OLAF RUHEN
The victory and the triumph of Phillip Marlett, first man to cast off in his lifetime the physical bounds of the earth and its atmosphere, were at best vicarious, and in a way, unsatisfactory. Even his relaxation within the confined limits of the nose capsule came from a rigid discipline primarily imposed by others. And the rewards of his experience were yet to come.
He was travelling faster than man had ever travelled, yet he had no impression of speed on this his third and last circuit of the earth. From the position he occupied in space it might be imagined that he could view the great orb of the earth in its entirety; its daylight surface lemon-khaki and glowing against the velvet black of the remaining sky, and elsewhere faintly luminous; the orb spread wide and massive, covering a third of his horizons. Or the stars, more brilliant than man had seen them, or the ring of Saturn, defined and clear to naked eyes, or the moon in a detail unobscured by atmospheric dust.
But he was encased in steel, and there was not even the tiny television screen that had once been proposed.
He lay in a consciously-imposed relaxation, his every response measured by instruments, only his mind aware, his eyes constantly roving the instrument panel which was the sole concession to his individuality.
He was, not unnaturally, an admirable specimen of a man. He was five feet ten inches in height, which was not commanding; but he had broad shoulders, a heart action without a flaw, a deep chest, a history of complete health and mental stability. He was well-read and his mental reactions were speedier than normal. He was twenty-seven years of age.
A warning light showed on the panel. It gave him twenty seconds before the firing of the rockets should slow the capsule and permit its re-entry into the earth’s atmosphere. Somewhere ahead, thousands of miles ahead, the same signal blinked on ships and planes forming a primary and secondary net to bring him safely back to the world. Subconsciously he stiffened; consciously he noted this response and calmly, deliberately relaxed his muscles.
The rockets fired. Immediately the giant hand closed on him—the incredibly efficient deceleration pulled at his cheek muscles, at his loose lips and eyelids; the red mist welled up and overcame his sight and turned grey and finally black; and in a moment or two—it seemed less than a moment or two—reversed its trend until his eyesight once more became effective through the red mist.
Now he was falling towards the earth, towards a pre-determined spot in the North Pacific, the whole complicated mechanism of the capsule slowing its careering course until, under the impulse of the growing barometric pressure, the pneumatics would release the parachutes.
Minutes later he realised that things had gone awry. The instrument panel was not functioning; the little lights of the transmitters were dark. He did not panic. The hands of the clock moved, and he watched them. At six minutes past three he should have reached that point in space at which the parachutes would open. At eight minutes past three he knew that something was seriously wrong, and he fought panic.
Now, at this moment, he had come to the supreme test of his training. There was nothing for him to do. He had to keep calm, for now his mind was endangered.
At thirteen minutes past three he began to consider the inevitability of death. At three-fourteen his mind had relinquished that; he was back on a school stage, an adolescent in a King’s costume listening gravely to a squeaky Puck: “I’ll put a girdle round about the earth in forty minutes.” At three-nineteen the parachute mechanism went into action and again the deceleration drove him to, or beyond (for it was difficult to tell), the limits of consciousness.
When he recovered he knew, as though he could see beyond the walls of steel, that his capsule was swinging gently in space beneath its complex canopy.
He had done it He was the first man to visit the empyrean and return. Relief and pure happiness flooded his mind. He lay perfectly inert and, sooner than he could have expected, the capsule came to ground. He frowned; the altimeter hands had steadied at 2,600—he was around eight thousand feet up, then.
He had landed on solid ground, not water—that much was obvious—and in mountainous country, if the altimeter were dependable. The capsule was intended to float; the radar screens of the vast squadrons of searching aircraft could find it more easily at sea. But the circumstance did not worry him. He was equipped for survival under almost any conditions. And he had learned to wait.
The engagement of the parachutes had freed the escape hatch lock so he could open it from the interior. Marlett carefully, methodically, disengaged himself from the web of electrical connections that had recorded his ultra-territorial reactions, opened the hatch and looked at his surroundings.
He had fallen in a valley amongst the mountains—but what mountains? They crowned a tropical land, and it was an inhabited valley; he could see gardens planted, and groves of bananas. Hawaii? Fiji? Tahiti? South America?
The capsule lay in the attitude in which it had been planned to land, pointing to the skies from which it came. He negotiated the escape hatch with a practised ease and stood outside.
The capsule had fallen on a wide shelving slope nestled against a ridge of the mountains. The slope was grassed. Apparently at some stage it had been under cultivation and at its lower edge cultivation was still in progress. Further up the valley, however, the grass ended suddenly in scrubby forest. Beyond this he could hear the muted thunder of a waterfall.
The gardens down the hill were bordered with sugar-cane and they seemed to be haphazardly fenced by what looked like plaited rattan. He had been outside the capsule some time before he realised that eyes were looking at him from the gardens; that the ground was indeed thronged with people in semi-concealment. He took a few steps towards them, and there was a scattering of bodies; so he stopped to reconsider.
He shouted then, “Hello. Hello.” And then, rather foolishly: “Is anybody there?”
From far below the gardens, from some place out of sight, a high thin yodel mounted on the air, a wild sound almost like a song. It stopped abruptly; there was an answering voice far off to the right, and then silence.
He walked a little way in the direction of this new voice, and from his altered position down the hill he saw three women running. They were very fleet, and he glimpsed them only briefly. They seemed to wear nothing except an apron of strings or fibres and some sort of knotted textile upon their heads.
He stopped again and considered his position. These were primitive people; their communications with that outside world he must rejoin would be meagre at best. Unarmed as he was, he would be well-advised to wait. He was in no hurry; the probability was that the tracking planes would soon locate the nose capsule if, as they were trained to do, they had kept its erratic return under observation.
He sat down on the slope in the sunshine, opened the neck of his shirt, and tried to relax. He did not realise it, but this reaction was a product of his training as much as it was born of the temperament that had eventually clinched his selection. He would not have been human, though, if he had not thought of the crowds that would line Broadway, of the reception at City Hall, of the honours and the plaudits. All this was now delayed.
His was, from any point of view, a magnificent achievement; the product of latent, passive qualities, yet an achievement to stir the blood, raise the emotions, fire the imagination. It was not a moment to endure this anti-climax.
He sat there two hours, though, and the sun had lipped the further mountains when a deputation of men approached him.
The deputation was heavily armed with bows and arrows, and with clubs. Its leader carried a curiously-fashioned spear with one long central tine protruding from a tripartite fork that resembled the surroyals of a stag’s antlers.
The faces of the men were painted, and on their heads they wore huge crests of gloriously-coloured feathers, crests which advanced their height by half as much again. On the upper part of each left arm was a woven bracelet into which was thrust a long dagger of bone or white wood. Their shoulders too were decorated, and their waists belted, and their loins inadequately covered by short aprons of net. They came a little way beyond the garden fence and stopped.
When he rose and walked to meet them they became agitated and would have run except that he sat down again.
It was nearly dark when the man with the spear approached, closely followed by two others. He walked up, having apparently managed to suppress the visible signs of his fear, and addressed Marlett with unmistakable signs of respect, but in a completely incomprehensible language.
At the end of a long speech he stood expectantly. “Well, thanks for the welcome, old-timer. It’s not exactly what I expected, but I guess it will do,” Marlett said.
“A-a-ah.” It came from them all, a low, susurrant expression of relief. The stranger had at least exhibited another human quality. Behind the crowd of men a small boy emerged in front of the rattan fence. A hand followed him out and yanked him back, and Marlett laughed. Immediately the face near him crinkled into laughter. The men waited, though. Something more was expected of him; they hung upon his actions and his words.
He knew no language other than English. He tried them with variants, speaking louder as their total lack of understanding became evident.
“You savvy this kind of talk?” he asked. They didn’t.
He tried facetiousness, remembering—as indeed he had remembered several times during that fantastic voyage—the years-old gag. “Take me to your leader,” he said, and grinned, but they looked at him seriously, their wide eyes noting every movement, every expression.
There was no communication, but the fact of his speaking to them was striking a chord; they hung upon the sounds he made.
“All right,” he said. “Here goes.”
He struck a pose, and launched into Jefferson’s resounding phrases:
“When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands that have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth the separate and equal station to which the laws of Nature and Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation. We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal. . ..”
It was having its effect. The armed men listened to the cadence of the unintelligible words with what seemed like great respect, and Marlett warmed to his task, recalling to his aid the gestures of school oratory. When he had come to an end the chief extended a hand and placed it flat, palm inward, on Marlett’s chest, inviting him to respond in a similar way. Then the whole company led him down the hill, by a flower-bordered track, through the gardens to the village.
It was a large village. Marlett estimated that perhaps three hundred squat, grass-thatched huts stood in the light shelter of trees at the edge of a cliff beneath which the fine spray arising from the waterfall maintained a constant mist. A hut larger than the rest was amongst the twenty or thirty which faced an open space, completely denuded of grass or weeds, and occupying the centre of the village. Opposite this, facing it across the open space, another building with strange high-peaked gables looked as though it were capable of accommodating almost the entire community. Marlett guessed it to be a hall, or a temple.
Marlett was brought with some ceremony to the house facing the temple, and here the chief motioned him to sit. As he did so, the drumming began.
It started with a single drum, a regular, complicated rhythm of soft but obtrusive beats. It was augmented until there were thirty drummers, each sitting well back from the dancing space amongst the huts; and as it mounted to its full volume the women and the children began to appear, shyly, behind the press of men. The atmosphere was one of welcome, and Marlett at this stage had no misgivings.
He judged the people to be Melanesian, though they were taller than he had imagined Melanesians to be. He must be, he thought, among the mountains of New Guinea; the altitude of the valley and of the considerably higher peaks surrounding it, made it unlikely that it was a lesser island. The people were mountain people with heavy thighs developed by the slopes, and deep chests.
The women were not altogether uncomely, but they had a habit of standing in unattractive attitudes, with their hands clasped against their shoulders, their knees pressed together, their faces looking downward, and the arch of one foot clamped over the top of the other.
The men began to dance. A vast activity, in which he took no part although he was the central figure, to which he was utterly alien, began around him. The fires were stoked until the flames were bright; the nearly naked figures in slow ceremonial motion caught the leaping light; the throbbing drums, powerfully persistent, disciplined all movement.
Marlett laughed. “You go to the moon to see the world,” he said. “Wait till I tell this one.”
The chief, stamping at the head of the central line, smiled and nodded as though he understood and, as if at a signal, the dance stopped. Three men ran into the space, their arms filled with the coloured canopies, red and yellow and white, of the four parachutes. They laid the pile before Marlett. He took the survival knife from its socket in his boot leg and cut the cords from the canopies, giving them, one at a time, to the dancers. He kept one of the canopies to serve as a blanket and distributed the rest. The enthusiasm which greeted this was electrifying, and produced a round of speeches.
The smell of roasting pork now drifted over from the fires, mingling with the musky, not unpleasant smell of the congress of excited people. Presently two girls approached, willowy girls, nearly naked, and obviously frightened. The first offered him a wide lily leaf on which was arranged a selection of cooked vegetables. He recognised the yams, and there were also long white shoots that looked like asparagus or leeks. He hesitated, and the chief motioned him to take the leaf. He set it on the ground beside him.
The second girl, taller than the other, wearing a line of daisy blossoms in her short-cropped hair, was almost beautiful. From the knees upwards her figure would have stood comparison with those of classic beauties. Only her feet were ugly and splayed, and the calves of her legs were thin. In her fingers she carried a thick slab of roast pork, and this she offered him.
He accepted the meat with some distaste, hesitating while he considered the position. He had pills for emergency rations in the curved plastic boxes that nestled against his ribs, and certainly the aircraft would find him in the morning, so that he had no need of the meat. On the other hand it might not be wise to reject this hospitality. He decided to eat.
The pork was almost raw, cut from a larger chunk over-hastily cooked. He stood up, walked to the nearest fire, and set the slab again on the glowing embers. While it was cooking he heard the chief raise his voice, and casually looked back.
To his horror he saw the nearest warrior club the tall girl on the head. She fell. A group of men caught her by her arms and legs and carried her quickly away. Neglecting his meat he ran back, waving his arms, shouting, “No. No.”
“Ono, ono,” the chief said, smiling and nodding. “Ono. Ono.”
Others took up the words and made them a chant. “Ono. Ono.”
The chief motioned Marlett to seat himself again. Feeling completely helpless, he did so. He was surrounded again by smiling warriors. When another girl broke their ranks, advancing hesitantly with his now-cooked pork, he understood. Her predecessor had paid a penalty for failing to please him.
“I suppose I’m some sort of a God to them,” he thought for the first time; and as he examined this thought he knew it was true. He had come down from the Heavens under a coloured cloud of wonderful fabric—what else could he be but a God?
He must be careful not to offend, even more careful not ever to show himself offended. He ate the meat and found it tasty enough. He ate all the vegetables; he would have been satisfied with less than half; they were lukewarm and un-salted; but he was frightened that a refusal of any part might have tokened displeasure.
Late that night he was escorted across the dancing-ground and shown to a platform inside the horned house. Here he wrapped himself in the silk of the ‘chute and tried to sleep. He was alone in the house; the drumming and the dancing continued. Towards morning he did sleep; only for a few minutes in spite of his exhaustion. When the light of dawn infiltrated the building he got up; and horror met him at the door.
The head of the girl who had first served him with the meat was balanced in the fork of a stick set up before the house. Gouts of blood were black against its neck; two withered daisies were still entwined in the short-cropped, frizzy hair. Beyond the head, ranks of seated men looked up at him expectantly; and the drumming went on.
He stepped back momentarily into the darkness, nerving himself to face an ordeal that choked him. To show disapproval might provoke another killing, so he thought. To show approval was intolerable. The deed was done; it was part of the horrifying pattern of a savage life, and he temporised. He decided to ignore completely the presence of the head.
He marched stiffly, erect, with set face, out from the building, past the head in its forked mounting (a sacrifice? a mollification? a gift?), through the seated ranks, out from the village, through the gardens, up the slope, back to where the capsule stood erect, its peaked dome pointing to the heavens it had traversed, its escape hatch open.
He stood and looked at it awhile. He was quivering violently, as though at the crisis of a fever. At the end of perhaps ten minutes he had calmed, and sought comfort in logic.
These were people who lived by the club, the dagger and the bamboo knife. He could not have saved the girl. His duty to civilisation was to save himself. In only a few hours the aircraft would come; the parachutist would drop to bolster him while they awaited the succouring helicopters. For the moment he was the most valuable man in the world. The world could not afford to lose him.
He sat hours alone before the capsule on the hillside, but in mid-afternoon gratefully accepted another offering of food.
The gardens, however, were a hive of activity. Men and women worked there, cutting, digging, carrying. Some time after noon men came from the forest with two great logs and laid them before the capsule. They did not speak to Marlett; most of them did not look at him. There were forty men carrying each log, and when they had laid them down they departed.
When evening came he knew he was lost. The capsule had slipped undetected through the magnificent net of aerial waves spread to catch the echoes of its passage. It was close to an impossibility; yet it had happened. The onus was now on Marlett to save himself.
But this was not, surely, difficult. Rivers everywhere ran to a coast; men lived on river-banks and by coastlines. Once he had left the territory of these lost hill-men he could find safety.
He had the stamina; with his emergency rations, his box of drugs and pills he had weeks of energetic life ahead of him. Supplemented by the food of the country his box would bring him to the safety of men with known habits, men with the means of communication, men with understanding.
With the dark the chief and bis warriors came up the hill, all smiles and beckoning gestures. He had waited for this moment, and he knew he had to go with them.
The gardens were utterly despoiled; not a plant remained in them. Not only had the mature vegetables been dug, but every growing plant. The havoc was complete.
In the village, the dancing-ground had been transformed into a feasting-place. An incredible number of pigs had been slaughtered and now lay in tidy stacks; no animals whatsoever rooted amongst the huts. The entire food supply of the village had been brought to the feast.
From amazement Marlett’s emotions shaded into something approaching terror. Now he knew for sure that the village saw in him a God. To his worship, they had without hesitation sacrificed everything on which they depended for life.
There was no doubt in them; no trepidation. Their gift to him was full and free.
The chief showed Marlett to his place of honour, and great piles of food were placed on the ground in front of him. He ate of the fruits only, the breadfruit and the bananas. And he ate slowly. When at last he felt he could do so he stood up, and while a hush, broken only by the constant drums, fell on the people he walked to the horned house, past the head now withered and ugly that nestled still in the forked stick before the door, and went inside. There was a screen of plaited palmleaves to cover the entrance; he set it in place and was not disturbed.
There was a misty dignity about the horned house. The great roof-tree high above him was carved along its every inch, and the main supporting pillars were like totem-poles, with one recurring design: a masked face with a long hooked nose, looped at the septum, with protruding lips and looped earlobes.
His parachute canopy was where he had discarded it in the morning. He wrapped himself in a complex of its folds and tried to sleep.
As a God he would have responsibilities; the chief had been sincerely proud of the despoliation of the gardens. Now that the people had nothing left, would they look to him, the man from the Heavens, the wonder-worker, to fill the gap? He had no doubt that they would. And he could only fail them. The materials of the feast would last a few days; soon the remnants would spoil. When hunger threatened he would be blamed.
In the morning the horror was intensified. Beyond the forked stick, in a little line, were six others; each bore a human head newly taken.
Two were of men. Their heads were shaven back to the highest part of the cranium, and not newly shaved. It was a distinctive fashion that he had not seen; it was obvious they were not men of the tribe. There were three heads of women, one a very old woman, white-haired, wrinkled, with thin withdrawn lips exposing worn stumps of teeth. And the head of a small child, little more than a baby.
The young men had gone out in the night, and now offered him these tokens.
It was very clear, and he had to go. Not directly, but as unobtrusively as he could.
Again he walked through the village, through the wreck of the gardens, to the nose capsule. A band of carvers was working on the logs and fires indicated that they had, perhaps, worked through the night. He glanced at their work without seeing it.
After a little while he moved down to the forest, hoping that any watchers would think his object was simply to attend to physical needs.
In the shelter of the trees he felt safer. After a few hundred yards he cut a track that seemed as if it would take him to the stream-bed at the foot of the falls. For half a mile he followed it warily.
He walked quietly, and several times stopped to listen for sounds of pursuit, but there were none. As he plunged deeper into the dark, wet forest, even the bird notes were stilled; there was no sound but the throbbing of drums that had never stopped.
He walked more easily now, with more surety. He had covered perhaps five miles when he came to a place where a broken bamboo rod had been placed across the track. As he went to put it aside a voice behind him spoke.
One of the warriors stood there, smiling deferentially, repeating a few words over and over. Then the others moved in from the trees, more and more, smiling, sidling into sight, until there were thirty or forty of them. They carried bows and clubs and had arrows thrust beneath straps looped across their shoulders, but they made no move to use any of these weapons.
Marlett understood. He had reached the tribal boundary; or as far, anyway, as his hosts intended allowing him to go. They were friendly, insistent, respectful and firm. He was their God; they would not lose him.
Nevertheless he tried. He whirled and broke into a run. The proffered heads had indicated the presence of tribal enemies near at hand. Perhaps he could run into enemy country where these men would not follow him, and where he would not suffer the disadvantage of having arrived from the Heavens.
It was hopeless. They caught him, holding him gently, and led him back. Several times that day and in the night that followed he tried to go. On each occasion his hopes lifted. He saw no pursuers until he came to a point at which he found himself surrounded. When he went away in the night he had not gone fifty yards before he felt a soft and deferential finger prodding his back.
There were no new sacrifices in the morning. When, following the habit of the earlier mornings he walked beyond the gardens, he found that the carvers had done a great deal of work on the logs. Except for the final polishing their task was finished.
The beaked faces were represented here too—but they were interspersed with and dominated by frequent instances of a new symbol—a representation of the nose cone itself, its escape hatch gaping like a mouth. When he saw the two holes dug equidistant from the nose cone, holes ready to take the carved piles, he understood.
The carvings were for a new temple, and the nose cone was its altar.
And suddenly it was quite clear to him that he would never leave this valley. He was its God, and he would be its Divine victim. Only one sacrifice could consecrate the nose cone and the temple to the new belief, and the victim was himself.
When he saw them coming through the gardens he had a moment of panic. He jumped to the escape hatch to hide again in the steel-walled shelter that had carried him round the world with the speed of Puck; but he had no more than thrust his head in that tomb than he thought better of it and came away.
He knelt to pray, and while he knelt the chief lifted his stone club and, still deferentially, almost reverently, struck Marlett on the skull with a considered force.