Critical Threshold (16 page)

CHAPTER NINETEEN

I tried, in my mind, to lay out some kind of a grid in order to systematize the pattern of my search. I decided to go round the lake a couple of miles, and then strike out into the forest at an angle estimated to be ninety degrees from the line of the river. After a couple of miles that way I'd turn at a shallow angle and come back, towards the lake. Then, zigzagging in a series of acute turns, I'd cover the whole area—maybe four square miles—and end up, if I managed to hold my lines okay, back at the waterfall, late in the afternoon. That way, I'd have a reasonable chance of running across Mariel, if she was, in fact, somewhere within that area.

I wasn't really sure that it was a good idea to split up, but it
was
necessary to make the gesture of searching—necessary, at least, for my own peace of mind. It seemed important to do everything humanly possible, however futile. Fortunately, there seemed to be as little danger lurking in the forest as there was possibility of locating Mariel. The panthers seemed easily-enough intimidated, and apart from those, we had been threatened by nothing worse than the occasional stinging insect.

My spirits were not exactly high as I began to pace out my predetermined path. Trees kept getting in my way, and my attempts to use the sun in order to navigate as straight a line as possible seemed to place an unduly heavy burden on my concentration. I knew that I wasn't going to be able to conquer the gathering sense of frustration and disappointment that would inevitably haunt the day.

It didn't take long for my leg to begin to ache, and then to hurt. By mid-morning I was cursing my thoughtlessness in leaving the medical kit under the bush; I felt in some need of a local anesthetic.

For once, I was completely immune to the intellectual and aesthetic attractions of the forest. For the first time, it began to seem not only alien but implicitly hostile, no fit place for human beings. Knowing now of one sinister threat it was hard not to suspect more lurking close at hand. There were thousands of species of insect, any one of which, in collecting together into a cloud such as we had already witnessed twice, might build up in the air a physiologically active concentration of any kind of poison. Maybe the black and yellow butterflies were only one item on a long menu of pheromonal thrills available to the new human race of Dendra.

I was unsettled, unhappy, resentful of the whole unpalatable situation.

I trudged back and forth, weaving between the trees, never knowing how far away I was from my ideal grid. I didn't attempt to shout her name, figuring that calling attention to myself was as likely to attract trouble as not. I didn't know whether any of the savages were likely to be drifting about in the forest, or whether they would be aware of my presence if they were, or whether they would care, but there was no point in tempting fate with a series of rousing yells. I was by no means sure that Mariel would respond even if she did hear me. It all depended on why she had gone off in the first place.

I didn't pause for long at any time, although I had to lie down periodically to rest my leg. I kept hunger at bay by plucking fruit and nuts off bushes and trees when I came across the right varieties. There seemed to be a great abundance despite the fact that a sizable tribe, perhaps a hundred or a hundred and fifty strong, lived off the area. Obviously it supplied them easily, as well as the birds and beasts which they hunted.

The day wore on and on.

I found precisely nothing.

I didn't even see any animals of respectable size.

The differences between this region of the forest and those through which we had come had seemed striking on the previous day, but what seemed obvious today were the samenesses. It isn't possible to imagine a forest covering many millions of square miles—human minds just aren't up to that kind of imagining. We can imagine ten, and ten squared, and maybe ten cubed, but we live in a three-dimensional world of perceptions, and after that the number of noughts becomes perceptively meaningless, useful only in abstract calculation. We cannot visualize the difference in scale between a million and billion. We can only calculate, and then admit defeat.

In the mind, everything shrinks conceptually to a magnitude at which it can be handled. We always find ways to make complicated things simple, seeking analogies and theories with which to generalize and categorize. We are rarely aware of the absurdity of our attempts to reduce the scale of actuality to the scale of convenience. But absurd it is to search a few square miles of a forest extending for tens of thousands of miles in all directions, and to know that even that search has been cursory and incomplete. It was in the sameness of the forest that the absurdity began to show itself to me. That same sameness told me what hopeless vanity it had been to expect that I could come to understand the forest on the basis of a few days walk among its trees.

I was assaulted by continual impressions of
déjà-vu,
as if the forest were mocking me and my attempt to locate within its vast expanse one tiny lost girl.

And the torn flesh of my leg was giving me hell.

I cursed myself, the forest, Mariel and fate, in rotation. I did it silently, but with feeling.

But I knew, as sometimes you do know, that you just have to go on in a situation like that, and if it's impossible—well, you have to try and
do
the impossible. Because there isn't anything else to do, and no reward in doing nothing.

I had to try. I tried. I failed.

I felt bitter about it—no less bitter because I knew it all in advance. Maybe more so.

When the sun sank to the horizon, setting into the thin gray-green blur that was the far shore of the lake, amid a ghostly haze of gray cloud, I returned to the tower of rock that marked the gate of the waterfall, utterly exhausted.

I lay down, prone, on the apron where we had spent the previous night, sheltered from the view of the savages by the low ridge of rock. Without the binoculars I watched the villagers as they packed up their daily routine and withdrew to their shelters. They seemed completely oblivious, wrapped up entirely in their own lives. I had to quell an insane urge to stand up and howl at them. I watched for half an hour or more, well into twilight, while some small reservoir of strength contrived to reactivate my body, prepare it for the last long march back upriver to Karen's camp.

There was still no sign of Mariel. None whatsoever.

I pulled myself over to the thicket where I'd hidden the packs, crawling not because I was afraid of being seen if I stood, but because it seemed easier. I reached into the open space behind the spreading foliage.

And found nothing.

An arrow of fear struck at my heart. For a moment or two I groped frantically. Then cold reason swamped me, and I began, almost reflexively, to weigh up the situation.

I realized first that I had been something of a fool in thinking that it was sufficient to push the packs out of sight. Sight wasn't so important here in the forest, and the human beings must have adapted their perceptions to that even as the native creatures had. The spilled medical kit must have set up an alien stink that would have carried for miles. Maybe the whole pack reeked. Either way, the savages had been up to investigate something during the day.

I began to add up our depleted resources. All the camping equipment had gone with Karen. Also the lamps, and the flashguns.

But the radio was gone. We couldn't report in.

It would be no use to the savages. They'd probably smash it up to take pieces of metal from inside it, to make fishhooks and arrowheads. The spare clothing they could probably use. And what else—plastic cups, spare clips of ammunition.

And the medical kit. A dangerous toy, that one. Not something to investigate unwarily.

I tried to remember where the book had been—the guide-book to the forest. That was the one thing that they couldn't need at all, and it was one thing I particularly didn't want to lose. But I couldn't remember. Karen had rearranged the stuff within the packs, and where the book had ended up I just didn't know. But perhaps, if they did have it, it might some day come to mean something to them—a kind of lure, to help them back into the process of thinking, of trying to make of things.

Could a people without a language ever make sense of written words?

Maybe not, but....

I went back to look down the slope at the shelters huddled among the trees. It was too dark now to see anything down there. There was no light, no fire.

I picked up the rifle and pulled the flashlight out from my belt. I began to move away, upriver.

As I moved away from the falls their booming faded and died, and the background of sound was slowly taken over once again by the unsteady rustling of the wind in the treetops. The falls had been monotonous, but the wind was more varied, blowing and ebbing as if beating out some endless rhythmic tune in the eaves of the forest.

The fall of night made the forest—which had already become, so far as I was concerned, a cheerless and oppressive place—into a sinister gathering of shadows. I stayed close to the river, where the break in the cover allowed me the sight of a ribbon of sky, not filled with stars, for the night was hazy with light cloud, but silvery with a faint natural light.

The small flashlight I had did no more than illuminate a circle of ground a few feet in diameter. I played it on the grass ahead of my feet, selecting the easiest path.

The further south I went the darker and quieter it became. The river seemed black and still, discreet and patient in its flow, and there was a
hollowness
to the feel of the descending night. The calling of the frogs seemed duller, more remote. The night-flying moths, picked out occasionally by the beam of my torch, seemed large and slow, ghost-like.

All the events of the past forty-eight hours built up in my mind to make me far more susceptible than usual to the impressions of the night and the unease such impressions inevitably engender. The imagination always embellishes shadows and shapes with bizarre and irrational form, but the conscious mind usually rejects such fancies immediately. There are times, however, when consciousness, weakened by circumstance, will entertain such notions no matter how grotesque their implications. It is at such times that we say of ourselves that we are haunted.

I was perilously close to such a state.

That night, as it gathered about me, stalked me with the images of a rebel imagination, gave birth to the spirits of all the supernatural fears which never quite die in any one of us.

I heard sounds that were
not
of the forest: sounds much fainter than the wind, much stranger than the eerie calls of the night creatures. Sounds like the rippling of drum skins, deeply buried in the sight-depleted sensory environment, emanating from within myself rather than without. We can, occasionally, become aware of the music of our own bodies: the rhythm of heart and blood, the strain of muscle and tendon. It is not always in silence that such awareness becomes represented in our minds by the impressions of sound. In fact, it is usually into a chaos of sounds that such impressions intrude. They are made loud by fear.

And I was afraid.

In spite of myself, I was prey to fear. I am not a man who walks in awe of nature, and certainly not one who lends the least credence to the power of the supernatural. But fear is a physiological thing that need not be awakened by any stimulus of the waking, thinking mind. There are areas of the personality beneath consciousness, in which fears and anxieties may be stirred.

It was not an open, direct fear that worked in my mind, but a sly unease that slid around its periphery. It was natural enough, after a bad day and a drug-affected night. But it was none the less discomfiting for being natural.

I found the hand that held the rifle by no means relaxed. It gripped the metal around the trigger-guard with an anxious firmness which suggested readiness for action.

We tend, inevitably, to
translate
such apparently-sourceless fears as arise out of our innate condition. One man thinks of them as expressions of the elemental, empathy with nature or the cosmos, another finds in them the stirring of ancient, primitive things, a pagan knowledge of old gods and existence outside life, a third may think himself in tune with other forces alive and active within the real world, for good or evil, and imagines himself gifted or cursed with extra senses or inherent talents.

Rationality is not always enough to defy such easy translations.

I felt—knowing all the while that it was absurd—that I was the victim of alien forces, beset by something which sought to transform me into an alien within myself, to rob me of the humanity which I fought to secure inside me through the infinite days and nights in which the
real
human world was so very far away. I felt
them,
the naked savages, staring at me from secluded inner eyes, watching me and drawing me out with their new imagination, trying to twist
me
into something incalculable, something weird, something
other
than human.

I am not a trigger-happy man, but I believe that if one of the forest people had appeared before me then I would have shot him down without an instant's pause.

I was hurrying when the darkness became all but absolute. I had already covered a couple of miles and I was convinced (more by hope than by logic) that I might spot the guiding light at any moment. I felt, quite irrationally, that Karen would have stayed closer to the falls than we had suggested in arriving at the distance of five miles as a suitable margin. All this hope meant, however, was that the moments dragged by, stretching out as I passed each tree and found no distant gleam in the darkness.

Natural sounds became distorted in my mind. I was startled by something in the water close by, perhaps a fish jumping or an animal something like an otter turning to dive after taking air. The sound of the splash seemed to be sucked back into the water smoothly and rapidly.