By Richard Wilson
Chapter One
Nevins, who had been ill, did not rejoin the others for nearly two weeks after they had been cast away by the mutineers. It was dusk when he walked into the glade of flame-coloured grass where they had decided to wait. Jeffries was the only one to greet him.
‘Hello, Nevins,’ he said. ‘Going to be part of the happy group, are you? How’s the fever?’
‘Gone, I guess. But I still feel lightheaded.’
Jeffries laughed. ‘So do we all. It’s something in the atmosphere of this bloody planet. Well, pick yourself a spot. One’s as good as another.’
Nevins looked around. There was no hut or lean-to, or even bedding. ‘Where do you sleep?’ he asked.
Jeffries laughed again, with little humour. ‘You’ve been sleeping? You’re the lucky one. We don’t sleep, friend.’
‘They had me doped up. I guess I was out most of the time. You mean you can’t sleep?’
‘Can’t - and don’t need to,’ Jeffries said. ‘It’s the atmosphere, old boy. Something in it. But nothing to knit up the old ravelled sleeve. Damn nuisance, of course, but there it is. We’re the original lively four. Five, now you’re here.’
‘Nobody looks very lively,’ Nevins said.
Cadman, who was closest to them, sat crosslegged in front of his portable typewriter, which he had propped on top of a flat rock. He was pecking at the keys with two fingers, without enthusiasm but steadily.
‘Hello, Cadman,’ Nevins said. ‘Working?’
Cadman looked at him with no particular expression. ‘That’s what Interplanetary News pays me for,’ he said. ‘I’m preparing a dispatch.’
‘I see. That’s the spirit.’
Cadman brightened a little. ‘Look, Ralph,’ he said. ‘You’ve been away. You can use a fill-in. Feel free to look over my stuff any time. It wouldn’t be right for you to miss out on the story just because you’ve been sick.’
‘That’s damn nice of you,’ Nevins said.
Jeffries said: ‘Code of the journalist, eh, Cadman?’
‘Just the decent thing to do,’ Cadman said, not looking at Jeffries.
‘Thanks, Cadman,’ Nevins said. ‘I’ll have a look later.’
‘Okay.’ Cadman went back to typing. ‘There’s really no hurry.’
Before Jeffries led him away, Nevins had a glimpse of the line Cadman was typing. It said: damn nice code journalist look later no hurry
* * * *
‘Cadman’s got it all down,’ Jeffries said. ‘Every jot and title. Every crashing bore of an incident. It’s there for when you want it, but you won’t want it. He’s crackers, you know.’
‘Crackers?’
‘Nutty as a fruit cake, to use your idiom. More so than the rest of us.’
Nevins looked at him closely. ‘Not you,’ he said. ‘Not Justin Jeffries of the Daily Mail, dean of the British press corps.’ He’d tried to say it lightly, but it came out sounding nasty. He hadn’t meant it to; Jeffries was supercilious and full of biting wit but there was no malice in him.
‘The same,’ said Jeffries, who’d apparently taken no offence. ‘We’ve all developed our little ways. Just as you will, Ralph L. Nevins of Galactic News, now that you’re back from limbo.’
‘How’s Cindy? She’s a pretty level-headed one.’
Cindy Garth, feature writer for World Wide News, wasn’t the prettiest girl in the world. Few women correspondents were externally beautiful. But Cindy was intelligent and pleasant and, before the mutiny, had been a real diplomat as lone woman in the ship. She’d earned the respect of each of her male colleagues, even those she’d had to rebuff when they tried too unsubtly to be lady-killers.
Jeffries said: ‘Want to talk to her now, or save it for dessert? It may come as a shock.’
Ralph Nevins hesitated. He could see Cindy at the far end of the glade. She was perched on a hummock, turned half away from them, watching the sun-moon as it prepared to sink behind the dark red ridge across the little valley. She looked perfectly normal, almost pretty, in the gathering dusk. What could be wrong with her?
Nothing, Ralph decided. ‘Come on; let’s go say hello.’
Jeffries shrugged. ‘Hold on to your illusions.’
Cindy Garth looked around sharply as they neared. She sprang to her feet.
‘Hold!’ she cried, flinging out an imperious arm. ‘None approaches save at our bidding.’ She glared at them. ‘What seek ye?’
Ralph turned to the older man in dismay. ‘What’s happened to her?’
Cindy’s hair was a tangle. She wore no makeup. Her clothing was rumpled. Nevertheless her carriage was erect and her gaze haughty.
‘She’s Queen of the May,’ Jeffries said. ‘Or perhaps Catherine the Great. Had enough for now?’
‘Yes. I’ll talk to her when I’m stronger.’
They turned away. Cindy went back to her hummock, muttering. It sounded as if she were saying, ‘... respect for our sovereign person.’
* * * *
As they headed back toward the centre of the darkening glade Hunter, the fifth in their group, jogged past them around the perimeter. His head was flung back and his eyes appeared to be closed. He held his hands in fists, close to his chest, and trotted soundlessly around a narrow track which had been worn into the yellow-orange grass. He was breathing in a deep, controlled rhythm.
‘What’s he doing?’ Ralph asked.
‘Working himself up to it.’
‘To what? I’d say hello, but he looks as if he doesn’t want anybody to bother him.’
‘He wouldn’t talk to you now. Afterwards, maybe.’
‘After what?’
‘Let’s see if we can find you a hummock to call your own,’ Jeffries said. ‘We may not sleep, but we can’t stand up all night like bloody horses, either.’
The sun-moon touched the rim of the horizon and seemed to spread its softly silver luminescence along the edge of it, as if it were an egg yolk accommodating itself to the flatness of a pan. Then it was sucked under the rim, leaving the sky dark but with fiery streaks at one of the bottom edges of its inverted bowl.
Then the moon-moon rose, in almost the exact place where the sun-moon had set, and, on a far ridge between it and the glade, some figures began to move back and forth in a curious, jerky way.
They were at such a distance that it was hard to judge their size, but Ralph imagined they were about as big as wolves.
They travelled in a kind of mechanical lope, moving in one direction for several seconds, then halting with a jerk and going in the opposite way. They were little more than silhouettes at this distance, and to Ralph they looked like cookie-cutter figures being manipulated by a child in the beam of a projector. They constantly moved back and forth, crisscrossing, perhaps even swinging around one another the way people did at a barn dance.
Then another image came into Ralph’s mind, that of a crack-the-whip at a carnival, where each car was sent speeding in one direction and then was whipped around as it reached the end of its mechanical tether.
But that was still not right. The word ‘wolves’ came back into his mind, without reason.
Jeffries had paused and watched with him. ‘Hypnotic spectacle, isn’t it? For some reason, undoubtedly psychological, everybody calls them the wolves. Yet they don’t look a bit like wolves, do they?’ He watched them for a while longer, then turned away and said abruptly: ‘Besides, there aren’t any animals on this planet. Except for us.’
* * * *
Chapter Two
They had never learned the name of the leader of the mutiny aboard the man o’ war Patton. Nor were the correspondents able to learn the reason for it. Only two ship’s officers were spared - Captain Brian Larcom and Lieutenant John Raney, the medics - and neither would discuss it.
The uprising had been carried out swiftly early one morning (ship’s time) as the Patton sped in tertiary max towards a rendezvous with the remnants of a beleaguered Earth fleet, a specified number of parsecs from Barnard’s Oph.
Nevins had heard one scream. When he dragged himself out of his cabin, feverish and half asleep, a mutineer prodded him towards the lounge. The other four correspondents were already there, herded into a corner under a diorama of Paris-before-the-bomb. Even Justin Jeffries had lost some of his imperturbability, possibly due to the fact that he hadn’t been allowed to dress except for a robe over his pyjamas.
There had been a giddy moment as the ship came to a stop, ending the flutter-in-the-stomach of tertiary max which they had almost come to accept as normal.
There had been some whispering among the mutineers. Then Cindy Garth screamed. She’d had a glimpse through a port of the bodies of the murdered officers, in orbit around the Patton.
The apparent leader of the uprising, a gaunt, middle-aged man with a terrible scar over his left eye, spoke.
We’ve nothing against you,’ he said. ‘There’s a planet on the chart where we’ll drop you and the two medics who didn’t want to throw in with us.’
‘I’ll go with you,’ one of the correspondents said to the mutineer chief.
He was Ramsey Hunter, a lean, unfriendly war correspondent whose reputation had been made because he happened to be in the right place to dash to the Sinkiang border to report that shortlived, accidental Sin-Soviet war in which a million men and women died in three days because of a misunderstood order from either Moscow or Peking. Had it not been for Hunter, the rest of the world might never have heard about the terrible conflict. Had it not been for his dispatches, there might not have been those basic changes in east-west diplomacy which brought some sense to a world which had been on the lip of the pit of disaster.
No one knew then, of course, that soon a united Earth would face interplanetary disaster.
Hunter, who was only 28, had been hired away from his news agency and was now a rove-at-will syndicated war correspondent for Trans-Universe Features. He claimed he had a Chinese bullet in his left arm and a piece of Russian shrapnel in his right leg. Though he never mentioned them except in print, his scars had been plain to see when he went for a swim at Wallops Island before the Patton leapt away to fling itself across six light-years to the vicinity of Barnard’s Oph, to fight the war of the particles.
So Ramsey Hunter naturally said to the mutineers that he would join them, in a professional capacity, of course. There would be many a column in the experience, and probably a better chance of getting back to Earth.
‘No, you won’t,’ the mutineer chief said. ‘We’re taking our own and nobody else. This is a nice uninhabited planet we picked out for you. It’s got air and everything.’ He had a sense of humour, of a kind, this scarred mutineer.
‘But that’s inhuman!’ Arthur Cadman said. ‘Who would ever find us?’
“Nobody, maybe. On the other hand, if we get where we’re going, and if we feel like it, we’ll send a message to Earth and tell them where you are. If you cooperate and don’t make any trouble, that is.’
‘I don’t think we can ask for more than that,’ Justin Jeffries said, with a glance at the bodies circling outside against the unfamiliar sky. The mutineers could easily add five more grisly satellites. Or four more, keeping Cindy for themselves.
No, it would be best to take what was offered and to ask no questions, such as what the mutiny had been about.
‘Very sensible, Mr Jeffries,’ the chief mutineer told him. ‘Now you pioneers go back to your cabins and pack what you want to. Stay there till we let you know. It’ll be a few hours yet before we get you to your new home.’
* * * *
The warm climate, where the temperature did not vary by a degree day or night, and the lack of rain made shelter unnecessary.
Captain Larcom and Lieutenant Raney, the medics, had built a chemical privy near the little house they put up.
The mutineers had let them have pre-formed material out of the stores. The mutineers also had left enough material for each of the correspondents to have built himself a fair-sized hut, had he wished to. But none had. Perhaps if Cindy Garth had singled out one of them there would have been some carpentry. But with the medics’ toilet available to all and with Cindy gone mad, there was no need for building. Nothing went up in the glade.
The medics had put up their place in a smaller clearing behind a low hill and out of sight of the glade. They called it a dispensary. It actually served as a hospital for Ralph Nevins until he recovered from his fever.
But Jeffries called it the fairy palace. He was positive that Captain Larcom and Lieutenant Raney were homosexuals and that they had built their dispensary not because they were concerned about the health of their fellow castaways but because they were the only two people on the planet who were having any kind of sexual relations.
‘I have no proof,’ Jeffries told Ralph. ‘It could be just my nasty mind. You spent a fortnight there. In your lucid moments, how did they strike you?’
Ralph shrugged. ‘There’s nothing overt about them, but there are signs, if they mean anything: the fussy way they fight with each other, for one thing.’
‘You don’t mean physically fight?’
‘No; I mean argue. It’s a petty sort of contradiction - or a vying for superlatives. It’s as if one of them said he had once treated a very difficult case of double pneumonia and the other had to say he’d once had a terrible case of triple pneumonia.’
‘I see. A sort of one-upmanship - over nothing.’
‘Over nothing important, anyway,’ Ralph said.
‘And the diddling went on out of sight.’
‘If there was any. We’re just guessing, aren’t we?’
‘Gossiping, I’d call it. But there’s nothing much else to do, is there? Not until mealtime, anyway.’
“When is mealtime?’
‘Whenever Hunter gets back,’ Jeffries said.
‘Back from where?’
‘It’s interesting how we’ve adjusted to eating only one meal a day. Like the family dog.’
Ralph said: ‘This is the second time you’ve evaded one of my questions about what Hunter goes out for. Why?’
‘Why have I evaded your question? I’ll keep on evading for a while.’
* * * *
By then it was dark, or as dark as it ever got. Hunter, who all this time had been jogging around the track, increased his pace for a final lap, then sped away from the glade until he disappeared among the tall, toadstool-shaped trees. As he left, the others gathered in:
Arthur Cadman, whose typing had finally stopped, though earlier it had continued despite the gathering gloom;
Cindy Garth, wary-eyed and aloof, but obviously in need, now, of having people around her;
Lieutenant John Raney, a thin man, apparently in his late twenties, whose hair was rapidly turning grey;
Captain Brian Larcom, a once-trim figure in his early forties who was beginning to bulge above the belt and below the chin; and
Justin Jeffries, who led Ralph Nevins to the centre of the glade as if initiating him into a rite.
The medics arrived in single file, several feet apart, from out of the toadstool wood beyond the circular glade of grass. The glade had lost its yellow-orange daytime fire and was now the colour of a steak which had lain too long in the supermarket freezer-shelf.
No one spoke. They arranged themselves on hummocks, almost ceremoniously, facing the far-off rise where the silhouetted figures persisted in their silent, tireless dance. Ralph, his questions hushed by the obvious solemnity of the occasion, sat down where Jeffries indicated he should.
The moon-moon had risen just so far over the horizon and hovered there, concentrically ringed, like a thin onion-slice in the dark sky.
The far-off stage was filled with ever-changing shapes. Occasionally, although the movements of the figures had to be purely random, Ralph was tempted to ascribe rational motives to them.
Even as a dedicated skywatcher must inevitably find meaning in a cloud-shape, so did Ralph find significance in the motions of these others with whom he and his fellow castaways shared the planet.
And as they watched - intent, involved, apprehensive, fearful - a new figure appeared at the left of the double-moon-illuminated stage. It was Ramsey Hunter, instantly recognizable. But then, as Hunter’s presence made itself felt, the movements of the others on the stage, heretofore calm and ordered, if swift, became frenzied and frantic, as if menace had entered from the wings.
Then Ralph noticed Cindy. As Hunter joined the group across the valley and became one of the silhouettes, Cindy became less aloof. Her hands began to flutter, to her hair, to her face, to her breast.
Cadman, who was sitting near Cindy, watched her with concern. He moved closer and then, tentatively, fearfully, not looking at her, he stretched out a hand to her, ready to withdraw it instantly if it were rebuffed.
But it was not rebuffed. It was ignored for a time; then Cindy reached out, without looking, and grasped Cadman’s hand and clung to it as she watched the distant tableau.
* * * *
Ralph looked away to the others. Larcom and Raney, who had entered the glade so conspicuously apart, were sitting on a hummock. As Hunter appeared on the ridge they moved closer together, as if in fear. Then slowly, unconsciously perhaps, Larcom’s right hand reached out and gripped Raney’s left and they clung to each other, their eyes fixed on the drama being enacted on the far ridge.
Justin Jeffries, having brought Ralph to the centre, sat apart from him. Jeffries watched as intently as any of the others, but seemingly without the need for another’s support. Yet towards the end of the drama he too had become tensely involved. As he watched, his right hand made a fist and slowly bored into his left palm.
Ralph, not knowing what any of this meant, was less personally involved, though the obvious emotion of the others was affecting him. His realization that the others were being so profoundly moved made him seek harder for clues to what was really happening on the ridge where Ramsey Hunter and the other silhouetted creatures were acting out their macabre ballet.
Those others on the stage-like ridge now drew away from Hunter as if he were contaminated. It was as if those who approached Hunter from the right did so with the greatest reluctance. But approach they must, Ralph thought, because they were on a treadmill. No, not so much a treadmill as one of those little hand-cranked merry-go-rounds you used to see in the city, on the back of a truck, where the horses and swans and ostriches moved with stroboscopic haltingness both from left to right and right to left. All that was lacking was the music, the imitation-calliope sound.
While the figures approaching Hunter did so haltingly -fearfully? - those fleeing from him went in a wild plunge, as if strung on elastic, almost as if exultant at having been spared.
The weird dance became even more frenzied. It must have been Ralph’s delusion but Hunter, the hunter, had become shrunken and had assumed the shape of a wolf. Or had he merely dropped down on all fours?
But at the same time the others - the hunter’s prey - became human-shaped. Their scissorwork outlines took on the forms of full, rounded men and women. They grew arms and legs of the most astonishing realism. With the legs they sought hopelessly to run from this alien creature intent on their destruction.
But their legs were chained to the eternally revolving central mechanism. There was nowhere they could go except to cower away from their hunter as they were drawn towards him and then to fling themselves away as soon as they were able.
With their arms they gestured to each other and to their foe, making plain their fear and disgust. They did not hold each other’s hands nor did they strike out against the wolf-shape of the hunter who menaced them. Their arms appeared designed less for offence or self-defence than to express their otherwise unvoiceable emotions - their terror at being attacked by this alien creature.
The faces of the hunted could not be distinguished, but there was enough in the way they turned their heads, this way or that, or held them at an angle, to persuade Ralph that only intelligence could have directed such movements.
It was appalling to watch, therefore, as the wolf-shaped creature Ralph knew to be a human being crept ever closer to the terrified pack of tethered human-seeming beings.
The tableau became a silent crescendo of agonized movement as the hunter reached slowly into their midst and came away with the one he had chosen.
* * * *
Chapter Three
It had been done so quickly, after the ritualistic preliminary, that Ralph almost missed it. He had expected to see Hunter re-assume human form and strike with a knife, with a dramatic upflung and downthrust arm. But Hunter attacked from near the ground and used no weapon that Ralph could see.
The one taken from the midst of the others threw up its arms in one final hopeless gesture. Its head went back on its neck in a silent scream of despair. Then it withered. It simply collapsed and was borne away across the shoulder of the man who had now risen to his full human height.
A great sigh, whether of relief or shame Ralph could not tell, rose from the watchers in the glade. Ralph himself felt chiefly release from tension. The others had not sighed in unison, but each individual sigh had been of such duration that at one point they had blended into a unified expression of group emotion.
As the hunter left the distant stage with his kill the dancers on that knoll returned to the measured round in which they had been peacefully engaged before the stranger joined the scene.
Now that this act of the drama had ended, those in the glade drew apart. Cindy Garth dropped Arthur Cadman’s hand with an expression of distaste and retired to a separate hummock. Cadman looked after her for a moment, then took a small notebook from his pocket and began to write busily, bending close to the page so he could see in the dimness.
Larcom and Raney unclasped hands and self-consciously withdrew to opposite sides of the same hummock, where each sat stiffly upright.
Justin Jeffries, the cool one, stopped turning his fist in palm and stood up, thrusting hands into pants pockets. He looked at Ralph, who shook his head and gave a smile of no meaning.
Jeffries walked to Ralph’s hummock. He said with forced lightness: ‘What do you think of our amateur theatricals?’
Ralph, putting his voice together, said: ‘You sound like the actor who asked Mrs Lincoln how she liked the show. I thought it was horrible, of course.’
He saw Cadman cock an ear towards them, then write in his notebook, nose almost touching a page. Ralph could imagine him putting down: Lincoln, show horrible of course...
‘Of course,’ Jeffries said. ‘But fascinating, too, you must admit. You wouldn’t think the same routine could hold an audience night after night, but it does. The same audience, needless to say.’
‘You mean it’s always Hunter who goes out?’
‘He’s a volunteer. Never mind now. Here comes the killer with his kill.’
Hunter strode into the glade with some awful thing over his shoulder.
* * * *
Ramsey Hunter, chronicler of wars, castaway of fate, killer of aliens, strode into the glade with a confident step and a proud bearing. He went directly to Cindy Garth and kneeled before her.
‘I have returned, O my Queen, with food for your subjects,’ he said. His expression was a mixture of haughtiness and mock servility, overshadowed by a look which laughed at everyone and everything.
Cindy ignored the look, if she saw it, and stood. She stretched out a tentative hand which did not quite touch Hunter on the forehead. ‘Rise, mighty hunter,’ she said. ‘Thou hast done well.’
Hunter rose and tossed down the thing he had been carrying.
Ralph didn’t know what he had expected - perhaps a clatter of skeletal bones or the thud of a body. What he heard was the faintest rustle, as if Hunter had dropped an autumn cornstalk. And when he looked he saw a leafy bundle, a sheaf, whose plucking would have been no more traumatic than the picking of an apple.
‘Will Your Highness honour me by accepting the first of the servings?’ Hunter asked.
‘We accept,’ Cindy said, and Hunter leaned down and broke off a piece. It was about as long as a leg of lamb and not quite as thick.
Cindy grabbed it out of his hand and ran to her place at the edge of the glade, calling over her shoulder: ‘Serve the others, mighty hunter, and thyself.’
Hunter reached down again and broke off a piece which he put in his pocket. Then he beckoned to the medics, who seemed the most eager to be fed. Cindy had seemed more eager to leave than to eat.
Larcom and Raney accepted the portion Hunter tore off for them, then went off beyond the glade to their infirmary (or fairy palace), Larcom first and Raney carrying the food. No words were exchanged.
Cadman was the next to go up. Hunter, a benevolent smile on his lips, waited for him to approach. Ralph, watching, thought of Hunter as heir apparent and wondered how he would treat poor Cadman as he claimed his pound of grain, or whatever the stuff was that lay, inert, on the ground.
To Ralph’s surprise, Hunter (Hunter the hunter, dispenser of life) treated Cadman very decently. ‘How are you, Cadman?’ he said. ‘Everything all right?’
‘Fine, Hunter,’ Cadman said. ‘I’m keeping up to date.’
‘That’s the way,’ Hunter said. ‘Take some chow so you’ll have the strength for it.’ He put a piece in Cadman’s pocket. ‘Here, have another little something for later, in case you get bogged down in the middle of the night while you’re doing the history. It’s amazing how a little something to nibble on stimulates the creative juices.’
‘Thank you,’ Cadman said gravely. ‘Having been a writer yourself, Hunter, you understand our problems. I appreciate that.’
‘Quite,’ Hunter said, equally grave. ‘Carry on, Cadman, and remember the old precept: Never mind the facts, but be sure you spell the names right.’ He kept an absolutely straight face.
A little frown appeared on Cadman’s forehead. He said: ‘Forgive me for asking, but is it Hunter with a capital H or is it small-h hunter? I mean in the generic sense. I do get confused.’
And Hunter said, again more kindly than Ralph would have expected: ‘It depends entirely on your point of view, Arthur. You’re the historian; you’re Herodotus, you’re Toynbee. And the historian is the referee. Call ‘em as you see ‘em, Arthur, and damn the dissenters.’
Cadman, his notebook out, was busy recording it all, his face close to the paper, as he backed away from Hunter, the man on the Queen’s hummock; Hunter, the acting chief.
* * * *
Then it was Justin Jeffries’ turn. Jeffries went with a combination of bravado and subservience, a mingling of defiance and dependence. He said: ‘Hail, Chief. Congratulations on a successful hunt. What can I, your humble servant, do for you?’
Hunter regarded him coldly. “You can hunt in my place tomorrow night. How would that suit you, wise guy?’
‘Perfectly,’ Jeffries replied. ‘I’ve offered before, you remember, but you’ve never accepted.’
‘You’d willingly go?’ Hunter asked, as if in disbelief. ‘You’d risk the perils, the psychic terrors?’
‘Ah, bull,’ Jeffries said. ‘It’s not so terrible as all that. I particularly want to put my offer on the record because we have a new arrival today: Ralph Nevins.’
‘I am glad to welcome him,’ Hunter said. ‘Out of courtesy to him I overlook all the ways you have attempted to subvert my authority and belittle my achievement.’
Ralph, who had drawn close to the two, said: ‘Surely Hunter hasn’t forgotten that we were all together aboard the Patton.’
‘I’m afraid he has,’ Jeffries replied under his breath. ‘He’s completely absorbed in this heroic drama he’s playing. Try him out if you like.’
‘I will.’ Ralph thought for a moment while Hunter stared coldly at Jeffries. Then he said: ‘Hunter, what do you plan to do when the rescue ship comes?’
Hunter went into the first person plural, as if Cindy no longer existed, and said: ‘Our fealty is to our subjects. Naturally we shall stay here with them.’
Jeffries put left ear to left shoulder and rolled his eyeballs up as if to say: You see? Completely mad.
‘Enough of this empty talk,’ Hunter said. ‘Here is your share, Jeffries, and yours, Nevins. Now get thee hence, that the hunter may enjoy what is left to himself, before the great sleep descends.’
Ralph watched Hunter detach a piece which he handed to Jeffries. He gave another to Ralph and stuffed what was left under his arm and loped off to the edge of the glade, halfway between Cindy and Cadman.
Ralph told Jeffries: ‘He talks like a cross between the King James version and Edgar Rice Burroughs.’
‘Really?’ Jeffries said with a minimum of interest now that dinner had been served. ‘I’m hungry, so I suggest you go and eat, privately, while I do the same. Don’t be self-conscious. No one will watch.’
As Ralph hesitated, Jeffries, though obviously anxious to go, took the time to say: ‘What you’ve got to understand is that they’re vegetables.’
‘I know that, I suppose.’
‘Well, you have no compunctions about digging up a potato, have you? And then plucking out its eyes and boiling it in water, or baking it in its skin, and then eating it? Same thing. Only these are mobile vegetables.’
‘But they’re shaped like people.’
‘So’s a gingerbread man. You’ve got to be realistic. The only other stuff that grows here is impossible. It has no nourishment and it makes you sick.’
‘Maybe we could build up an immunity to it.’
‘Don’t think we haven’t tried. It’s like eating a poison ivy salad.’
Saying no more, Jeffries went off to his own hummock, clutching the meal that Hunter had given him.
* * * *
Ralph, after a moment’s hesitation, took his share and went to his own place, near the perimeter.
There, sitting beside his hummock, which so accommodatingly fitted its edge to the back of his neck, Ralph examined his ration.
It was less ominous than he had feared. There was nothing about it that was the least like flesh. Relieved, Ralph broke off a piece. It caused him no more pain than it would to snap a bread stick.
It was crisp, like celery. It had separated cleanly, with no bleeding or any other indication that it might once have been flesh. Grateful for this, Ralph looked to see what the others were doing.
Cindy Garth was eating as if there might never be tomorrow, cramming food into her mouth in an orgy of self-gratification. Ralph stared at her for a time but she either did not see him or chose to ignore him.
His gaze went next to Arthur Cadman, the fortunate one who had held the Queen’s hand and who had been spoken civilly to by Hunter. But Cadman was even less responsive. He had eyes for nothing but his journal. He wrote steadily, a pen in his right hand and his eyes close to the page, his left hand only occasionally bringing a bite of supper to his mouth.
Ralph looked next to Jeffries, a dozen feet away. Jeffries, former man-about-London, sophisticate, sometime adviser of prime ministers, was so engrossed in his meal that Ralph, shocked, looked away quickly. At the moment there was nothing to be learned from Jeffries except gluttony.
Ralph turned finally to study the hunter himself, Ramsey Hunter.
Hunter was eating like a gourmet, choosing a bit of this, a trifle of that, wiping his lips with a handkerchief and then nibbling again, unhurriedly. It was a bravura performance, like his earlier one on the knoll across the valley, none the less polished now that Ralph Nevins was the sole member of the audience.
But then, for no apparent reason, Hunter clutched his belly, groaned and ran. Like anyone who is about to vomit, he headed away from his fellow creatures. He went a little beyond the perimeter and stood there, facing out from them, his body heaving as his stomach worked to rid itself of that which offended it.
To Ralph, who had not yet eaten, this was a discouraging sight. If the great hunter could not stomach his own provender, who else could be expected to?
* * * *
Suddenly Ralph had no appetite. He took his share to Cadman. (His first impulse had been to go to Jeffries, but Jeffries’ gluttony had disgusted him.) Cadman looked up from his notebook and said: ‘Thanks.’
‘Does Hunter always get sick like that?’ Ralph asked.
‘Always when it’s his turn.’
‘You mean others have been out? Hunter talked as if he was the only one.’
‘Oh, no,’ Cadman said; ‘we’ve all been out. Hunter’s just going through one of his heroic moods. Then it’ll be up to Jeffries or me - or you.’ He smiled at Ralph. ‘You thought I was crazy, didn’t you? I suppose I am, in a way. But not as crazy as some. Poor Cindy, for instance, is worse off by far. And Jeffries - I really feel sorry for him. He can’t eat at all when he’s the hunter and he tries to make up for it by stuffing himself when somebody else has gone out.’
Ralph looked at Cadman through new eyes. ‘You’ve been out?’ he said. ‘By yourself?’
‘Certainly,’ Cadman said. ‘I told you. We’ve all been out - all except Cindy, and even she said she wanted to but we wouldn’t let her.’
‘The medics, too? Have they gone?’
Cadman smiled. ‘Yes, in tandem.’
Ralph considered this new information. Then he said: ‘Could you eat afterwards, when you’d been out?’
‘Only when I wasn’t noticing,’ Cadman said. ‘If I was engrossed in my journal, and eating was secondary, yes. Only once, when it was so dark I couldn’t write at all and when eating became a conscious thing - then I couldn’t.’
‘I can’t eat now,’ Ralph said.
‘Oh, you must. You’ll need your strength.’
‘I keep seeing them up there, like people, terrified of Hunter.’
‘Lots of vegetables move,’ Cadman said. ‘Try to bear that in mind. You’ve seen waving wheat and Mexican jumping beans. You’ve seen a willow tree in a windstorm, shaking its skirt like a hula dancer. Didn’t you ever see an aspen shimmer in the slightest breeze, like a woman in sequins in a spotlight? Here, take this and go on back to your hummock and try. No one will watch you. It’s a sort of unwritten rule.’
Ralph was touched by Cadman’s concern. After a moment he said: ‘Thanks; I’ll try. I shouldn’t have stared at you and the rest, should I? I’m sorry.’
‘That’s all right. Go ahead and eat. I have a lot of writing to do. I especially want to get down my little speech to you -the one about the moving vegetables - before I forget it. Forgive my vanity.’
Ralph went back to his hummock and, resolutely thinking of gingerbread men and Mexican jumping beans, managed to eat a little. Then he must have dozed, back of neck comfortably against hummock’s edge, because when he next noticed the sun-sun had joined the sun-moon in the sky.
* * * *
Chapter Four
In the bright, hard light the knoll where the drama had taken place was like any small hilltop, and the creatures which had been hunted were about as lively as a cornfield.
Ralph’s companions sat on or lay against their hummocks in a seeming stupor, except Cadman, who was writing. Cadman was almost always writing.
Ralph stood up, then staggered as he tried to walk. He was weak, like any hospital patient who had been on his back for a long time. He knew then, as well as if one of the medics had explained it to him, that he needed food. He felt himself toppling and guided his fall towards the little pile of food Cadman had persuaded him to keep and to try to eat.
Lying on his left side where he had gone down (none of the others had made the slightest effort to help him), Ralph reached for one of the food pieces. But even before he brought it to his mouth he realized he couldn’t eat it. It was not that there was anything psychologically wrong, as there had been last night; now the stuff was literally inedible. He could no more have got nourishment from the thing he was holding than he could have got marrow from a stone.
Feebly, he threw it away. It bounced towards Jeffries, who finally looked up, rousing himself from his torpor.
‘You have to eat it while it’s fresh,’ Jeffries said, as if everybody should have known that. ‘All the good goes out of it overnight.’
‘I feel weak.’
“You should have eaten last night. Last night it had the crunchiness of celery, the juiciness of good rare steak, the crumbly consistency of cheese. I enjoyed it. Mad or not, Hunter gave me a particularly fine piece. But today it would be like eating an old turd.’
‘I’m hungry,’ Ralph said. ‘Isn’t there anything else I could eat?’
Jeffries shrugged. ‘Poison ivy salad.’
‘If I had the strength I’d drag myself over to the ridge and cut myself a fresh piece. I don’t think it’s as traumatic an experience as Hunter made out.’
Jeffries shrugged again. He looked bored with Ralph’s troubles. ‘Suit yourself.’
‘I suppose I’ve got to go.’ Ralph tried a jest: ‘I can’t sit around starving until the next safari leaves, can I?’
‘It’s your stomach,’ Jeffries said, vastly uninterested. He leaned back against his hummock and closed his eyes.
Hating him suddenly, Ralph got to his knees, then stood erect and, carefully putting one foot ahead of the other, started out of the glade towards the far ridge where the vegetation stood motionless under the brilliant sky.
* * * *
Ralph felt a bright light inside his skull. Although there was a visual impression of great heat the temperature was no higher than it had been the previous night. He was not perspiring. But there was no breath of motion to the air, and the unfiltered light hurt his eyes so that he had to close them to slits. The glare also seemed to focus on his brain, cooking it without heat.
He envied the others their torpor and their full bellies. Well, the sooner he got to the ridge and cut himself a meal, the sooner he’d be able to lounge against his own hummock and wait for it to be a more bearable time of day.
Ralph stopped at the medics’ to borrow a machete. No one answered his call, so he helped himself to a heavy jungle knife which hung outside and went on through the wood.
The toadstool-shaped, umber-coloured trees gave some relief from the stabbing light, but the glare was so much more intense when there were gaps between the tall trees that it seemed almost worse to have had their random protection.
His brain cooking, Ralph could understand why the food gathering took place after the sun-sun had set.
Step by dogged step he brought himself to the base of the ridge where the crop, or whatever it was, grew. It stood there in stalks, like a dusty cornfield, yellowy-tan, silent, unmoving.
In a final burst of forced energy, Ralph went up the rise and cut a single stalk.
His machete sliced through it effortlessly. There was no excitement or danger, as there had seemed to be when Hunter was here last night.
Nobody, nothing, grimaced at Ralph, or threw up his-her-its hands in despair.
Nobody, nothing, screamed; or opened a mouth (or anything like a mouth) to scream, silently or otherwise.
It was dull, in fact. He felt a little disappointed because there had been no dashing back and forth of humanoid plants, no mystery or drama. Each of the other faded-tan stalks had drooped dutifully, dully in its place while he cut down its brother.
The stuff didn’t even wave, as wheat was said to do. It certainly hadn’t waved at Ralph, either with affection or fear.
Giddy because of his hunger and the piercing light in his skull but pleased with himself, Ralph looked across the valley to the glade where his fellow castaways sat or lay, locked in ennui. They had certainly made a big problem out of his harvesting, this bringing in of the sheaves.
He couldn’t make out the expressions on their faces, but all of them seemed to be watching him. Hunter particularly (mighty hunter, indeed!) seemed to have an intent eye on him.
Having gained strength from his triumph, Ralph decided it would be possible to return to the glade with his stalk intact and eat it there - perhaps even to make the magnanimous gesture of offering some to Hunter. This thought buoyed him up so that the trip back took much less time than his outward journey.
* * * *
The sun-sun had passed its zenith before his return. His fellow castaways seemed to gain strength as the brightness faded and they left their hummocks to greet him. Even Larcom and Raney had come to the glade from their self-imposed segregation.
Ralph, so elated by this reception that he felt he could postpone eating almost indefinitely, tossed his trophy to the ground. It fell with a tiny rustling noise.
Hunter looked down at it, then at Ralph. ‘Back with your kill, are you, Nevins ?’ he asked sardonically.
Ralph replied modestly: ‘Oh, I wouldn’t call it a “kill”. It wasn’t all that hard.’
‘Was it easy?’ Jeffries asked.
‘Well, I did what I had to do. It was easy, frankly, and not at all traumatic’
‘So much so,’ Hunter said with a sneer, ‘that you don’t see what all the fuss was about, do you? Isn’t that right?’
‘Oh, I think I can understand how the ritual came to be built up,’ Ralph said, smiling despite a sudden pang of hunger (he could hold out a few minutes longer, anyway.) ‘I guess after I’ve been out here in the glade as long as you have, I’ll welcome some sort of diversion too. Some kind of—’
‘Amateur dramatics?’ Hunter asked. ‘Group theatricals?’
‘That’s it, of course,’ Ralph said recklessly. ‘A kind of community pageant to relieve the tedium, with everyone playing his assigned rote—’
Ralph’s voice trailed off as Cindy Garth came forward. The others stepped aside for her. She looked much better. Last night she had been mad; but now she was angry. ‘Just let me say something to him while I’m rational,’ Cindy said.
‘Go ahead, Cindy,’ Cadman said.
Captain Larcom said: ‘Don’t excite yourself, Cindy. It’s not worth it.’
Cindy said to Ralph: ‘You’re new here and we can forgive that.’ It wasn’t the royal ‘we’ she was using now. ‘Of course we were all together aboard the Patton and that should count for something, but these past two weeks when you were safely tucked away in the infirmary sometimes seem more like two years. We’ve all gone crazy in different ways, Nevins, and some more than others. You’ll find your own peculiar mania in a day or two, I’m sure. In the meantime give us credit for having a small residue of common sense. We do what we have to do - a few of us a little more strenuously than necessary -but we’re all human beings and we’ve all adjusted to this impossible planet the way we’ve had to. So stop feeling superior to Hunter because you went out in the midday sun. Things are not what they seem, especially in the euphoric noon. Nobody’s going to eat your pathetic little offering. Not even you.’
Ralph met their various glances, then dropped his gaze to his dry stalk. ‘Why not?’ he asked hopelessly, already knowing the answer. ‘What’s wrong with it?’
‘Try it and see,’ Cindy said softly.
With his triumph turned to straw, Ralph’s hunger could no longer be denied. Finally, embarrassed and in gnawing pain, he tried it. There was no nourishment in it. No juice or even moisture in the silly little stalk he had bravely harvested and brought back to gloat over. It was simply a dried hulk, like a cornstalk from last year’s mulch pile. He spat out the tasteless, powdery thing.
‘Sorry,’ Cindy said. She added, ever so rationally: ‘I suppose somebody should have told you the juices leave the stalk in daylight. The moisture that makes the plant edible hides in the roots until the sun-sun goes down.’
* * * *
Chapter Five
Night finally came and he was able to go out again. His hunger had become a gnawing ache, punctuated by an occasional stabbing pang. Ralph had taken Hunter’s advice on how to alleviate it by jogging around the perimeter, as all true hunters were alleged to do.
The monotonous jarring of feet on earth (Earth! - would he ever see it again?) had made the time pass faster and had even taken his mind off his hunger a little. It had also numbed his mind, but again only a little.
Because the waiting for night had been hard, they took compassion on him to the extent of talking to him now and then. As he jogged he remembered disjointed random fragments:
Hunter saying: ‘Let me assure you that there’s not one unnecessary move in this nightly performance. In the first place it has to be every night. You found out for yourself that the stuff won’t keep through the heat of the day...’
Jog, jog, jog.
Somebody (himself?) saying: ‘Grant me that you consider murder an odious occupation.’
Thud of heels on packed earth. (Earth? No.)
Somebody else: ‘Murder, yes; but not picking vegetables.’
Ignore the pangs. Jog. Thud.
Himself? : ‘Tell me what you consider murder to be.’
Thud. Jog. Pang, pang.
Another: ‘The destruction of a thinking being, I suppose.’
Head back, breathe deeply of the still air. Jog, jog.
Cindy Garth (listen, now; listen to Cindy; Cindy knows): We have communicated with them, though we know not how. A queenly gift of second sight? Telepathy? No matter; they are thinking beings.’ (Cindy was mad again. Still, everyone was listening respectfully as if she told a truth they knew.) ‘We know them well. They are friendly, compatible, intelligent; lovable, even. They have been, at times, evocative to us of old friends, family, lovers...’
Cadman: ‘I had a Bunk Johnson record that I used to play all the time. It was my grandfather’s. It was You Always Hurt the One You Love.’
Himself?: ‘That’s all right; I’m a vegetarian.’
Hunter: ‘Is that your bad joke for today, cannibal?’
Who?: “We were all cannibals once. That’s the kind of business we were in. We stole each other’s stories and copied each other’s leads. We bribed and spied to cultivate a new source, preferably one “close to the presidential palace” or “acquainted with the Leader’s thinking”, in our journalistic jargon, and then we fed on each other’s sources until they’d been milked dry and discarded for more sensational ones. Too often we were less interested in writing the truth (which might just explode under everybody, us included) than we were in promulgating a government line or in helping an obscure department send up a trial balloon which quite often was shot down the following day. Knowingly abetting this, we were immoral, we were savages, we were cannibals.’
* * * *
Joggity jog-jog. Words, only words. They had no meaning to match that of hunger.
Another (Cadman?): ‘At least we’re honest cannibals now. We kill our fellow thinkers only that we may keep alive. If they think. There once was a paper in New York - remember New York? - that called itself “The Paper for People who Think”. It was a Hearst paper and when it wanted to emphasize a word or a phrase in an editorial it printed it all in capital letters. Its critics called it “The Paper for People who Think They Think”. So maybe we only think they think - I mean maybe we only think they think. At least - let me see if I can think this through - I’d like to think we only think they think. What do you think?’
And Cindy said: ‘If you think about it long enough you go crazy. If you think about anything long enough you go crazy. We - I went crazy, thinking. I haven’t come back yet.’
And Hunter said: ‘Shut up, Cindy. It’s hard enough without you reminding us all.’
And Cindy: ‘But when I do come back I’ll comb my hair and put on makeup and maybe somebody, not noticing that I’m a cannibal, will dance with me. I won’t think then; I’ll just dream.’
Hunter: ‘Shutup, Cindy.’
Thud, thud. Jog, jog. The vibrations Jarring through his body were almost as good as food. (What a lie!) This way he could stand it (he told himself). As he jogged around the track, head back, fists clenched, he remembered Cadman trying to persuade Cindy to let him (Ralph) have some of the emergency ration - the food he had been fed in the hospital. There couldn’t have been much of it but he found it hard to understand Cindy’s flat refusal. ‘Nevins isn’t going to starve to death in the next couple of hours,’ she had said. ‘And he’ll learn a lesson.’
He (Ralph) was learning it. He was Ralph. He was Nevins. He was (full name now) Ralph Leslie Nevins. Oh, yes, he (you know who) was learning a good lesson. He was learning to hate them all, the bastards. Bastards and a bitch. Cindy Bitch-Queen Garth, who wouldn’t let him have the ration. Justin Bastard Jeffries, who. had let him go out under the sun-sun, sadistically knowing he was making a futile trip. He hated Jeffries worse.
He had wanted to go early but they explained (some of them reasonably, some shouting angrily) that it would do no good to cut a stalk until the juices had returned to it from the roots. Hadn’t he learned that? Ralph had said he would dig the roots (he was in pain, starving, famished; it was impossible to bear) but they explained (as to a child, some of them, but others in disgust because he didn’t know what they knew) that when the roots were disturbed the moisture fled through them into the soil, leaving no nourishment.
‘You may think this is a lot of melodrama.’ Who had said that? The Who who had spoken several times earlier. ‘It is not a lot of melodrama. It is essential. Es-sen-tial. Know this.’
He knew it now. He was convinced of it. His stomach was convinced, at least. His stomach was devout, a true believer. Jog; jog and thud. Was it still too early to go? He could understand how the jogging would numb the mind as well as the stomach.
* * * *
Finally, finally, it was time.
He left the perimeter. Scarcely believing his release had come, he left the well-beaten track and set off across the valley as the short night began.
There they were, on the far ridge, waving, beckoning to him. To him? Beckoning? Or horrified to see him approach? Him - Nevins the hunter, the killer, the vegetable-eating cannibal. Nevins the new one, perhaps crueller than the others who had come before.
Off he went, recalling his relatively calm conversation with Hunter (Hunter who had joined hunter - Ralph - in jogging around the track:) ‘But why do you call them wolves?’
And Hunter saying: ‘A euphemism. Both hunter and hunted became the wolves, the beasts. Each, driven by something outside itself, loses its human qualities. I, forced by hunger; they, shaken by terror.’
‘You agree with Cindy that they think?’
‘I reject that possibility. I must. All I know is that they thrash about. Lots of plants can do that under certain circumstances. But these seem to be under a double terror, or whatever word you want to use. “Fear” is too weak. First, their terror of being killed; second, the unacceptable realization that anyone or anything on their heretofore peaceful planet could conceive of killing another. In fact, killing was impossible because nobody - nothing, I mean - was able to move from the spot where he first germinated. I mean it.’
Ralph knew what he meant. He had gone across the valley, through the toadstool wood, and was at the edge of the field of thrashing, terrified creatures. (Hunter was right: ‘fear’ was too pallid a word.)
They could not be human; could not even be creatures. His mind told him this, but his emotions told him something else: Not only could they be creatures (living, if not breathing; thinking, if not speaking), they were human. He knew that now, as of this minute. And what was he doing here, about to commit an atrocity upon one of them? Who was he, God?, to be destroying another living creature? He was not a flesh-eater, true, but he was undeniably a cannibal.
Shut up, he told himself. You haven’t destroyed anybody yet and it’s a moot question whether you will. (This was not his stomach talking.) So don’t let anybody panic you. You’re just out here on a tactical exercise, so to speak - a dry run, so far, to see how you’ll react when the real thing comes along, if it ever does. Of course you aren’t going to kill these dear, helpless creatures.
His stomach laughed at this nonsense. Certainly he was going to kill. Kill and eat; kill and provide. It was kill or starve.
It wasn’t an ethical problem at all - hadn’t his pioneer ancestors killed to feed their families? Hadn’t they killed daily? Hadn’t they slaughtered the dear little chickens and geese and bulls and brown-eyed calves and woolly lambs and whatever other sweet, succulent creatures stood between them and hunger, or even appetite? Of course they had. They might even be burning in hell for it - if there was a hell, anywhere else but here.
* * * *
Then he recalled Cindy’s version of having communicated with them, or of having thought she had. He was having a vision of his own, in his extremity of starvation. He was communicating with them himself.
Well, not really: they were revealing themselves to him; he had said nothing to them except tacitly, by being there with a weapon which spoke for him; silently, terribly.
His hunger-induced revelations were graphic depictions of the most awful things that had ever happened to people he knew or to whom he was related. As remembered from his childhood in ghastly detail, they included:
His Uncle Alfred, arrested through some terrible miscarriage of justice and sentenced to a road gang in the South, dragging his ball and chain behind him as his poor, broken-blistered hands, which he had previously used to chalk abstruse, beautiful mathematical formulae on a blackboard at the Institute for Advanced Theory, tried to drive his mattock into the soil often enough to avoid the lash of the gang-master;
His Grandma Maud, polio victim, her leg in a brace, dragging it behind her as she tried to get closer to the faith healer who, for a twenty-five-dollar love offering, was laying on hands under a big tent in the vacant lot down near the railroad siding;
His father, a foot caught in his own fox trap, and so weak from loss of blood that he was unable to pry it open, crawling through the woods towards the house more than a mile away;
His mother, alone in the house in her wheelchair after her operation, when the oil-burner exploded...
More visions crowded in on him; visions of people burdened or crippled or otherwise rendered unable to move very far or very fast:
Visions of Roosevelt, of Joan of Arc, of Tantalus, of Christ...
Then the visions coalesced and the vegetable people, hurling themselves away in their terrified attempt to escape his sword, took on the personalities of his hallucinations. It was more than horrible, it was shocking and obscene, that he should be the instrument of their destruction, that he should be forced to choose which of these well beloved creatures he would maim and kill.
Worse: not which, but whom.
You always hurt the one you love ..
But must you kill?
Must you choose among mother, father, saint, president, God. Was it necessary to decide, coldly in the midst of horror, whom to destroy? Did continued existence demand that he pick which body would be sliced through with his blade? Did life depend on slaughter?
* * * *
Ralph avoided the answers as the terrified plant creatures hurled themselves away from this executioner; from this despicable thing that would kill and eat its own family, its own Lord.
(But why not? Did not some religions hold that the communion wafer was the actual, the literal body of Christ? Is it cannibalism to eat the flesh of Jesus?)
Faster and faster they seemed to circle, to come towards him reluctantly, fearfully, bending back away from him until they were almost flat on the ground; then, as their Coney Island ride brought them inevitably past him, they whipped away like hurricane-tossed palm branches, straining to escape, to be beyond the reach of his terrible blade.
Three times he raised his machete - three times, impelled by the gnawing in his stomach. Each time he let it fall to his side.
He sobbed in frustration: how could he cut down these beautiful people, these gods and goddesses? How could he butcher his mother or his father (or his Father) and then feed them to his friends ?
Of course he couldn’t. He dropped his machete. He’d rather die.
Then Hunter was there, shouting: ‘You’ve got to jog, man, jog! You were just standing. You can’t let them get through to you; it’s impossible if they do. Jog, jog. Come on, Nevins! Can you do it ? Can you ?’
Obviously Ralph could not. He sank to the ground. Hunter said: ‘Too bad. Never mind; stand back.’
With a swish of his own machete, Hunter lopped down a big stalk as it hurtled past him, expertly severing it close to the ground.
A hallucinatory voice, not Hunter’s, taunted Ralph:
‘How speaks he now,
This loud-voiced,
proud-voiced
newcomer?
‘A change of tune,
a dull harpoon;
less haughty
than he thought he was.’
It had a pedantic sound, as if one of his old professors of journalism, or maybe an over-educated city editor, was sneering at him.
Then came Hunter’s voice. There was nothing hallucinatory about it.
‘Okay, Nevins, let’s go. That’s all for today.’
But Ralph could do nothing and Hunter had to half-carry him back to the glade.
* * * *
Chapter Six
The others watched openly as Cindy, cradling him in her left arm, his head against her breast, fed him. Too weak now to move or protest, he accepted mouthfuls of nourishment without questioning its origin. Cindy, feeding him and herself alternately, chewing away, smiled at him. He smiled back, chewing also, his palate revelling in what it imagined to be a smorgasbord of delicacies, successively:
• the whitest, crunchiest celery, stuffed with the best homemade cheese, sprinkled with paprika;
• a gargantuan ripe olive, pitted;
• crisp, warm, buttered whole wheat toast;
• freshly-given milk;
• a bite into a Winesap apple;
• a morsel of perfectly-fried scallop;
• a mouthful of Maine lobster, dipped in melted Wisconsin butter;
• a forkful of Idaho potato, baked, whipped with butter and salted;
• a slice of rare roast beef;
• a slightly-salted, gorgeously-green avocado half;
• a demi-tasse of Colombian coffee.
He was delirious, of course.
* * * *
That was about the end of it. Ralph never went out again. After he had been nourished back to the point where he could feed himself. Cindy would have nothing more to do with him. She retreated into her regal self, her moment of compassion spent.
Hunter once again assumed de facto command. He was their only possible provider. Despite the others’ brave talk or their sneers at Ralph, Hunter was the only one who had been out more than once. Hunter alone had been capable of working out the logistics of the situation; he alone had been strong enough to keep his fears, his illusions, his hallucinations to himself. It was obvious that Cindy was only the titular ruler.
Sometime later Cadman died and Ralph took over the keeping of the journal.
The medics, who did not say why Cadman had died, buried him during the short, bright day, at the edge of the plant-people patch on the far ridge. It was only right, Ralph supposed, that Cadman’s remains should nourish the roots of the plants.
Ralph wrote: ‘Now that I am no longer an active participant in the hunt, I am beginning to find it exciting.’
At first the others expressed interest in his daily journal entries and even praised him, sometimes, for the cleverness of his writing.
‘Cadman merely recorded,’ Jeffries said to him once, ‘but you comment. Cadman was a journalist, you are an historian.’
Ralph glowed to that for days, although in his American way he would have said ‘a historian’. To him the other was like saying ‘an horse’. He wrote that down.
But after a while Jeffries and the others, with one exception, lost interest in the journal, even when it mentioned them, and drew back to their own hummocks. ,
Only at night, when Hunter was out bagging their game, was there a drawing together in an approximation of a community spirit. And it was clear to Ralph now that nothing else mattered. Nothing else was vital.
And of course after a while Ralph wrote about nothing else. His daily entry was an ingenious attempt, by a resourceful journalist-turned-historian, to find fresh meaning in the nightly hunt.
The only other one who cared was Hunter. Therefore it became a ritual with them to meet after the nightly division of the nutrient (the vegetable, the meat, the Wafer - whatever it was) and for Hunter to describe his adventures to Ralph. Hunter would talk - in the first person singular or plural, depending on his mood - and Ralph would make notes before either of them touched his nightly ration.
Having finished his notes, Ralph and Hunter would withdraw to their separate hummocks and eat, Hunter vomiting less often than he used to. Ralph ate thoughtfully and without after-effects, scarcely aware of his bites as he considered how best to transcribe his notes.
But then the strain became too much for even Hunter’s ego and he became repetitive and dull.
Ralph became alarmed. If there were no more to write his function would vanish as Cadman’s had. He would become superfluous.
He went to Cindy Garth to record her reactions to the nightly kill, but she waved him away languidly. He wrote this up as verbosely as possible.
He went to Jeffries, who met him with an amused smile but told him: ‘Nothing to say, old boy.’ When Ralph persisted, Jeffries dismissed him by saying: ‘It’s all been said, you know. I told it to Cadman a dozen times and he took it down each time. I have no desire to repeat myself to you. Look it up in Cadman’s journal if you like but don’t bother me.’
Ralph wrote up his talk with Jeffries at as great a length as possible, quoting himself as well as Jefferies (he had deliberately asked some long-winded questions). But it was impossible to string it out forever.
He went to the medics and was rewarded with an outpouring of words. Away from the others, Larcom and Raney had witty and crackling things to say about the few events their world provided. Ralph, delighted, took full notes and transcribed at great length. This kept him busy for many days.
But then they began to repeat themselves. Their apparent wit charmed the new acquaintance, but one who came to know them for any length of time realized that there was a limit to the variations they could apply to their basic conversational formula. They became tiresome as well as repetitious. Then, as if realizing their failure to entertain, they became argumentative - first with each other, then with Ralph.
* * * *
At that point Ralph, having transcribed all that was available from them jointly, interviewed them singly. Separate floodgates opened; Ralph took down page after page of pent-up frustration, petty tirade and invective as each of the medics turned his wrath on the other.
Fascinated, occasionally repelled, Ralph wrote them up at gratifying length, first together and then separately. But this field also went fallow as eventually each developed a case of the sulks and refused to talk to him.
This left no one.
Doggedly, Ralph went back to each: to Hunter who, having rested as raconteur, was good for a few more nights; to Jeffries, whose now insulting behaviour towards Ralph provided a day’s copy; and to Cindy, who was completely silent but whose attitude Ralph described in great detail, drawing heavily on surmise.
Again there was no one left. Except - inspiration! - himself. But he found himself a thin source. For several days he talked to himself and recorded the result. But Ralph had always been an honest reporter and this deceit soon palled.
He was unable to delude himself, as Cadman had, that he was preparing a dispatch. Nor would he put down fiction or half-truths; his entire journalistic background rebelled against such heresy.
He examined his pen and the other one that Cadman had involuntarily bequeathed him. Ink aplenty, enough for a decade, remained in each. It seemed clear that there was more ink than there were words to write with it.
He knew now why poor Cadman had died. Cadman had been no egocentric hero. He had been, as Ralph Nevins was, an honest journalist: not an analyst but an annalist.
And the annals were complete. Nothing more remained to be said about this handful of human beings stranded on the only habitable planet between Sol’s Earth and Barnard’s Oph.
Nevertheless much had to be said, regardless of whether it was worth saying, if Ralph were to remain sane against the day when the rescue ship heaved to and took him home. The easy way would be to let himself slip into the madness of Ramsey Hunter and Cindy Garth, the apathy of Justin Jeffries or the self-centred isolation of the medics. But Ralph was not ready to give up. As long as he did not have to go out at night to bring in the sheaves, it was possible to work and to hope.
Then the engine in his mind started and its fuel was his memories. He realized that what was within himself was limited: there was only Ralph Nevins, at the current or earlier age, on which to draw. Still a single person was a microcosm of the human race and perhaps he was as good as any other for the purpose, at this particular time.
That being so, he reached back as far into his memory as it was possible to go . . . (he knew that when he had nothing more to say he would be dead) . . . and he found a place to start.
Thus, one night, after having dined with pleasure, without questioning the source, on an unusually thick stalk which he chose to think tasted of Thanksgiving turkey, he wrote the following in his journal:
Book I, Chapter One
Nevins the Child, or, The Humble Start
Ralph Leslie Nevins, so named by his parents, Leslie Coombs and Leslie Hume Nevins (we shall return to this coincidence of names presently) aged respectively 25 and 22, was born, in wedlock, on an August day, the 17th, a Thursday, to be precise, in the Year of Our Lord, or Whoever is In Charge, 1999...
* * * *
And thus Ralph Nevins began the chronicle which we found when we grew over to the glade and which, together with other scattered documents from the worlds that they had attempted to colonize, provided us with an invaluable insight to the mores of those who knew themselves as human beings.
Oh, yes. To answer Ralph’s question, it might just be noted that we’re in charge, here and everywhere.