West Of The Sun

  2

  The Earphones Were Squawking: "Speak Up! Can you hear me? Can you----"

  "Not hurt. Seams open, and there goes Sears' thirty-six-hour test forair-borne bacteria. Down and safe, Ed."

  "Listen." In relief, Ed Spearman was heavily didactic again. "You arethree quarters of a mile inside the jungle. I will land near thewoods. It will be dark in about an hour. Wait there until we----"

  "One minute," Paul said in sudden exhaustion. "We can find you,easier. Sears' test is important. We're already exposed to the air,but----"

  "What? Can't hear--damn it----" The voice dimmed and crackled.

  "Stay sealed up!" Nothing. "Can you hear?" Nothing. "Oh, well, good,"said Paul, discarding the headset, adding foolishly: "I'm tired."

  Dorothy unfastened his straps; her kiss was warm and quick.

  "Radio kaput, huh?" Wright flexed lean cautious legs. "Pity. I didwant to tell Sears one I just remembered after eleven years, aboutpoor lackadaisical Lou, who painted her torso bright blue, not forlove, not for money, not because it looked funny, but simply forsomething to do."

  "You're not hurt, Doc," Dorothy said. "Not where it counts."

  "Can't kill an anthropologist. Ask my student Paul Mason. Leatherhides, pickled in a solution ten parts curiosity to one of statistics.Doctors are mighty viable too. Ask my student Dorothy Leeds."

  Paul's forehead was wet. "Dark in an hour, he reminded me."

  "How close are we to the nearest of those parallel lines?"

  "Three or four miles, Doc, at a loose guess."

  "Remember that great mess of 'em fifty or sixty miles south of here?Shows on Ed's map. We must be--mm--seventy miles from the smallest ofthe two oceans--oh, let's call it the Atlantic, huh? And the other onethe East Atlantic? Anyway the ocean's beyond that range of hills wesaw on the way down."

  "I saw campfires in the meadow," Dorothy said. "Things running."

  "I thought so too.... Paul, I wonder if Sears can do any testing ofthe air from the lifeboat? Some of the equipment couldn't betransferred from _Argo_. And--how could they communicate with us?They'll have to breathe it soon in any case."

  Paul checked a shuddering yawn. "I must have been thinking in terms of_Argo_, which is--history.... You know, I believe the artificialgravity was stronger than we thought? I feel light, not heavy."

  "High oxygen?" Dorothy suggested. "Hot, too."

  "Eighty-plus. Crash suits can't do us any more good." They struggledout of them in the cramped space, down to faded jackets and shorts.

  Wright brooded on it, pinching his throat. "Only advantage in theothers' staying sealed up a while is that if we get sick, they'll getsick a bit later. Could be some advantage. Paul--think we should tryto reach them this evening?"

  "Three quarters of a mile, dark coming on--no. But so far as I'mconcerned, Doc, you're boss of this expedition. In the ship, Ed had tobe--matter of engineering knowledge. No longer applies. I wanted tosay that."

  Wright turned away. "Dorothy?"

  She said warmly, "Yes. You."

  "I--oh, my dear, I don't know that it's--best." Fretfully he added:"Shouldn't need a leader. Only six of us--agreement----"

  Dorothy held her voice to lightness: "I can even disagree with myself.Sears will want you to take over. Ann too, probably."

  His gray head sank in his hands. "As for that," he said, "inside of meI'm apt to be a committee of fifteen." Paul thought: _But he's notold! Fifty-two. When did he turn gray, and we never noticing it...?_"For now," Wright said, "let's not be official about it, huh? What ifmy dreams for Lucifer are--not shared?"

  "Dreams are never quite shared," Dorothy said. "I want you to leadus."

  Wright whispered with difficulty, "I will try."

  Dorothy continued: "Ed may want things black and white. Not Ann, Ithink--she hates discussions, being obliged to make up her mind.You're elected, soldier.... Can you open the door, Paul?"

  It jammed in the spoiled frame after opening enough for a tight exit.Wright stared into evening. "Not the leader kind. Academic." His whitehands moved in doubtful protest. "Hate snap decisions--we'll be forcedto make a lot of them."

  Paul said, "They're best made by one who hates making them."

  The lean face became gentle. "Taught you that myself, didn't I,son...? Well--inventory. What've we got, right here?"

  "Thirty days' rations for three, packed eleven years ago. Twoautomatic rifles, one shotgun, three automatic pistols, three hundredrounds for each weapon. Should have transferred more from the ship,but--we didn't. Three four-inch hunting knives, very good----"

  "They at least won't give out. With care."

  "Right. Two sealed cases of garden seeds--anybody's guess about them.Six sets of overalls, shorts, and jackets. Three pairs of shoesapiece--the Federation allowed that you and Ann might grow a little,Dot--plasta soles and uppers, should last several years. Carpentrytools. Ed's boat has the garden tools instead. Sears did pack hismicroscope, didn't he?"

  "Oh my, yes," said Dorothy, in affectionate mimicry of the fat man'sturn of speech.

  "Each crash suit has first-aid kit, radion flashlight (good for twoyears maybe), compass, field glasses, plus whatever else we had senseenough to stuff in. Set of technical manuals, mostly useless withoutthe ship, but I think there's one on woodcraft, primitive tools andweapons--survival stuff----"

  "Oh, the books!" Wright clutched his hair, groaning. "The books----"

  "Just that woodcraft----"

  "No, no, no--the books on _Argo_! Everything--the library--I've onlyjust understood that it's gone. The whole flowering of humanthought--man's best, uncorrupted--_Odyssey_--Ann's music, the artvolumes you selected, Paul, and your own sketches and paintings----"

  "No loss there----"

  "Don't talk like a damn fool! Shakespeare--_Divina commedia_----"

  Dorothy twisted in the narrowness to put both arms around him."Doc--quiet, dear--please----"

  "I can remember pages of _Huck Finn_--_a few pages_!"

  Dorothy was wiping his face with a loose comer of her jacket."Doc--subside! Please now--make it stop hurting inside yourself. Oh,quiet...."

  After a time he said lifelessly, "Go on with the inventory, Paul."

  "Well--there's a duplicate of that map Ed made yesterday from orbitphotographs of this area, about a hundred miles square. We're near theeastern edge of that square. There's the other map he made of thewhole globe. We didn't duplicate that one. I guess that's about it."

  "Knives," Wright muttered. "Knives and a few tools."

  "The firearms may make a difference while they last."

  "Yes, perhaps. But thirty years from now----"

  "Thirty years from now," said Dorothy, still sheltering his head,"thirty years from now our children will be grown."

  "Oh." Wright groped for her fingers. "You almost wanted it like this,didn't you? I mean, to land and not return?"

  "I don't know, Doc. Maybe. I'm not sure I ever quite believed in thepossibility of return. State Orphanage children like Ann and me,growing up in a tiny world within a big one, we weren't quite humanever, were we? Not that the big world didn't seep in plenty." Shesmiled off at private shadows of memory. "We did learn things not inthe directors' curriculum. When they started grooming Ann and me forthis--Youth Volunteers! Stuffing our little heads with the best theyhad--oh, it was fun too. By that time I think I had a fair idea of thebig world. The Orphanage was pleasant, you know--clean, humanitarian,good teachers, all of them kind and more than a bit hurried. They didtry so hard never to let me hear the word 'nigger'! Ignorance is poorinsulating material, don't you think? And why, Doc, after all that'sbeen known and thought and argued for the last hundred years, couldn'tthey select at least one Oriental for our little trip? Wouldn't havehad to come from Jenga's empire--our own states in the Federation hadplenty of 'em--scholars, technicians, anything you care to name."

  Wright had calmed. He said, "I argued for it and got told. They evensaid that the spaceport rights and privileges recently given toJ
enga's empire would allow the Asiatics to build their ownship--tacitly implying that humanity should stay in two camps worldwithout end. Ach! You can shove the political mind just so far, thenit stalls in its own dirt Even Jensen wasn't able to budge them."

  "It's history," said Dorothy, and Paul wondered: _How does she do it?Speaking hands and voice, enough to shove away the black sorrow evenbefore it fairly had hold of him--and she'd try to do it for anyone,loved or not. She was the first (and only one) who said to me thereare some things more important than love-and she herself would bebothered to explain that in words._ "Well," Dorothy reflected, "Ibelieve the Orphanage slapped too much destiny of Man on the backs ofour little necks--they're just necks. Paul, why don't you sleepawhile? You too, Doc. Let me keep watch. I'll wake you both ifanything stirs out there. Doze off, boys."

  Paul tried to, his mind restless in weary flesh. No permissible marginof error, said the twenty-first century. But _Argo_ lay at the bottomof a lake because of an error. Not an error like the gross errorstwenty-first century man still made in dealing with his own kind andstill noisily disregarded, but an engineering error--somethingtwenty-first-century man viewed with a horror once reserved, in not soancient times, for moral evil. The cardinal sin was to drop a decimal.If, like Wright, or Paul himself, you were concerned with the agonyand growing pains of human nature, disturbed by the paralyticsterility of state socialism and the worse paralysis of open tyranny,you kept your mouth shut--or even yielded, almost unknowingly, to thepressures that reduced ethical realities to a piddling checker gameperverting the uses of semantics. They said, "There won't be any war.If there is, look what we've got!" If you were like the majority ofEarth's three billion, you hoped to get by with as much as the trafficwould bear and never stuck your neck out. They celebrated the turn ofthe third millennium with a jolly new song: "Snuggle up, Baby--Unclepays the bill...." But for all that, you mustn't use the wrong bolt.

  Unreasonably quiet here. A jungle evening on Earth would have beenriotous with bird and insect noises.... He slept.

  It was dark when Wright's finger prodded him. "A visitor."

  The darkness was rose-tinged, not with sunset. There were two moons,Paul remembered, one white and large and far away, one red and near.Should the red moon be shining now? He gazed through the half-opendoorway, wondering why he was not afraid, seeing something pale andvast, washed in--yes, surely in reddish moon-light. A thing swaying onthe pillars of its legs, perhaps listening, tasting the air forstrangeness. And scattered through the night, sapphires on blackvelvet, were tiny dots of blue, moving, vanishing, reappearing. "Bluefireflies," Dorothy whispered, "blue fireflies, that's all they are."He felt her controlled breathing, forced down a foolish laugh. _Wecould have done without a white elephant._

  Nine or ten feet tall at the shoulder, a tapir-like snout, black tusksbending more nearly downward than an elephant's, from milk-whiteflesh. The ears were mobile, waving to study the night. There was anoval hump near the base of the neck. The beast had been facing them;it turned to pull down a branch, munch the leaves, casually drop thestalk. In silence it drifted away, pausing to meditate, grumblingjuicily, but with no alarm.

  Wright whispered, "The planet Lucifer did not ask for us."

  "Paul--I stepped out for a minute, while you were both asleep. Firmground. A smell--flowers, I think--made me remember frangipani."

  "I'll try it."

  "Oh, but not with that thing----"

  "He didn't seem to mind us. I'll stay near the door." He knew Dorothywould come with him. Feeling earth under legs that had nearlyforgotten it, he turned to help her down; her dark eyes played diamondgames with the moon-light.

  It could have been a night anywhere in the Galaxy, up there beyondtorn branches, stars, and red moon in a vagueness of cloud. Bluefireflies....

  But there was a child wailing somewhere. Far-off and weak, a dim riseand fall of sound, grief and remoteness. A waterfall? Wind in upperbranches? But they were still, and the sound carried the timbre ofanimal life. Dorothy murmured, "It's been crying that way ever sincemoon-rise." She came closely into his arms.

  "I can read one thing inside of you--you're not scared."

  "I'm not, Paul?"

  "No."

  "But don't ever leave me--Adam."