Norton, Andre - Anthology (19 page)

Funny thing, though—I didn't do
much talking at all and Sis hung on to Ma all the time and hid her face when
anybody looked at her. I felt pretty uncomfortable and disturbed myself, even
about the young lady. Glimpsing her outside there, I'd had all sorts of mushy
thoughts, but now I was just embarrassed and scared of her, even though she
tried to be nice as anything to me.

I sort of wished they'd all quit
crowding the Nest and let us be alone and get our feelings straightened out.

And when the newcomers began to
talk about our all going to
Los Alamos
, as if that were
taken for granted, I could see that something of the same feeling struck Pa and
Ma, too. Pa got very silent all of a sudden and Ma kept telling the young lady,
"But I wouldn't know how to act there and I haven't any clothes."

The strangers were puzzled like
anything at first, but then they got the idea. As Pa kept saying, "It just
doesn't seem right to let this fire go out."

* * *

Well, the strangers are gone, but
they're coming back. It hasn't been decided yet just what will happen. Maybe
the Nest will be kept up as what one of the strangers called a "survival
school." Or maybe we will join the pioneers who are going to try to
establish a new colony at the uranium mines at
Great Slave Lake
or in the
Congo
.

Of course, now that the strangers
are gone, I've been thinking a lot about
Los Alamos
and
those other tremendous colonies. I have a hankering to see them for myself.

You ask me, Pa wants to see them,
too. He's been getting pretty thoughtful, watching Ma and Sis perk up.

"It's different, now that we
know others are alive," he explains to me. "Your mother doesn't feel
so hopeless any more. Neither do
I
, for that matter,
not having to carry the whole responsibility for keeping the human race going,
so to speak. It scares a person."

I looked around at the blanket
walls and the fire and the pails of air boiling away and Ma and Sis sleeping in
the warmth and the flickering light.

"It's not going to be easy to
leave the Nest," I said, wanting to cry, kind of. "It's so small and
there's just the four of us. I get scared at the idea of big places and a lot
of strangers."

He nodded and put another piece of
coal on the fire. Then he looked at the little pile and grinned suddenly and
put a couple of handfuls on, just as if it was one of our birthdays or
Christmas.

"You'll quickly get over that
feeling, son," he said. "The trouble with the world was that it kept
getting smaller and smaller, till it ended with just the Nest. Now it'll be
good to have a real huge world again, the way it was in the beginning."

I guess he's right. You think the
beautiful young lady will wait for me till I grow up? I'll be twenty in only
ten years.

            
Man has fouled his
world to the danger point. He has looted its treasures, despoiled its beauty,
threatened
his own existence in heedless greed. If the
balance tips in the future, if man becomes "extinct," what will be
the attitude of those replacing him as bearers of so-called civilization? Will
they, in turn, be any more merciful, any wiser?

           
WHERE the
rivers flowed together, the country was flat and, in places, swampy. The
combined waters spread out and crawled around reedy islands. Back from the
banks, the ground rose into low tree-crowned humps.

           
The May
flies were swarming that day, and as thousands of them danced, the low
afternoon sun, whose setting would bring death to them all, glinted on their
wings. There was little sound, other than the hum of a belated cicada and the
splashing of an elephantlike beast in the southern tributary.

           
The beast
suddenly raised its head, its great mulish ears swiveling forward and its
upraised trunk turning this way and that like a periscope. It evidently
disapproved of what it smelled, for it heaved its bulk out of its bath and
ambled off up a creek bed, the feet on its columnar legs making loud sucking
noises as they pulled out of the mud.

           
Two riders
appeared from downstream, each leading an animal similar to the one he rode.
The animals' feet swished through the laurel beds and went
squilch-squilch
as
they struck patches of muck. As they crossed the creek bed, the leading rider
pulled up his mount and pointed to the tracks made by the elephantine beast.

           
"Giant
tapir!" he said in his own harsh, chattering language.
"A
big one.
What a specimen he'd make!"

           
"Ngoy?"
drawled his companion, meaning approximately "Oh, yeah?" He
continued: "And how would we get it back to
South America
?
Carry it slung from a pole?"

           
The first
rider made the grating noise in his throat that was his race's equivalent of
laughter. "I didn't suggest shooting it. I just said it would make a good
specimen. We'll have to get one some day. The museum hasn't a decent mounted
example of the species."

           
The riders
were anthropoid, but not human. Their large prehensile tails, rolled up behind
them on the saddle, and the thick coats of brown and black hair that covered
them, precluded that. Their thumblike halluces or big toes jutted out from the
mid-portion of their feet and were hooked into the stirrups, which were about
the size and shape of napkin rings. Below the large liquid eyes in their
prognathous faces there were no external noses, just a pair of narrow nostrils
set wide apart. The riders weighed about one hundred and fifty pounds each. A
zoologist of today would have placed them in the family
Cebidae,
the
capuchin monkeys, and been right. They would have had more difficulty in
classifying the zoologist, because in their time the science of paleontology
was young, and the family tree of the primates had not been worked out fully.

           
Their
mounts were the size of mules; tailless, round-eared, and with catlike whiskers
sprouting from their deep muzzles. They absurdly resembled colossal guinea
pigs, which they were; or rather, they were colossal agoutis, the ordinary
agouti being a rabbit-sized member of the cavy family.

           
The leading
rider whistled. His mount and the lead pack agouti bucked up the creek bank and
headed at their tireless trot toward one of the mounds. The rider dismounted
and began poking around between the curiously regular granite blocks scattered
among the green-and-brown-spotted trunks of the sycamores. Grasshoppers
exploded from under his feet as he walked.

           
He called,
"Chujee!"

           
The other
rider trotted up and got off. The four agoutis went to work with their great
chisel teeth on the low-drooping branches.

           
"Look,"
the first rider said, turning over one of the blocks. "Those faces are too
nearly parallel to have been made that way by accident. And here's one with two
plane surfaces at a perfect right angle. I think we've found it."

           
"Ngoy?"
drawled the other. "You mean the site of a large city of
Men
?
Maybe."
Skepticism was patent in his tone as he
strolled about, poking at the stones with his foot. Then his voice rose.
"Nawputta!
You think
you've
found something;
look at this!"
He uprighted a large stone.
Its
flat face was nearly smooth, but when it was turned so that the sun's rays were
almost parallel with the face, a set of curiously regular shadows sprang out on
the surface.

           
Nawputta—he
had a given name as well, but it was both unpronounceable and unnecessary to
reproduce here—scowled at it, trying in his mind to straighten the faint
indentations into a series of inscribed characters. He fished a camera out of
his harness and snapped several pictures, while Chujee braced the stone. The
markings were as follows:

NATIO

ANK OF

TTSBURGH

           
"It's
an inscription, all right," Nawputta remarked, as he put his camera away.
"Most of
it's
weathered away, which isn't
surprising, considering that the stone's been here for five or ten million
years, or however long Man has been extinct. The redness of this sand bears out
the theory. It's probably full of iron oxide. Men must have used an incredible
amount of steel in their buildings."

           
Chujee
asked: "Have you any idea what the inscription says?" In his voice
there was the trace of awe which the capuchins felt toward these predecessors
who had
risen
so high and vanished so utterly.

           
"No.
Some of our specialists will have to try to decipher it from my photographs.
That'll be possible only if it's in one of the languages of Man that have been
worked out. He had dozens of different languages that we know of, and probably
hundreds that we don't. The commonest was En-gel-iss-ha, which we can translate
fairly well. It's too bad there aren't some live Men running around. They could
answer a lot of questions that puzzle us."

           
"Maybe,"
said Chujee. "And maybe it's just as well there aren't. They might have
killed
us
off if they'd thought we were going to become civilized enough
to compete with them."

           
"Perhaps
you're right. I never thought of that. I wish we could take the stone back with
us."

           
Chujee
grunted. "When you hired me to guide you, you told me the museum just
wanted you to make a short reconnaissance. And every day you see something
weighing a ton or so that you want to collect. Yesterday it was that bear we
saw on the cliff; it weighed a ton and a half at least."

           
"But,"
expostulated
Nawputta, "that was a new
subspecies!"

           
"Sure,"
growled the guide. "That makes it different. New subspecies aren't really
heavy; they only look that way. You scientific guys! We should have brought
along a derrick, a steam tractor, and a gang of laborers from the Colony."
His grin took the sting out of his words. "Well, old-timer, I see you'll
be puttering around after relics all day; I might as well set up camp." He
collected the agoutis and went off to find a dry spot near the river.

           
Presently
he was back. "I found a place," he said. "But we aren't the
first ones.
There's
the remains of a recent
fire."

           
Nawputta,
the zoologist, looked disappointed. "Then we aren't the first to penetrate
this far into the
Eastern Forest
. Who do you suppose it
was?"

           
"Dunno.
Maybe
a timber scout
from the Colony. They're trying
to build up a lumber export business, you know. They don't like being too
dependent on their salt and sulphur— Yeow!" Chujee jumped three feet
straight up.
"Snake!"

           
Nawputta
jumped, too; then laughed at their timidity. He bent over and snatched up the
little reptile as it slithered among the stones. "It's perfectly
harmless," he said. "Most of them
are,
this
far north."

           
"I
don't care if it is," barked Chujee, backing up rapidly. "You keep
that damn thing away from me!"

           
Next day
they pushed up the south tributary. The character of the vegetation slowly
changed as they climbed. A few miles up, they came to another fork. They had to
swim the main stream in order to follow the smaller one, as Nawputta wished to
cast toward the line of hills becoming visible in the east, before turning
back. As they swam their agoutis across the main street, a black-bellied cloud
that had crept up behind them suddenly opened with a crash of thunder, and
pelting rain whipped the surface to froth.

           
As they
climbed out
On
the far bank, Nawputta began
absent-mindedly unrolling his cape. He almost had it on when a whoop from
Chujee reminded him that he was thoroughly soaked already. The rain had
slackened to a drizzle and presently ceased.

           
The
scientist sniffed. "Wood smoke," he said.

           
Chujee
grunted. "Either that's our mysterious friend, or we're just in time to
stop a forest fire, if the rain hasn't done that for us." He kicked his
mount forward. In the patch of pine they were traversing, the agoutis' feet
made no sound on the carpet of needles. Thus they came upon the fire and the
capuchin
who
was roasting a slab of venison over it
before the latter saw them.

           
At the snap
of a twig, the stranger whirled and snatched up a heavy rifle.

           
"Well?"
he said in a flat voice. "Who
be
you?" In
his cape, which he was still wearing after the rain, he looked like a
caricature of Little Red Ridinghood.

           
The
explorers automatically reached for the rifles in their saddle boots, but
thought better of it in the face of that unwavering muzzle. Nawputta identified
himself and the guide.

           
The
stranger relaxed. "Oh!
Just another one of those damn
bug hunters.
Sorry I scared you. Make yourselves at home. I'm Nguchoy
tsu Chaw, timber scout for the Colony. We—I—came up in that canoe yonder.
Made it ourselves out of birch bark.
Great
stuff, birch bark."
"We?" echoed Nawputta.

           
The scout's
shoulders drooped sadly.
"Just finished burying my
partner.
Rattlesnake got him. Name was Jawga; Jawga tsu Shrr. Best
partner a scout ever had. Say, could you let me have some flea powder? I'm all
out."

           
As he
rubbed the powder into his fur, he continued: "We'd just found the biggest
stand of pine you ever saw. This river cuts through a notch in the ridge about
thirty miles up. Beyond that it's gorges and rapids for miles, and beyond that
it cuts through another ridge and breaks up into little creeks. We had to tie
the boat up and hike.
Great country; deer, bear, giant
rabbit, duck, and all kinds of game.
Not
so
thick as they say it is on the western plains, but you can shoot your meat
easy." He went on to say that he was making a cast up the main stream
before returning to the Colony with his news.

           
After
Nguchoy had departed early the following morning, Chujee, the guide, scratched
his head. "Guess I must have picked up some fleas from our friend. Wonder
why he held a gun on us until he found who we were? That's no way to treat a
stranger."

           
Nawputta
wiggled his thumbs, the capuchin equivalent of a shrug. "He was afraid at
being alone, I imagine."

           
Chujee
still frowned. "I can understand his grabbing it before he knew what was
behind him; we might have been a lion. But he kept pointing it after he saw we
were
Jmu"
—the capuchin word for "human" —"like
himself. There aren't any criminals around here for him to be scared of. Oh,
well, I guess I'm just naturally mistrustful of these damned Colonials. Do you
want to look at this 'great country'?"

           
"Yes,"
said Nawputta. "If we go on another week, we can still get out before the
cold weather begins." (Despite their fur, the capuchins were sensitive to
cold, for which reason exploration had lagged behind the other elements of their
civilization.) "Nguchoy's description agrees with what Chmrrgoy saw from
his balloon, though, as you recall, he never got up this far on foot. He landed
by the river forty miles down and floated down the Big Muddy to the Colony on a
raft."

           
"Say,"
said Chujee. "Do you suppose they'll ever get a flying machine that'll go
where you want it to, instead of being blown around like these balloons? You
know all about these scientific things."

           
"Not
unless they can get a much lighter engine. By the time you've loaded your
boiler, your engine proper, and your fuel and feed water aboard, your flying
machine has as much chance of taking off as a granite boulder. There's a theory
that Men had flying machines, but the evidence isn't conclusive. They may have
had engines powered by mineral oils, which they pumped out of beds of
oil-bearing sand. Our geologists have traced some of their borings. They used
up nearly all the oils, so
we
have to be satisfied with coal."