the borders of Central Government's
sprawling interstellar domain—they did seem to have escaped. But that was a
theory that still remained to be proved.

"Are
you going to accept contact with CG tomorrow?" Klim inquired.

Grevan
shrugged. "I don't know." Their only remaining connection with CG,
so far as they could tell, were the vocal messages which flashed sub-spatially
on prearranged occasions between two paired contact sets, one of which was
installed on their ship. They had no way of guessing where the other one might
be, but it was activated periodically by one of the CG officials who directed
the Group's affairs.

"I
was going to put it to a vote tonight," Grevan hedged. "They can't
possibly trace us through the sets, and I'd like to hear what they have to say
when they find out we've resigned."

"It might be a good
idea. But you won't get a vote on it."

He
looked down at her, while she stooped to haul a small portable cooker out of
the big one's interior and slung it over her shoulder.

"Why
not?"

"The cubs seem to think there's no way
of guessing whether accepting contact at this stage is more likely to help us
or hurt us. They'll leave it up to you to decide."

"Aren't
you worried about it at all?" he inquired, somewhat startled. However well
he felt he knew the cubs, they still managed to amaze him on occasion.

Klim shrugged. "Not
too much." She clamped a chemical testing set to the portable cooker.
"After all, we're not going back, whatever happens. If CG's still got some
fancy way of reaching out and stopping us, wherever we are, I'd much rather be
stopped out here than get another going-over in one of their psych
laboratories—and come out a mindless-controlled this time—"

She
paused. Faint, protesting outcries were arising from a point a few hundred
yards out in the water. "Sounds like Muscles caught up with Vernet. Let's
get down to the beach."

Vernet raked wet brown hair out of her eyes
and indignantly denied that it was her turn to sample. But the Group contradicted
her seven to one, with Lancey withholding his vote on a plea of bad memory. She
dried and dressed resignedly and came along.

The
first three likely-looking growths the foraging party tested and offered her
were neither here nor there. They put up no worthwhile argument against
assimilation and probably would turn out to be nourishing enough. But raw or
variously treated and flavored in Klim's portable cooker, they remained, Vernet
reported, as flatly uninspiring as any potential mouthful could hope to be.

The fourth item to pass the chemical tests
was a plump little cabbage-arrangement, sky-blue with scarlet leaf-fringes. She
sniffed around it forebodingly.

"They
don't advertise identity like that for nothing!" she pointed out.
"Loaded for bear, I bet!" She scowled at Klim. "You picked it on
purpose!"

"Ho-hum,"
Klim murmured languidly. "Remember who had me sampling that large fried
spider-type on wherever-it-was?"

"That
was different," said Vernet. "I had a hunch the thing would turn out
to be perfectly delicious!"

Klim
smiled at her. "I'm K.P. today. I'm having the hunches. How would you like
it?"

"Quick-baked,"
snarled Vernet. "And my blood
be
on your
head!"

Half a minute later, she nibbled tentatively
at a crisped leaf of the cabbage, announced with surprise that it was indeed delicious
and helped herself to more. On the third leaf, she uttered a wild whoop,
doubled up and began to adapt at speed. That took about twelve seconds, but
they allowed a full ten minutes then
to let
the
reaction flush her blood stream. Then Vernet was sampled in turn and staggered
back to the beach with a martyred expression, while Klim and Muscles started
cabbage-hunting.

Grevan retired to the ship's laboratory,
where he poured the half cupful of blood he had extracted from the martyr's
veins carefully into a small retort. Ontogenetic adaptation, with reaction-times
that crowded zero, to anything new in the way of infections or absorbed venoms
was one of the more useful talents of their specialized strain. Considerable
unauthorized research and experimentation finally had revealed to them just how
they did it. The invading substance was met by an instantaneous regrouping of
complex enzyme chains in every body cell affected by it, which matched and
nullified its specific harmful properties and left the Group member involved
permanently immune to them.

The
experience of getting immunized sometimes included the momentary impression of
having swallowed a small but active volcano, but that illusion didn't last long
enough to be taken very seriously by anyone but the sufferer. Vernet's blood
emerged from processing presently in the shape of small pink pills; and just
before dinner everybody washed down two each of these and thus adapted the easy
way, while the donor denounced them as vampires.

Albert II, in a vintage mushroom sauce and
garnished with quick-baked Vernet Cabbages, was hailed as an outstanding culinary
composition all around. Klim took the bows.

By nightfall, they had built a fire among
rocks above the highest tide mark, not far from the edge of the rustling
jungle; and a little later they were settled about it, making lazy conversation
or just watching the dancing flames.

Special
precautions did not seem required at the moment, though Weyer had reported
direct neuronic impressions of carnivorous and aggressive big-life in the
immediate neighborhood, and the Group's investigation of the planet had
revealed scattered traces of at least two deep-water civilizations maintained
by life forms of unknown type but with suggestively secretive habits. A half
dozen forms of sudden death snuggled inside the ornamental little gadgets
clamped to their gun belts, not to mention the monstrous argument the
pocket-sized battleship which had carried them here could put up; and their
perceptions were quick and accurate and very far-ranging. If any of this
world's denizens were considering a hostile first encounter, the Group was more
than willing to let them do the worrying about it.

Not a care in their heads, to look at them,
Grevan thought, a trifle enviously.
Handsome young animals,
just touching adulthood—four young men and four young women, who acted as if
they had been sent on a star-hopping picnic, with Grevan trailing along as a
sort of scoutmaster.

Which
wasn't of course, quite fair.

The cubs were as conscious as he was of the
fact that they might still be on a long, invisible leash out here—artificial
mental restraints imposed by Central Government's psychological machines. They
had developed a practical psychology of their own to free themselves of those
thought-traps, but they had no way of knowing how successful they had been. If
any such hypnotic mechanisms remained undiscovered in them, the penalty for defying
Central Government's instructions would be automatic and disastrous. Grevan
could see himself again as a frightened, rebellious boy inside a subterranean
conditioning vault, facing the apparently blank wall which concealed one of the
machines known as Dominators. He heard the flat, toneless voice of the
legendary monster, almost as old as Central Government itself, watched the
dazzling hypnotic patterns slide and shift suddenly across the wall and felt
hard knots of compulsive thought leap up in response and fade almost instantly
beyond the reach of his consciousness.

That had been his first experience with CG's
euphemistically termed "restraints." The Dominator had installed
three of them and let the boy know what to expect if rebellion was attempted
again. Two days later, he had skeptically put the power of the restraints to
a
test, and had very nearly died then and there.

They
would know soon enough. Failure to keep the scheduled contact tomorrow would
trigger any compulsive responses left in them as certainly as direct defiance
of CG's instructions would do. And because they had found finally a world
beyond CG's reach that could be their home, they were going to follow one or the
other of those courses of action tomorrow. Looking around at the circle of
thoughtfully relaxed young faces, he couldn't even imagine one of them
suggesting the possibility of a compromise with CG instead. After eight years
of secret planning and preparing, it wouldn't have occurred to them.

He relaxed himself, with a sigh and a
conscious effort, releasing his perceptions to mingle with theirs. A cool
breeze was shifting overhead, slowly drawing fresh scents from new sources,
while unseen night things with thin, crying voices flew out over the sea. The
ocean muttered about the lower rocks; and a mile to the east something big came
splashing noisily into the shallows and presently returned again to the deeper
water. Resting, the cubs seemed to be fitting themselves into the night,
putting out tentative sensory roots to gather up the essence of this new
world's life.

Then their attention began to shift and
gather, and Grevan again let his mind follow where they seemed to be pointing
without effort of his own.

It came to him quickly—a composite of
impressions which were being picked up individually by one or the other of them
and then formed by all into an increasingly definite picture.
The picture of
a
pair of shaggy, shambling appetites working their way awkwardly
down the cliffs behind the Group, towards the gleam of the fire.

The
cubs sat still and waited while the things approached, and Grevan watched them,
amused and momentarily distracted from his worries. The shaggy appetites
reached the foot of the cliff at length and came moving down through the
jungle. Heavy-footed but accomplished stalkers, Grevan decided. The local
species of king-beast probably, who knew the need of a long, cautious approach
before their final rush upon nimbler prey—he filed the fact away for future
consideration that a camp-fire seemed to mean such prey to them.

On a
rocky ridge two hundred yards above the fire, the stalkers came to a sudden
halt. He had an impression of great, gray, shadowy forms and two sets of
staring red eyes-It would be interesting, he thought, to know just what sort of
intuitive alarms went off in the more intelligent forms of alien carnivores
whenever they got their first good look at the Group. The cubs still hadn't
moved, but the visitors seemed to have come almost immediately to the
conclusion that they weren't nearly as hungry now as they had thought. They
were beginning a stealthy withdrawal—

And
then Eliol suddenly threw back her head and
laughed,
a
quick, rippling sound like a flash of wicked white teeth; a yell of pure mirth
went up from the others, and the withdrawal turned instantly into ludicrously
panicky flight.

The
incident had brought them awake and put them into a talkative mood. It might be
a good time to find out what they really thought of their chances of breaking
free of CG tomorrow. Grevan sat up, waiting for an opening in an impassioned
argument that had started up on the other side of the fire.

There
had been a bet involved, it seemed, in that impulsive five-fold plunge into the
ocean on landing. Last one in to be tomorrow's K.P.—and Vemet had come out on
the sticky end of the bet.

Everybody else agreed thoughtfully that it
just hadn't been Vernet's day. Vemet appeared unreconciled.

"You
knew my gun belt was stuck again," she accused Eliol. "You had it
planned so I'd be lastl"

Eliol,
having postponed her own turn at the Group's least-favored chore for one day by
issuing the
challenge,
permitted herself a gentle
chuckle.

"Teach you to keep your equipment in
regulation condition! You didn't have to take me up on it. Weyer didn't."

"Well,
anyway," said Vemet, "Lancey will help Vernet live through it. Won't
he?"

"Uh-huh!" beamed Lancey. "You
bet!"

"How
he dotes!" Eliol remarked critically. "Sometimes it gets
a
little disgusting. Take Cusat there—flat on his back as usual. There's a
boy who shows some decent restraint. Nobody would guess that he's actually a
slave to my slightest whim."