West of the Sun. Edgar Pangborn
Читать онлайн книгу.
woke—all at once, like a cat. He stretched, extending his arms twelve feet from wrist to wrist. He smiled down at Paul. He studied the helpless ones, peering longest at Ann Bryan; the black-haired girl was breathing harshly, fidgeting. Now and then her eyes flickered open and perhaps they saw. Softly as smoke Mijok stepped into the shadow of the trees and listened. Wright remarked, “Speaking of that reptile, we should set up a monument to it. Nothing luckier could have happened than that chance to lend Mijok a hand.” His gray eyes fixed on Paul, lids lowered in a speculative smile. “I’m not the only one who remembers, Paul, that you were the first to go to his help. He hasn’t forgotten.… Dot, you’re sure Ed understood that we have a friend there?”
“He seemed to, Doc. I watched them. They got along—practically buddies.”
Paul saw the bandage was still on Mijok’s arm, earth-stained and with fragments of gray moss, but not disarranged; the bandage on his own shoulder had been removed. The flying beast’s attack had left only a heavy scratch, which looked clean; there was no pain, only an itching. The meadow was empty of brown wings. The dead fish were gone from the lake. Perhaps other scavengers had been busy in the thirteen-hour night. The water was an innocent blue, a luminous stillness under the sun.
Mijok stole out into the grass, gazing westward along the line where meadow met jungle. Returning, he squatted by Wright and muttered, “Migan.” He spread a hand three feet above the ground; two fingers drooped and indicated the motion of walking legs. Paul suggested: “Pygmies?”
“Could be.” Mijok stared eloquently at Wright’s rifle then crouched at the barrier of branches, complaining in his throat. Taking up his own rifle, Paul joined him. Dorothy hurried to the lifeboat and came back with field glasses for him and Wright and herself. In spite of the great planet’s heavy pull, her body moved with even more light easiness than it had shown in the unreal years of Argo. With the glasses, vague motion a quarter mile away in the meadow leaped shockingly into precision.
The pygmies were not approaching but heading out from the edge of the forest, a group of nine, barely taller than the grass, bald red heads and shoulders in single file. The rearmost had a burden: seven others carried bows, with quivers on the right hip. “Left-handed,” Paul observed aloud. The leader was the tallest—a woman, with a long spear. All were sending anxious glances at the sky and toward the human shelter; their motions suggested a fear so deep it must be pain, yet something drew them out there in spite of it. The pygmy with the burden, a rolled-up hide, was also a woman. The leader was bald as the others, slender, muscular, her head round, with prominent forehead and thin nose, tattooed cheeks. The bowmen had only simple loincloths, and belts for their arrow quivers. The women’s knee-length grass skirts were like the Melanesian, but the leader’s was dyed a brilliant blue. Her two little pairs of breasts were youthfully firm and pointed. Dorothy murmured, “American civilization would have gone mad about those people.”
“What a girl!” Wright sighed. “I mean Dorothy—the Dope.”
“Even a dope can be jealous. Do you s’pose Mrs. Mijok has—Oh! Oh, poor darling! Not funny after all, gentlemen—”
The pygmy leader had turned full face, as the nine paused at trampled grass. She wore a necklace of shell. These had no glitter, but their yellow and blue made handsome splashes against the red of her skin. Reason told Paul that she could see at most only dazzling spots where sunlight might be touching the glasses he had thrust through wilted leaves. It made no difference: she was staring directly into him, making her grief a part of his life. A still-faced grief, too profound for any tears, if she knew of tears. The green cat eyes lowered; she stabbed her spear into the ground and lifted her arms, a giving, yielding motion. Her lips moved—in prayer, surely, since all but one of the men were bowed, performing ritual gestures toward whatever lay on the ground. The one who did not bow never ceased to watch the sky. The prayer was brief. The woman’s left hand dropped meaningly, the hide was unrolled, and its bearer raised what the grass had hidden—no more than a skull and a few bones, a broken spear, a muddy scrap that might have been a grass skirt. The hide was folded gently over these; the group went on.
“Dorothy—those things you saw running when we were circling down—I missed ’em,” Wright said. “Poor eyesight, and seems to me the air was still misty from Argo’s crash in the lake. They were going south, away from here? And they could have been—people like these?”
“Yes. Hundreds or thousands of them. I suppose the crash of Argomust have seemed like the heavens falling. The lifeboats too.”
“I think we interrupted a war.”
“These would be survivors? Live in this part of the jungle maybe? Looking for what’s left after those—those flying beasts—”
“It makes sense,” Wright said. “They’re more afraid of the sky than of our setup over here. Maybe we’re gods who came down to help them. If we did help them. Look: they’ve found another.… Yes, now the prayer.… Wish Mijok wasn’t so afraid of them. Inevitable. To them I suppose he’s an ugly wild animal. Different species, similar enough to be shocked at the similarity. ’Tain’t good.”
“Do we try for a foot in both camps?”
“Paul, I think I’ll take a rain check on answering that.… Ach—if I could go out there now—communicate—”
“No!” Dorothy gasped. “Not while the others are still sick.”
“You’re right of course.” Wright fretted at his beard stubble. “I get sillier all the time. As Ed would tell me if he were up and around. It’s the high oxygen.…”
There were brown splashes in the sky. The pygmies saw the peril first and darted for the woods—an orderly flight however—the woman with the hide in front, the blue-skirted woman next, then the bowmen. Three of the latter turned bravely and shot arrows that glittered and whined. The brown beasts wheeled and flapped angrily upward, though the buzzing arrows dropped far short of them. The pygmies gained the trees; the omasha scouted the edge of the woods, squawking, three of them drifting toward the lifeboat, weaving heads surveying the ground. Paul gave way to unfamiliar savage enjoyment. “Do we, Doc?”
“Yes,” said Wright, and took aim himself.
All three were brought down, at a cost of four irreplaceable rifle bullets and two shots from Dorothy’s automatic. Mijok bellowed with satisfaction but recoiled as Wright dragged a dirty brown carcass into the clearing. “A dissection is in order.” Mijok grumbled and fidgeted. “Don’t fret, Mijok.” Wright pegged down the wings of the dead animal with sharp sticks and drew an incision on the leathery belly with his hunting knife. “Good head shot, Paul—this one’s yours. We’ll do a brain job from one of the others, but I think we’ll let that wait for Sears—oh my, yes…! Doesn’t weigh over thirty pounds. Hollow bones like a bird’s, very likely. Hope they’ll keep.”
“You hope,” Dorothy sniffed. “What do you do when I turn housewife and instruct you to get that awful mess the hell off my nice clean floor?”
“Dope! And you my best and only medical student.” He worked at the cutting dubiously, inexpertly. “Conventional mammalian setup, more or less. Small lungs, big stomach. Hah—two pairs of kidneys?” He spread the viscera out on the wing. “Short intestine, also like a bird. And she was preparing a blessed event multiplied by—count ’em—six.”
“Too many,” said Paul. “Altogether too industrious.”
“What I really want to know—Oh…?” With the lungs removed, it could be seen that the hump on the back was caused by a great enlargement of four thoracic vertebrae, which swelled into the chest cavity as well as outward. Wright cut away spinal cartilage. “Damn, I wish Sears was doing this. Well, it’s neural tissue, nothing else—a big swelling of the spinal cord.” He sliced at the ugly head, but the hermorrhage from a .30-caliber bullet confused the picture. “The brain looks too simple. Could that lump in the cord be the hind brain? I hereby leave the theories to Sears. But, son, you might slit the stomach and see what the old lady had for breakfast.”
Paul’s