Here Comes Civilization: The Complete Science Fiction of William Tenn Volume II (29 page)

"Wonder how they knew about Susie," the spaceman mused. "Was it because she didn't come back at the usual time that the posse was organized? Or are they telepathic?"

"A combination, possibly. They certainly seem to know when one of them is in trouble. You wouldn't say they're acting belligerent?"

"Nope. Just flexing what passes for their muscles. They don't know whether we intend to serve Susie fricasseed or boiled. Better duck inside."

The biologist became her crisp self the moment she saw the white worms. "Wish I could tell exactly what it is they're eating. Now suppose I make a loose guess. Yes, it could well be. Jake, where are those other eggs?"

"Other eggs? Back there. Funny kind of eggs."

She slipped ahead of him, her searchlight picking out the chest-high globules. With a muttered exclamation, she bent down and examined one closely. It was slowly splitting along a pink vein. Donelli waited hopefully.

"No." She straightened. "It doesn't add up. Even assuming, as would seem possible, that those small creatures in the front are the live young of the burrowers and these are the eggs of the avians, it still doesn't explain their relative distance from the usual habitat of their parents. If they
were
the young of each species, the positions should be reversed. With their strong taboos and respective phobias, the avians would not fly so far into the cave, and the burrowers would not crawl so close to the surface. Furthermore, they would inevitably have passed each other at some time and know of each other's existence. Then too, while birth taboos are common among all primitive races, they hardly have the force of the psychoses which seem to affect both species relative to this and other caves. I'd need a good deal of study and many, many careful notes to work this problem out."

"Continuum!" he swore. "This isn't a research paper for some scientific society or other. We're in a hurry. This is a matter of life and death, woman! Can't you put some pressure into your thinking?"

She threw up her arms in their ungainly wrappings helplessly. "I'm sorry, Jake. I'm trying hard, but I just don't have enough facts on which to base an analysis of two separate, unfamiliar societies. I'm not a sociologist; I'm a biologist. So far as these creatures are concerned, I've just reached the threshold."

"That's all we do—stand around on the threshold," Donelli muttered. "Here are these caves, the threshold to our survival if we can get these babies to pick up the Q and bring it to us. The avians fly around the threshold of the underground but won't go in, while the burrowers crawl around the threshold of the surface but won't go further if you give them the place."

"And both races are on the threshold of civilization. I wonder how long they have been there?"

The spaceman slung the inerted lead container to the ground, preparatory to catching up the crystals of contra-uranium.

"What's the matter with them anyway, that they're so afraid of the caves? What do they think will happen to them after they cross the threshold?"

"What—do—they—think—will—happen," Helena repeated slowly. "What are we all afraid of, the fear intrinsic to any living animal? But how—the eggs—why, of course!
Of course!
"

She bent toward him briefly and Donelli felt his helmet
clang
.

"Sorry," she said. "I forgot. I tried to kiss you. What beautiful reasoning, Jake!"

"Huh?" He felt absurdly clumsy in his ignorance—and guilty.

"I'll have to work the details out as I go. Dr. Blaine—once I give him your premise—he'll be able to help. Isn't it wonderful how removal of one stone from the pyramid of obscurity sends the whole structure tumbling down? Now, Jake, do you think you could go into those tunnels and fetch me a live but slightly stunned burrower? We'll need one, you know."

"I—I guess I can. Where do you want him?"

"It, Jake,
it
! Bring it right here to the middle of the cave. I'll be waiting for you. Hurry!"

She ran out of the cave toward the ship. Donelli watched her go, decided he couldn't recall any particularly clever remarks he had made, set his supersonic for its lowest frequency, and moved to the tunnels.

He paused before the intersection. He and Blaine had had their little scrap with the burrowers in the right-hand one, and an elaborate trap might have been set there against their return: accordingly, he chose to walk down the shaft on his left.

It was much like the other shaft. Carefully carved cross-beams were set up at intervals, while the sides were smooth and round. He came to the sharp slope and moved more cautiously. If he slipped into a hole, there was no telling how far he might fall.

The slope became steeper. Donelli's helmet light suddenly exposed another, more complicated intersection ahead in the form of six tunnel entrances. In front of one, two burrowers were chipping the end of a large root out of the tunnel ceiling.

As his search beam hit them, they whirled simultaneously and waved the hairy appendage at him for the barest fraction a second. Then, both sprang for the tunnel entrance in a flick of ivory bodies.

Donelli thought he had missed. He had brought up his weapon just as they leaped. But one fell to the floor, the ax-head dropping. The creature was not completely unconscious, gobbling weakly at him as he approached. Donelli slung it over his shoulder and started back. The creature squirmed limply in his grasp.

There was an odd, insistent patter behind him, a sound of many legs. Pursuit. Well, they wouldn't dare follow him into the cave. He wished the suit weren't so heavy, though. He kept turning his head to look at the empty shaft to the rear. Nasty to be overcome from behind, under the suffocating earth of an alien planet.

Even though the burrower stiffened with fear when he reached the cave, he felt better. The pattering grew louder, stopped, came on slowly.

Helena Naxos and Blaine were squatting near the four large veined balls, the avian, weakly fluttering, between them. They held a supersonic over it. The winged creature had evidently had a dose of sound like that of Donelli's captive. Blaine was speaking persuasively, in that hum-drone language, with little apparent effect.

"Put it right down here, next to the other one," Helena ordered. "With a little time and a little imagination, we may get out of this fix. Too early to tell just yet. Jake, you'll have to act as sort of armed guard at this conference. We mustn't be disturbed. Susie's playmates are too frightened to come in, but they've been making all kinds of fuss since we carried her out of the ship and into the cave."

"I'll take care of it," the spaceman promised.

He gasped with sheer astonishment when he reached the entrance of the cave. The saffron sky was obscured by multitudes of black-winged avians dipping in short angry circles. A swarm of the avians had surrounded the lifeboat and, as he watched, they lifted it slightly off the ground in the direction of the sea. This was no attempt to placate a deity, he decided, but sheer vindictiveness—revenge for the unspeakable tortures they imagined the humans were venting on the prisoner.

The supersonic low-power beam rolled them off the ship in a huge stunned mass. Their places were immediately taken by others. Donelli sprayed them off too.

They left the ship alone after that, and came in flying low at him with their blow tubes in their mouths. Jagged darts shrilled nastily all around him. He felt one bounce off his chest and hoped vaguely that they were less effective than the weapons of the burrowers on Grojen shielding. He moved back into the shadow of the cave.

Helena, Dr. Blaine, and the two aliens came up behind him and gathered round the white worms near the entrance.

"Pretty dangerous here," he told them. "These avians of yours are an accurate bunch of snipers."

"No help for it," she replied. "We're getting close. I don't think they'll keep blowing darts after they get a glimpse of Sister Susie. We'll be safe so long as we're near her. Suppose you do something about the other side. Those burrowers are throwing an awful lot of stuff awfully far."

He moved past them toward the rear, noting that both the winged and clawed creatures were no longer under the influence of the supersonics but were listening intently to Dr. Blaine as he alternately hummed at one and clicked at the other. They almost watched Helena gesture to the white worms and their grisly meal and back to them.

At least we've got their interest, Donelli thought grimly.

He began to cough. No mistake this time, there was HF vapor seeping into his suit through some scratch. Fluorine was eating at his lungs. Well, he didn't have time to feel sick.

The ivory-colored animals had rigged up a primitive ballista just a few feet from the end of the tunnel and were pegging ax-heads into the cave at fairly respectable velocities. The missiles were easy to side-step, but Donelli's head was getting heavy and he lost his footing once or twice. As fast as his supersonic would sweep them away from the ballista, they would crowd back again with stubborn determination. A slow, evil fire built itself in Donelli's chest and spread nibbling fingers along his throat.

He looked over his shoulder. No more darts were coming in at the rapt group near the cave mouth. Evidently the avians were possessed of more love for one of their number than the burrowers. He had just started to turn his head when a heavy object struck the back of his helmet. He dimly perceived he was falling. It seemed to him that the burrower which he had captured leaped over him and rejoined its fellows, and that Susie flew out to a clustered bunch of avians and that they all buzzed and hummed like idiots.

What a waste of time, he thought as the fire began to consume his brain. Helena let them go.

It seemed to him that Helena and Dr. Blaine were hurrying to his side through a shimmering mist of yellow agony. It also seemed to him that one of the chest-high balls split up along a pink vein and something came out.

But he was sure of nothing but the painful, choking darkness into which his body twisted, nothing but the agony in his chest...

He woke with a spaceman's certain knowledge of riding a smooth jet. His body felt deliciously light. He tried to sit up, but he was too weak to do more than turn his head. Two men had their backs to him. After a while he identified them as Dr. Archibald Blaine and Dr. Douglas Ibn Yussuf. Dr. Yussuf was out of his cast and was arguing in an animated fashion with Blaine over a white ax-head imprisoned in a plastic block.

"Why, I'm in Dr. Yussuf's bunk," Donelli muttered stupidly.

"Welcome back," Helena told him, moving into range of his watery eyes. "You've been pretty far away for a long, long time."

"Away?"

"You ate enough hydrofluoric acid to etch a glass factory out of existence. I made my biological education turn handsprings to save that belligerent life of yours. We used up almost every drug on the ship, and Dr. Yussuf's organic deconverter-and-respirator, which he built and used on you, is going to make him the first physical chemist to win a Solarian Prize in medicine."

"When—when did we take off?"

"Days ago. We should be near a traffic lane now, not to mention the galactic patrol. Our tanks are stuffed with contra-uranium, our second jet is operating in a clumsy sort of way, and our converter is functioning as cheerily as any atomic converter ever did. After the help we gave them with their own lives, the population of Maximilian II was so busy bringing us Q that we ran out of inerted lead containers. From considering us the personifications of death, they've come to the point where they believe humans go around destroying death, or at least its fear. And it's Jake Donelli who did that."

"I did, did I?" Donelli was being very cautious.

"Didn't you? That business about the threshold of life and death being the caves was what I heard you develop with my own ears. It was the only clue I needed. The caves related not only to the sacredness of birth, but—more important to the primitive mind—to the awful terror of death. A threshold, you called it. And so it was, not only between life and death, but between the burrowers and the avians. Once I had that, and with a little scientific guessing, it was simple to figure out why the eggs were laid in apparent reverse order—those of the burrowers near the front, and those of the avians at the rear—and why they had never met each other."

The spaceman thought that over and then nodded slowly.

"Simple," Donelli murmured. "Yes, that might be the word. This little shred of scientific guessing you did, just what did it amount to?"

"Why, that the avians and the burrowers were different forms of the same creature in different stages of the life-process. The winged creatures mate just as their powers start to decline. Before the young hatch, the parents seek out a cave and die there. The young, those white worms, use the parental bodies as food until they have grown claws and can travel down to the tunnels where they become adolescent burrowers.

"The burrowers, after all, are nothing but larvae—despite the timbering of their shafts and their mining techniques, which Drs. Blaine and Yussuf consider spectacular. They can be considered sexless. After several years, the burrower will return to the cave. In the belief of its fellows it dies there, since it returns no more. It spins a cocoon—that's what those large green balls were—and remains a chrysalis until the winged form is fully developed. It then flies out of the cave and into the open air, where it is accepted by the so-called avians as their junior. It evidently retains no memory of its pre-chrysalis existence.

"Thus you have two civilizations unaware of each other, each different and each proceeding from the same organism. So far as the organism was concerned in either stage, it went to the cave only to die, and, from the cave, in some mysterious fashion, its own kind came forth. Therefore, a taboo is built up on both sides of the threshold, a taboo of the most thoroughgoing and binding nature, the mere thought of whose violation results in psychosis. The taboo, of course, has held their development in check for centuries, perhaps for millennia. Interesting?"

"Yeah!"

"The clue was what was important, Jake. Once I had it, I could relate their life-cycle to the
Goma
of Venus, the
Lepidoptera
of Earth, the
Sislinsinsi
of Altair VI. And the clincher was that one of the winged forms hatched out of a cocoon just after I'd finished explaining what was, up to that moment, only my hypothesis."