THE GAME OF GOD
Brian Aldiss
 
 
IN the afternoon they brought him entrails.
 
At other times of day, the pygmies brought the old man fish from the river, or the watercress which he loved, but in the afternoon they brought him two bowls of entrails.
 
He stood to receive them, staring over their heads through the open door, looking at the blue jungle without seeing it. He was in pain. He dared not let his subjects see that he suffered or was weak; the pygmies had a short way with weakness. Before they entered his room, he forced himself to stand erect, using his stick for support.
 
The two bearers stopped before him, bowing their heads until their snouts were almost in the still steaming bowls.
 
‘Your God gives you thanks. Your offering is received,’ the old man said.
 
Whether or not they really comprehended his clicking attempt to reproduce their tongue, he could not tell. Shaking slightly, he patted their scaly heads. They rose and departed with their rapid, slithering walk. In the bowls, oily highlights glistened, reflected from the sunshine outside.
 
Sinking back on to his bed, the old man fell into his usual fantasy: the pygmies came to him, and he treated them not with forbearance but hatred. He poured over them the weight of his long-repressed loathing and despisal, striking them over the heads with his stick and finally driving them and all their race for ever from this planet. They were gone. The azure sun and the blue jungles were his alone; he could live where no body would ever find or worry him. He could die at last as simply as a leaf falls from a tree.
 
The reverie faded, and he recognized it for what it was. He knotted his hands together till the knuckles stood out like cobble-stones, coughing a little blood. The bowl of intestines would have to be disposed of.
 
Next day, the rocket ship landed a mile away.
 
* * * *
 
The overlander lumbered along the devious forest tract. It was losing as little time as possible with Barney Brangwyn’s expert hand at the wheel. On either side of the vehicle, the vegetation was thick, presenting that sombre blue-green hue which characterized most of the living things on the planet Kakakakaxo.
 
‘You neither of you look in the pink of health!’ Barney observed, flicking his eyes from the track to glance at the azure lights on the faces of his companions.
 
The three members of the Planetary Ecological Survey Team had blue shadows shading every plane of their countenances. The shadows gave an illusion of chill, yet in this equatorial zone, and with the sun Cassivelaunus shining at zenith, it was comfortably warm, if not hot. The surrounding jungle grew thickly, with an almost tropical luxuriance, the bushes sagged under the weight of their own foliage. It was strange to recall that they were heading for a man who had lived in these un inviting surroundings for almost twenty years. Now they were here, it became easier to see why he was universally regarded as a hero.
 
‘There’s plenty of cover here for any green pygmies who may be watching us,’ Tim Anderson said, peering at the pass ing thickets. ‘I was hoping to see one or two.’
 
Barney chuckled at the worried note in the younger man’s voice.
 
The pygmies are probably still getting over the racket we made in landing,’ he said, ‘we’ll be seeing them soon enough. When you get as ancient as I am, Tim, you’ll become less keen to meet the local bigwigs. The top dogs of any planet are generally the most obstreperous—ipso facto, as the lawyers say.’
 
He lapsed into silence as he negotiated a gulley, swinging the big vehicle expertly up the far slope.
 
‘By the evidence, the most obstreperous factor on Kakaka kaxo is the climate,’ Tim said. ‘Only six or seven hundred miles north and south of here, the glaciers begin, and go right on up to the poles. I’m glad our job is just to vet the planet to see that it’s safe for colonists—I shouldn’t want to live here myself, pygmies or no pygmies. I’ve seen enough already to tell you that.’
 
‘It’s not a question of choice for the colonists,’ Craig Hodges, leader of the team, remarked. ‘They’ll come because of some kind of pressure on them: economic factors, oppression, desti tution, or the need for liebensraum—the sort of grim necessi ties which keep us all on the hop.’
 
‘You’re a cheerful couple!’ Barney exclaimed. ‘At least Daddy Dangerfield likes it here! He has faced Kakakakaxo for nineteen years, playing God, wet-nursing the pygmies!’
 
‘He crashed here accidentally in the first place; he’s had to adjust,’ Craig said, unwilling to be shaken out of a melancholy which always descended on him when the P.E.S.T. first con­fronted the mystery of a new planet.
 
‘What a magnificent adjustment!’ Tim exclaimed, ‘Daddy Dangerfield, God of the Great Beyond! He was one of my childhood heroes. I can hardly believe we’re going to meet him.’
 
‘Most of the legends built around him originate on Droxy,’ Craig said, ‘where half the ballyhoo in the universe comes from. I am chary about the blighter myself, but he could prove informative—don’t forget we’re not on an autograph hunt, Tim.’
 
‘He’ll be informative,’ Barney said, skirting a thicket of rhododendron. ‘He’ll save us a whack of field work. In nine teen years—if he’s anything like the man he’s cracked up to be—he should have accumulated a mass of material of in estimable value to us.’
 
The P.E.S.T. task was seldom simple. When a three-man team landed on an unexplored planet like Kakakakaxo, they had to categorize its possible dangers and determine exactly the nature of the opposition any superior species might offer colonizing man. The superior species in a galaxy tumbling with diversity, might be mammal, reptile, insect, vegetable, mineral, or virus. Frequently it was so obstreperous that it had to be exterminated entirely before man could move in—and exterminated so that the ecological balance of the planet was disturbed as little as possible.
 
Their journey ended unexpectedly. They were only a mile from their ship when the jungle on one side of the overlander gave way to a cliff, which formed the base of a steep and afforested mountain. Rounding a high spur of rock, they saw the pygmies’ village ahead of them. When Barney braked and cut out the power, the three of them sat for a minute in silence, taking in the scene.
 
Rapid movement under the trees followed their arrival.
 
‘Here comes the welcoming committee,’ Craig said. ‘We’d better climb down and look agreeable, as far as that is pos sible; Heaven knows what they are going to make of your beard, Barney. Get your blaster on, Tim, just in case it’s needed.’
 
The trio was surrounded as soon as it jumped to the ground. The pygmies moved like jerky lightning, enclosing the ecologists. Though they appeared from all quarters, apparently without prearranged plan, it took them only a few seconds to form a wall round the intruders. And for all their speed, there was a quality of stealth about them; there was something menacing about their haste; they were ugly creatures.
 
They moved like lizards, and their skin was like lizard-skin, green and mottled, except where it broke into coarse scales down their backs. Pygmy-sized, none of them stood more than four feet high. They were four-legged and two-armed. Their heads, perched above their bodies with no visible neck, were like cayman-heads, fitted with long, cruel jaws and serrated teeth. These heads now swivelled from side to side, like gun-turrets on tanks seeking sight of the enemy.
 
Once they had surrounded the ecologists, the pygmies made no further move. The initiative had passed from them. In their baggy throats, heavy pulses beat.
 
Craig pointed at a cayman-head in front of him and said, ‘Greetings! Where is Daddy Dangerfield? We intend you no harm. We merely wish to see Dangerfield. Please take us to him.’
 
He repeated his words in Galingua.
 
The pygmies stirred, opening their jaws and croaking. An excited clack-clack-clackering broke out on all sides. Overpoweringly, an odour of fish rose from the creatures. None of them volunteered anything which might be construed as a reply. The wave of excitement, if it was that, which passed over them emphasized their more formidable features. Their stocky bodies might have been ludicrous, but their two pairs of sturdy legs and their armoured jaws would deter anyone from regarding them as figures of fun.
 
‘These are only animals!’ Tim exclaimed. ‘Look at them— they relieve themselves as they stand, like cattle. They possess none of the personal pride you’d expect in a primitive savage. They wear absolutely nothing in the way of clothes. Why, they aren’t even armed!’
 
‘Don’t say that until you’ve had a good look at their claws and teeth,’ Barney said cheerfully. He had caught the loathing in the youngster’s voice, and knew how loathing cloaks fear. He himself felt curious, dry tension, originating less from thought of the pygmies than from the reflection that the three of them were in an unknown world, without precedents to guide them; when he ceased to feel that tension, he would be due for retirement.
 
‘Move forward slowly with me,’ Craig said. ‘We are doing no good standing here. Dangerfield must be about somewhere, heaven help him.’
 
Thigh-deep in clacking cayman-heads, who kept them en circled, the P.E.S.T. men advanced towards the settlement, which lay in patchy tones of blue sunshine and blue shade. This manoeuvre was resented by the pygmies, whose noise redoubled, though they backed away without offering opposi tion. When they spoke, their grey tongues wagged up and down in their long mouths. Following Craig’s lead, Barney and Tim kept their hands at their sidearms, ready for trouble.
 
So they moved slowly into the village. Bounded on one side by the cliff face, it stood under trees. In the foliage of these trees, a colony of gay-coloured birds, evidently a sort of weavers, had plaited a continuous roof out of lianas, climbers, leaves, and twigs. Under this cover, on the dropping-bespattered ground, the pygmies had their rude huts, which were no more than squares of woven reed propped at an angle by sticks, to allow an entrance. They looked like collapsed bivouacs.
 
Tied outside these dismal dwellings were furry animals, walking in the small circles allowed by their leashes and call ing to each other. Their mewing cries, the staccato calls of the birds, and the croaking of the cayman-heads, made a babel of sound. And over everything lay the stench of decaying fish.
 
‘Plenty of local colour,’ Barney remarked. ‘These tethered animals are an odd touch, aren’t they?’
 
In contrast to this squalid scene was the cliff face, which had been ornately carved with stylized representations of foli age mingled with intricate geometrical forms. The decoration rose to a height of some twelve metres and was inventive and well-proportioned. Later, the ecologists were to find this work crude in detail, but from a distance its superiority to the vil lage was marked. As they came nearer, they saw that the decorated area was the facade of a building hewn in the living rock, complete with doors, passages, rooms, and windows, from which pygmies watched their progress with unblinking curiosity.
 
‘I begin to be impressed,’ Tim observed, eyeing the patterns in the rock. ‘If these little horrors can create something as elaborate as that, there is hope for them yet.’
 
‘Dangerfield!’ Craig called, when another attempt to com municate with the pygmies had failed. Only the whooping birds answered him.
 
Already the pygmies were losing interest in the men. They pressed less closely; several scuttled with lizard speed back into their shelters. Looking over the knobby heads of the crowd, Barney pointed to the far side of the clearing. There, leaning against the dun-coloured rock of the cliff, was a size able hut, built of the same flimsy material as the pygmy dwell ings, but constructed with more care and of less uncouth design.
 
While the ecologists were looking at it, an emaciated figure appeared in the doorway. It was human. It made its way towards them, aiding itself with a stout stick.
 
‘That’s Dangerfield!’ Barney exclaimed. ‘It must be Dangerfield. As far as we know, there’s no other human being on the whole benighted planet.’
 
A warming stream of excitement ran through Tim. Daddy Dangerfield was a legend in this region of the inhabited galaxy. Crash-landing on Kakakakaxo nineteen years ago, he had been the first man to visit this uninviting little world.
 
Although only fifteen light years from Droxy, one of the great interstellar centres of commerce and pleasure, Kakaka kaxo was off the trade lanes. So Dangerfield had lived alone with the pygmies for ten standard years before someone had chanced to arrive with an offer of rescue.
 
By then it was too late: the poison of loneliness had become its own antidote. The stubborn man refused to leave. He claimed that the native tribes, the pygmies, had need of him. So he remained where he was, King of the Crocodile People, Daddy to the Little Folk—-as the Droxy tabloids phrased it, with their affection for capital letters and absurd titles.
 
As Dangerfield approached the team now, the pygmies fell back before him, maintaining their clacking chorus. Many of them slid away, indifferent to affairs beyond their comprehen sion.
 
It was hard to recognize, in the bent figure peering anxiously at them, the young, bronzed giant by which Dangerfield was represented in the comic strips oh Droxy. The thin, sardonic face with its powerful hook of nose had become a caricature of itself. The grey hair was long and dirty. The lumpy hands which grasped the stick were bespattered with liver marks. This was Dangerfield, but appearances suggested that the legend would outlive the man.
 
‘You’re from Droxy?’ he asked eagerly, speaking in Galingua. ‘You’ve come to make another solid about me? I’m very pleased to see you here. Welcome to the untamed planet of Kakakakaxo.’
 
Craig Hodges put out his hand.
 
‘We’re not from Droxy,’ he said. ‘We’re based on Earth, although most of our days are spent far from it. Nor are we a film unit about to make a solid; our mission is rather more practical than that.’
 
‘You ought to shoot a solid—you’d make your fortune. What are you doing here, then?’
 
As Craig introduced himself and his team, Dangerfield’s manner became noticeably less cordial. He muttered angrily to himself about invaders of his privacy.
 
‘Come over and have a drink with us in our wagon,’ Barney said. ‘We’ve got a nice little Aldebaran wine you might like to sample. You must be glad to see someone to talk to.’
 
‘This is my place,’ the old man said pugnaciously, waving his stick over the tawdry clearing. ‘I don’t know what you people are doing here. I’m the man who beat Kakakakaxo. The God of the Crocodile Folk, that’s what they call me.’ As if Barney’s suggestion about the wine had just sunk in, he began moving towards the overlander, talking as he went. ‘If you had pushed your way in here twenty years ago as you did just now, the pygmies would have torn you to bits—right to little bits. I tamed ‘em! No living man has ever done what I’ve done. They’ve made films about my life on Droxy—that’s how important I am. Didn’t you know that?’
 
His sunken eyes rested on Tim Anderson. ‘Didn’t you know that, young man?’
 
Tim evaded the stare.
 
‘I was brought up on those films, sir. They were made by the old Melmoth Solid Studios.’
 
‘Yes, yes, that was the name. You don’t belong to them? Why don’t they come back here any more, eh, why don’t they?’
 
‘I believe I read somewhere they went bankrupt a couple of years ago.’
 
Tim wanted to tell this gaunt relic that Dangerfield, the Far-Flung Father, the Cosmic Schweitzer, had been one of his boyhood heroes, a giant through whom he had first felt the ineluctable lure of space travel; he wanted to tell him that it hurt to have the legend outfaced by the reality. Here was the giant himself—bragging of his past, and bragging, moreover, in a supplicatory whine.
 
They came up to the overlander. Dangerfield stared at the neat shield on the side, under which the words Planetary Ecological Survey were inscribed in grey. After a moment, he turned pugnaciously to Craig.
 
‘Who are you people? What do you want here? I’ve got troubles enough.’
 
‘We’re a fact-finding team, Mr. Dangerfield,’ Craig said levelly. ‘Our business is to gather data on this planet. Next to nothing is known about ecological or living conditions here; the planet has never even been properly surveyed. We are naturally keen to secure your help; you should be a treasury of information-----’
 
‘I can’t answer any questions! I never answer questions. You’ll have to find out anything you want to know for your selves. I’m a sick man—I’m in pain. It’s all I can do to walk. I need a doctor, drugs. . . . Are you a doctor?’
 
‘I can administer an analgesic,’ Craig said. ‘And if you will let me examine you, I will try to find out what you are suffer ing from.’
 
Dangerfield waved a hand angrily in the air.
 
‘I don’t need telling what’s wrong with me,’ he snapped. ‘I know every disease that’s going on this cursed planet. I’ve got fiffins, that’s my trouble, and all I’m asking you for is some thing to relieve the pain. If you haven’t come to be helpful, you’d best get out altogether!’
 
‘Just what is or are fiffins?’ Barney asked.
 
‘None of your business. They’re not infectious, if that’s what’s worrying you. If you have only come to ask questions, clear out. The pygmies will look after me, just as I’ve always looked after them.’
 
As he turned to go, Dangerfield staggered and would have fallen, had not Tim moved fast enough to catch his arm. The old fellow shook off the supporting hand and hurried back across the clearing in a shuffle that sent the captive animals squeaking to the far end of their tethers.
 
Catching him up, Tim laid a hand on his arm.
 
‘We can help you,’ he said pleadingly. ‘Please be reasonable. You look as if you need medical treatment, which we can give you.’
 
‘I never had help, and I don’t need it now. And what’s more, I’ve made it a rule never to be reasonable.’
 
Full of conflicting emotion, Tim turned back. He caught sight of Craig’s impassive face.
 
‘We should help him,’ he said.
 
‘He doesn’t want help, from you or anyone,’ Craig replied, not moving.
 
‘But he’s in pain!’
 
‘No doubt, and the pain clouds his judgement. That may account for his uneasy mixture of insult and abasement. But he is still his own self, with his own ways. We have no right to take him over against his expressed wishes.’
 
‘He may be dying,’ Tim said. ‘You’ve no right to be so damned indifferent.’ He looked defiantly at Craig, who re turned his gaze. Then he walked rapidly away, pushing past the few cayman-heads who still remained on the scene. Dan gerfield, on the other side of the clearing, glanced back once and then disappeared into his hut. Barney made to follow Tim, but Craig stopped him.
 
‘Leave him,’ he said quietly. ‘Let him have his temper out.’
 
Barney looked straight at his friend.
 
‘Don’t force the boy,’ he said. ‘He hasn’t got your com plicated outlook on life. Just go easy on him, Craig.’
 
‘We all have to learn, and it is easier to learn fast,’ Craig observed, almost sadly. Then, changing his tone, he said, ‘For a reason we have yet to discover, Dangerfield is un-cooperative. From first impressions, he is unbalanced, which means he may soon swing the other way and offer us help: that we should wait for; I’d be interested to get a straight record of his nineteen years here. It would make a useful psychological document, if nothing else.’
 
‘He’s a stubborn old blighter, to my way of thinking,’ Barney said, shaking his head.
 
“Which is the sign of a weak man. That’s why Tim was unwise to coax him; it would merely make him more obdur ate. Ignore Dangerfield and he will come to us. Until he does, we shall work on our own here, completing the usual ground sample survey. First, we must establish the intelligence status of the pygmies, with a view to finding out how much opposi tion they will offer the colonists when they arrive. One or two other odd features may also prove interesting.’
 
Thrusting his hands in his pockets, Barney surveyed the shabby settlement. Now that it was quieter, he could hear a river flowing nearby. The pygmies had dispersed; some lay motionless in their crude shelters, only their snouts showing, the blue light lying like a mist along their scales.
 
‘Speaking off the cuff, I’d say the pygmies are infra-human,’ Barney remarked, picking from his beard an insect which had tumbled out of the thatched trees above them. ‘I’d also hazard they have got as far, evolutionwise, as they’re ever going to get. They have restricted cranial development, no opposed thumb, and no form of clothing—which means the lack of any sexual inhibition, such as one would expect to find in this Y-type culture. I should rate them as Y gamma stasis, Craig, at first blush.’
 
Craig nodded, smiling, as if with a secret pleasure.
 
‘Which means you feel as I do about the cliff temple,’ he said, indicating with his grey eyes the wealth of carving visible through the trees.
 
‘You mean—the pygmies couldn’t have built it?’ Barney said. Craig nodded his large head.
 
‘These cayman-heads are far below the cultural level im plicit in the architecture. They are its caretakers, not its creators. Which means, of course, that there is—or was— another species, a superior species, on Kakakakaxo, which may prove more elusive than the pygmies.’
 
Craig was solid and stolid; he spoke unemphatically. But Barney, who knew something of what went on inside that megacephalous skull, knew that Craig’s habit of throwing away an important point, revealed that he was chewing over a problem which excited his intellectual curiosity.
 
Understanding enough not to probe on the subject, Barney filed it away for later and switched to another topic. For such a bulky specimen of manhood, he possessed surprising deli cacy; but the confines of a small spaceship make a good schoolroom for the sensibilities.
 
‘I’m just going to look at these furry pets the cayman-heads keep tied up outside their shelters,’ he said, ‘they’re intriguing little creatures. We might make a pet of one ourselves.’
 
‘Go carefully,’ Craig cautioned. ‘I have a suspicion the cayman-heads may not appreciate your interference. Those pets may not be pets at all; the pygmies don’t look like a race of animal-lovers.’
 
‘Well, if they aren’t pets, they certainly aren’t livestock. Doesn’t smell as if the cayman-heads eat anything but fish, does it?’
 
Barney walked slowly among the crude shelters. He was careful to avoid any protruding pygmy snouts, which lay along the ground like fallen branches; they remained motionless as he passed; only the big pulse throbbed in their throats.
 
Outside most of the shelters, two different animals were tethered, generally by their hind legs. One animal, a grey, furry creature with a pushed-in face like a Pekinese dog, stood almost as high as the pygmies; the other animal, a pudgy-snouted little creature with brown fur and a gay yellow crest, was half the size of the ‘peke’, and resembled a miniature bear. Both pekes and bears had little black monkey-like paws, many of which were now raised as if in supplication as the ecologists approached.
 
‘They’re a deal more cuddlesome than their owners,’ Craig said. Stooping, he extended a hand cautiously to one of the little bears. It leapt forward and clutched his hand, chattering in appealing fashion.
 
‘Do you suppose the two species, the pekes and the bears, fight together?’ Barney asked. ‘You notice they are kept tied just far enough apart so that they can’t touch each other. We may have found the local variation on cock-fighting.’
 
‘Blood-sports may be in accord with the looks of the pyg mies,’ Craig said, ‘but not with the character of these creatures. Look at them—as pugnacious as bunny rabbits! Even their incisors are blunt. They have no natural weapons at all.’
 
‘Talking of teeth, they exist on the same diet as their masters,’ Barney commented. ‘Though whether from choice or necessity we’ll have to discover.’
 
He pointed to decaying piles of fish-bones, fish-heads, and scales, on which the little animals were sitting disconsolately. Iridescent beetles scuttled among the debris, busy almost beneath Barney’s feet.
 
‘I’m going to try taking one of these pekes back to the overlander,’ he announced. ‘It should be well worth examining.’
 
From the corner of his eye, he could see a pygmy snout sticking out of its shelter not three yards away; keeping it under observation, he bent over one of the pekes and tried to loosen the tightly-drawn thong that kept it captive. The tethered creatures nearby, large and small, set up an excited chatter as they saw what Barney was doing. At the same time, the watching pygmy moved.
 
Its speed was astonishing. One second, it was scarcely visible in its shelter, its nose extended along the ground; the next, it confronted Barney with its claws resting over his hand, its ferocious teeth bared in his face. Small though the reptile was, undoubtedly it could have snapped his neck through. Its yellow eyes glared unblinkingly up at Barney.
 
‘Don’t fire, or you’ll have the lot on us!’ Craig said, for Barney’s free hand had gone for his blaster.
 
They were surrounded almost immediately by pygmies, all scuttling up and clacking excitedly. The reptiles made their typical noises by waggling their tongues without moving their jaws. Though they crowded in, apparently hostile, they made no attempt to attack Craig and Barney. Then one of them thrust himself forward. Waving his small upper arms he commenced to harangue them.
 
‘Some traces of primitive speech pattern,’ Craig observed coolly. ‘Let’s try a little barter for your pet, Barney, while we have their attention.’
 
Dipping into one of the pouches of his duty equipment, he produced a necklace, in whose marble-sized stones spirals of colour danced, delicate internal springs ensuring that their hues changed continually as long as their wearer moved. It was the sort of bauble to be picked up for a few minicredits on almost any civilized planet. Craig held it out to the pygmy who had delivered the speech.
 
The pygmy leader scrutinized it briefly, then resumed his harangue. The necklace meant nothing to him. With signs, Craig explained the function of the necklace, and indicated that he would exchange it for one of the little bears. Abundant though these animals were, their owners showed no sign of wishing to part with one. Pocketing the necklace, Craig pro duced a mirror.
 
Mirrors unfailingly excite the interest of primitive tribes-yet the pygmies remained unmoved. Many of them began to disappear now the crisis was over, speeding off with their nervous, lizard movements. Putting the mirror away, Craig brought out a whistle.
 
It was an elaborate toy, shaped like a silver fish with an open mouth. The pygmy leader snatched it from Craig’s hand, leaving the red track of its claws across his open palm. It popped the whistle into its mouth.
 
‘Here, that’s not edible!’ Craig said, instinctively stepping forward with his hand out. Without warning, the pygmy struck. Perhaps it misinterpreted Craig’s gesture and acted unthinkingly in self-defence. Snapping its jaws, it lunged out at Craig’s leg. The ecologist fell instantly. Hardly had he struck the ground when a blue shaft flashed from Barney’s blaster. As the noise of the thermonuclear blast rattled round the clearing, the pygmy toppled over and fell fiat, its hide smoking.
 
Into the ensuing silence broke the terrified clatter of a thousand weaver birds, winging from their homes and circling high above the tree tops. Barney bent down, seized Craig round the shoulders, and raised him with one powerful arm, keeping the blaster levelled in his free hand. Over Craig’s thigh, soaking through his torn trousers, grew a ragged patch of blood.
 
‘Thanks, Barney,’ he said. ‘Trade seems to be bad today. Let’s get back to the overlander.’
 
They retreated, Craig limping painfully. The pygmies made no attempt to attack. They mostly stood still, crouching over the smoking body and either staring fixedly or waving their snouts helplessly from side to side. It was impossible to deter mine whether they were frightened by the show of force or had decided that the brief quarrel was no affair of theirs. At last they bent over their dead comrade, seized him by his hind feet, and dragged him briskly off in the direction of the river.
 
When Barney got Craig on to his bunk, he stripped his trousers off, cleansed the wound, and dressed it with anti septic and restorative powder. Although Craig had lost blood, little serious damage had been done; his leg would be entirely healed by morning.
 
‘You got off lightly,’ Barney said, straightening up. ‘It’s a deep flesh wound, but that baby could have chewed your knees off if he had been trying.’
 
Craig sat up and accepted a mescahale.
 
‘One thing about the incident particularly interested me,’ he said. ‘The cayman-heads wanted the whistle because they mis took it for food; fish, as we gather from the stink outside, is a main item of diet. The mirror and necklace meant nothing to them; I have never met a backward tribe so lacking in simple, elementary vanity. Does it connect with the absence of any sexual inhibitions which you mentioned?’
 
‘What have they to be vain about?’ Barney asked, stripping off and heading for the shower. ‘After five minutes out there, I feel as if the stench of fish has been painted on me with a brush.’
 
* * * *
 
It was not long before they realized Tim Anderson was nowhere in the overlander. Craig pursed his lips.
 
‘Go and see if you can find him, Barney,’ he said. ‘He isn’t safe wandering about on his own. He’ll have to learn to enjoy freedom of thought without freedom of action.’
 
The afternoon was stretching its blue shadows across the ground. In the quiet, you could almost hear the planet turn on its cold, hard axis. The birds had returned to their tight-knit home and made occasional bright darting forays to the ground. They would be picking up the beetles in the piles of fish debris, Barney thought. He saw one of the raiders fall victim—in a flurry of motion—to a cayman-head. It killed and did not eat.
 
Barney was familiar with the pattern of nature. He did not pause, except to take his bearings. He set out towards the distant murmur of water, thinking that a river would hold as much attraction for Tim as for himself. He turned down a narrow track among the trees, then stopped, unsure which way to go. He called Tim’s name once.
 
An answer came almost at once, unexpectedly. In a minute, Tim emerged from the bushes ahead and waved cheerfully to Barney.
 
‘You had me worried,’ Barney confessed, catching up with him. ‘It’s wiser not to stroll off like that without telling us where you are going. What have you been doing?’
 
‘I’m quite capable of looking after myself, you know,’ Tim said. ‘There’s a river just beyond these bushes, wide and deep and fast-flowing. I suppose these cayman-heads are cold­blooded?’
 
‘They are,’ Barney confided. ‘I should know. I had one holding hands with me a while back.’
 
‘Just as well for them,’ Tim remarked. ‘There’s a bunch of them in the water now and it’s ice cold. It must flow straight down off the glaciers. The pygmies are superb swimmers, very fast, very sure; they look altogether more graceful in the water than they do on land. I watched them diving and coming up with fish the size of a big salmon in their jaws.’
 
Barney told him about the incident with the fish-whistle.
 
‘I’m sorry about Craig’s leg,’ Tim said, ‘but while we’re on the subject, perhaps you can tell me why he’s got his knife into me, and why he jumped down my throat when I went after Dangerfield?’
 
‘He hasn’t got his knife into you, and he didn’t jump down your throat. When you’ve been on this team a little longer, Tim, you’ll see that Craig Hodges doesn’t work like that at all. He’s a neutral man. At present he’s worried because he smells a mystery, but is undecided where to turn for a key to it. He probably regards Dangerfield as that key; certainly he respects the knowledge the man must have, yet I think that inwardly he would prefer to tackle the whole problem with a clean slate, leaving Dangerfield out of it altogether.’
 
‘Why should Craig feel like that? P.E.S.T. H.Q. instructed us to contact Dangerfield.’
 
‘Quite. And H.Q. being a tidy few light years away is often out of touch with realities. But Craig probably thinks that old Dangerfield might be—well, misleading, ill-informed. . . . Craig’s a man who likes to work things out for himself—and he likes other people to work things out for themselves.’
 
They turned and began to make their way back to the settlement, walking slowly, enjoying the mild air uncontaminated by fish.
 
‘Surely that wasn’t why Craig was so ragged about helping Daddy Dangerfield?’ Tim asked.
 
Barney sighed and tugged at his beard.
 
‘No, that was something else,’ he said. ‘You develop a cer tain outlook to things when you’ve been on the P.E.S.T. run for some years, because a way of life induces an attitude to life. P.E.S. Teams are the precursors of change, remember. Before we arrive, the planets are in their natural state—that is, unspoiled or undeveloped, whichever way you care to phrase it. After we leave, they are going to be taken over and altered, on our recommendation. However cheery you feel about man’s position in the galaxy, you can’t help a part of you regretting that this inevitable mutilation is necessary.’
 
‘It’s not our business to care,’ Tim said, impatiently.
 
‘But Craig cares, Tim. The more planets we survey, the more he feels that some mysterious—divine—balance is being overthrown. I feel it myself; you’ll grow to feel it in time; directly you land on an unmanned planet, an occult sense of secrecy comes up and hits you. . . . You can’t avoid the idea that you are confronting an individual entity—and your sworn duty is to destroy it, and the enigma behind it, and turn out yet another assembly-line world for assembly-line man.
 
‘That’s how Craig feels about planets and people. For him, a man’s character is sacrosanct; anything that has accumu lated has his respect. It may be simpler to work with people who are mere ciphers, but an individual is of greater ultimate value.’
 
‘You mean that’s what he meant when he said Dangerfield was still his own self?’
 
‘More or less,’ Barney agreed.
 
‘Hm.’
 
‘Sound sceptical if you like. It’ll hit you one day. Look at this place! Now think of it in fifty years, if we give it a clean bill of health. Do you think your river will run as it does now? It may be dammed to provide hydro-electric power, it may be widened and made navigable, it may be a sewer. These birds overhead’ll be extinct or roosting on factory roofs. Every-thing’ll be changed—and we take much of the credit and blame for it.’
 
‘I shan’t miss the stink of fish,’ Tim said.
 
‘Even a stink of fish has------‘ Barney began, and broke off.
 
The silence was torn right down the middle by piercing screams. The two ecologists looked at each other and men ran down the trail, bursting full tilt into the clearing.
 
Beneath the spreading thatch of the treetops, a peke creature was being killed. A rabble of pygmies milled everywhere, con verging on a large decayed tree stump, upon which two of their kind stood in full view, the screaming peke held tightly between them.
 
The furry prisoner struggled and squealed, while to its cries were added those of all the others tethered nearby. The cries stopped abruptly. Without fuss, cruel talons came up and ripped its stomach open. Its entrails were then scooped, steam ing, into a crudely shaped clay bowl, after which the ravaged body was tossed to the crowd. With delighted cries, the pygmies scrambled for it.
 
Before the hubbub had died down, another captive was handed up to the two executioners, kicking and crying as it went. The crowd paused briefly to watch the fun. This time, the victim was one of the bear-like animals. Its body was gouged open, its insides turned into a second bowl. It, too, was tossed to the cayman-headed throng.
 
‘Horrible!’ Tim exclaimed. ‘Horrible!’
 
‘Good old Mother Nature!’ Barney said angrily. ‘How many more of the little blighters do they intend to slaughter?’
 
But the killing was over. The two executioner pygmies, bearing the bowls of entrails clumsily in their paws, climbed from the tree stump and made their way through the crowd, which ceased its squabbling to fall back for them. The vessels were carried towards the rear of the village.
 
‘It almost looks like some sort of a religious ceremony,’ Craig said. Barney and Tim turned to find him standing close behind them. The screaming had drawn him from his bed; in. the tumult, he had limped over to them unobserved.
 
‘How’s the leg?’ Tim asked him.
 
‘It’ll be better by morning, Tim.’
 
‘The creature that bit you—the one Barney killed—was thrown into the river,’ Tim said. ‘I was there watching from the bank when the others turned up with his carcass and slung him in.’
 
“They’re taking those bowls of guts into Dangerfield’s hut,’ Barney said, pointing across the clearing. The two cayman-headed bearers disappeared through the doorway; a minute later they emerged empty-handed from the hut by the cliff, and mingled with the throng.
 
‘I wonder what he wants guts for,’ Tim said. ‘Don’t say he eats them.’
 
‘There’s smoke!’ Craig exclaimed. ‘His hut’s caught fire! Tim, quick and fetch a foam extinguisher from the overlander. Run!’
 
A cloud of smoke, followed by a licking flame, had shown through Dangerfield’s window. It died, then sprang up again. Craig and Barney ran forward as Tim dashed back to the overlander. The pygmies, some of whom were still quarrelling over the pelts of the dead peke and bear, took no notice of them or the fire as the men pelted past.
 
Arriving at the hut first, Barney burst in. The interior of the first room was full of smoke. Flame crawled among the dry rushes on the floor. A crude oil-lamp had been upset; it lay on its side among the flames. Only a few feet beyond ft, Dangerfield sprawled on his bed, his eyes closed.
 
Without wasting words, Craig pulled a rug from the other side of the room, flung it on to the fire and stamped on it. When Tim arrived with the extinguisher, it was hardly needed, but they soused the smouldering ashes with chemicals to make doubly sure.
 
“There might be an opportunity to talk to the old boy when he pulls out of his faint,’ Craig said. ‘Leave me here with him, will you, and I’ll see what I can do. Keep an eye on the cayman-heads.’
 
As Tim and Barney left, Craig noticed the two bowls of entrails standing on a side table. They were still gently steaming.
 
On the bed, Dangerfield stirred. His eyelids flickered, one frail hand went up to his throat.
 
‘No mercy from me,’ he muttered, ‘you’ll get no mercy from me.’
 
As Craig bent over him, his eyes opened. He lay looking up at the ecologist. Blue shadows crept like faded ink-stains over the planes of his face.
 
‘I must have passed out,’ he said tonelessly. . . . ‘Felt so weak.’
 
‘You knocked over your oil-lamp as you collapsed,’ Craig said. ‘I was just in time to save a nasty blaze.’
 
The old man made no comment, unless the closing of his eyes was to be interpreted as an indifference to death.
 
‘Every afternoon they bring me the bowls of entrails,’ he muttered. ‘It’s a . . . rite—they’re touchy about it. I wouldn’t like to disappoint them. . . . But this afternoon it was such an effort to stand. It quite exhausted me. You people coming here exhausted me. If you aren’t making a solid, you’d better stay....’
 
Craig fetched him a mug of water. Dangerfield accepted it, drinking without raising his head, allowing half the liquid to trickle across his withered cheeks. After a minute, he groaned and sat up, propping himself against the wall. Without comment, Craig produced a hypodermic from his emergency pack and filled it from a plastic phial.
 
‘You’re in pain,’ he said. ‘This will stop the pain but leave your head clear. It won’t hurt you; let’s have a look at your arm, can I?’                                     
 
Dangerfield’s eyes rested on the syringe as if fascinated. He began to shake slowly, until the rickety bed creaked.
 
‘I don’t need your help, mister,’ he said, his face crinkling.
 
‘We need yours,’ replied Craig indifferently, swabbing the thin palsied arm. He nodded his head towards the bowls of entrails. ‘What are these unappetizing offerings? Some sort of religious tribute?’
 
Unexpectedly, the old man began to laugh, his eyes filling with tears.
 
‘Perhaps it’s to placate me,’ he said. ‘Every day for years, for longer than I can remember, they’ve been bringing me these guts. You wouldn’t believe me if I told you, Hodges— your name is Hodges, isn’t it?—that one of the chief problems of my life is hiding guts, getting rid of guts. . . . The pygmies must think I swallow them, and I don’t like to disillusion them, in case—well, in case I lost my power over them.’
 
He laughed and groaned then at the same time, hiding his gaunt, beaky face in his hands; the paper-thin skin on his fore head was suddenly showered with sweat. Craig steadied his arm, injected the needle deftly, and massaged the stringy flesh.
 
Standing away from the bed, he said deliberately, ‘It’s strange the way you stay here on Kakakakaxo when you fear these pygmies so much.’
 
Dangerfield looked sharply up, a scarecrow of a man with a shock of hair and a sucked-in mouth. Staring at Craig, his eyes became very clear, as if he realized for the first time that he was confronted by someone with an awareness of his own. Something like relief crept into his expression. He made no attempt to evade Craig’s statement.
 
‘Everyone who goes into space has a good reason driving them,’ he said. ‘You don’t only need escape velocity, you need a private dream—or a private nightmare.’ As always he spoke in Galingua, using it stiffly and unemphatically. ‘Me, I could never deal with people; it’s always been one of my troubles; perhaps that was one of the reasons why I was touchy when you arrived. Human beings—you never know where you stand with them. I’d rather face death with the pygmies than life with humanity. There’s a confession for you, Hodges, coining from Far-Flung Father Dangerfield. . . . Maybe all heroes are just escapees, if you could see into them, right into the core of them.’
 
The injection was taking effect. His words were coming more slowly.
 
‘You have it entirely wrong. Though it may be that all escapees pose as heroes,’ Craig said, but the old man continued to mutter to himself.
 
‘. . . so I stay on here, God of the Guts,’ he said. ‘That’s what I am, God of the Guts.’ His laugh wrecked itself on a shoal of wheezes; clutching his chest, he lay back.
 
He hunched himself up in the foetal position, breathing heavily. The bed creaked, and in a moment he was asleep. Craig sat quite still, his face expressionless, integrating all he had learnt or guessed about Dangerfield. At last he shrugged, rose, and slipped the P.E.S.T. harness from his shoulders; un zipping a pouch, he extracted two specimen jars. Standing them on the table, he poured the bloody contents of the clay bowls into one jar, one into the other. He set down the bowls, stoppered up the jars, and returned them to his pack.
 
‘That solves his worry about disposing of the tribute for today,’ Craig said aloud. ‘And now, I think, a little helminthology.’
 
As he returned through the village, he noticed that several pygmies lay motionless on the ground, glaring unwinkingly at each other over the two lacerated heaps of fur that were all remaining from the recent sacrifice. Circling them, he entered the overlander. It was unexpectedly good to breathe air free from the taint of fish and corruption.
 
‘I think I’ve broken the ice with Dangerfield,’ he announced to Barney and Tim. ‘He’s sleeping now. I’ll go back over there in a couple of hours, to try and treat his “flffin”, and get him in a proper frame of mind for talking. Before that, let’s eat; my stomach grows vociferous.’
 
‘How about exploring the temple in the cliff, Craig?’ Tim asked.
 
Craig smiled. ‘If it is a temple,’ he said. ‘We’ll let it keep till the morning. We don’t want to upset the locals more than possible: though I admit they’re a pretty phlegmatic lot, they might well take umbrage at our barging in there. And by morning I’m hoping Dangerfield will have given us more to go on.’
 
Over the meal, Barney told Craig of two weaver birds that he and Tim had snared while Craig was with Dangerfield.
 
‘The younger one had about one thousand six hundred lice on it,’ he said. ‘Not an unusually large number for a bird liv ing in a colony, and a youngster at that, not yet expert at preening. It goes to show that the usual complex ecological echelons are in full swing on Kakakakaxo.’
 
With their meal, they drank some of Barney’s excellent Aldebaran wine—only the wine of heavy-gravity planets will travel happily through space. As they were lingering over the coffee, Tim volunteered to go over and sit with Dangerfield.
 
‘Excellent idea,’ Craig agreed, gratefully. ‘I’ll be over to relieve you when I’ve done some work here. On your way, take a look at what the pygmies in the clearing are up to. They appeared to be enjoying a motionless fight when I passed them. And be careful—night’s coming down fast.’
 
Collecting his kit and a torch, Tim went out. Barney returned to his birds. Craig closeted himself in the tiny lab with his jars of entrails.
 
* * * *
 
Outside, the curtains of night drew across the sky with sad finality. A chill moved in the dusk. Tim zipped up his jacket and looked about. Striking through the grass a yard away from him passed a lithe serpent resembling the fer-de-lance, that deadly snake with the beautiful name. Intent on its own affairs, it ignored Tim.
 
Cassivelaunus was sinking below the western horizon. Beneath the sheltering trees, darkness was already dominant; a fish-scale gleamed here and there like a muddy star. In the treetops, where the weavers were settling to roost, making a perpetual uneasy noise, an entanglement of light and shade moved. Kept apart by their tethers, peke and bear lay staring at each other in disconsolate pairs, indifferent to day and night. Hardly a cayman-head moved; joylessly they sprawled beneath their crude shelters, not sleeping, not watching.
 
Five of them lay in the open. These were the ones Craig had noticed earlier. They waited with their heads raised. In the gloom, only their yellow-white throats, where a pulse beat like a slow drum, were clearly distinguishable. As he made his way across the clearing, giving them a wide berth, Tim saw that they were waiting, two round one body, three round the other body of the two creatures who had been sacrificed. They crouched tensely about the two little bundles of battered fur, glaring at one another, unmoving as Tim skirted them.
 
In Dangerfield’s hut, he found the overturned oil-lamp and a jar of fish-oil with which to refill it. He trimmed the wick and lit it. Though it gave off a reek of fish, he preferred it to the glare of his solar torch.
 
Dangerfield slept peacefully. Tim covered the old man with a blanket and settled down beside him.
 
The silence came down. In the chill air moving through the hut, Tim thought he caught a breath of the glaciers only a few hundred miles away, north or south.
 
Over him moved a feeling of wonder, or perhaps it was what Barney had called ‘the occult sense of secrecy’ emanating from an unknown planet. Tim experienced it with the strange sense man still does not officially recognize; and the vast barriers of space, the forests of Kakakakaxo, and the old hermit sleeping with a head stuffed full of untapped know ledge were all part of it. He felt nothing of Craig’s dislike of altering the nature of a planet, but suddenly he was impatient for the morning, when they would integrate and interpret the riddles they glimpsed around them.
 
A succession of leathery blows sounded outside. Jumping up, seizing his blaster, Tim stared out into the fishy shadows of the clearing. In the thick silence, the noises were crude and startling.
 
The three cayman-heads that had crouched over one of the mutilated pelts were fighting. They fought voicelessly, with a terrible skill. Though they were small, they battled like giants. Their main weapons were their long jaws, which they wielded as deftly as rapiers, parrying, thrusting, slashing, biting. When their jaws became wedged together in temporary deadlock, they used their claws as well. Each fought against the other two.
 
After some five minutes of this murderous activity, the three fell apart. Collapsing with their jaws along the ground, they eyed each other motionlessly once more over the body of the sacrificed bear.
 
Later, the two pygmies crouching over the dead peke rose and also did battle, their ferocious duel ending with a sudden reversion into immobility. The deep sudden evening light made the battles more terrible. However much the five pygmies suffered from any wounds they received, they gave no sign of pain.
 
‘They are fighting over the gutted bodies of their slaves. It’s a point of honour with them.’
 
Tim turned from the window. Dangerfield had roused, woken by the thumping outside. He spoke tiredly, without opening his eyes. By a quirk of the dim lighting, his eye sockets and the hollows of his cheeks looked like deep holes.
 
‘What are they fighting for?’ Tim asked, instinctively dropping his voice.
 
‘Every sunset they fight in the same way.’
 
‘But why?’
 
‘Tenacity . . . fight to the death. . . . Sometimes goes on all night,’ the old man muttered. His voice trailed off.
 
‘What does it all mean?’ Tim asked, but Dangerfield had drifted back into sleep. The question faded unanswered into the darkness.
 
For an hour, the old man slept undisturbedly. Then he be came restless, throwing off his blanket and tearing open his shirt, although it had grown chilly in the room. Tossing on the bed, he clawed repeatedly at his chest, coughing and groaning.
 
Bending over him anxiously, Tim noticed a patch of dis coloured skin under one of the sick man’s ribs. A small red spot was growing rapidly in size. As Tim stared, the spot reddened perceptibly, lapping at the surrounding grey flesh. He made to touch it and then thought better of it.
 
Dangerfield groaned and cried; Tim caught his wrist help lessly, steadying him against a crisis he did not understand. The growing patch on the chest formed a dark centre like a storm cloud. It oozed, then erupted thick blood, which trailed round the cage of the ribs to soak into the blanket below. In the middle of the bloody crater, something moved.
 
A flat armoured head appeared. A small brown insect—it resembled a caterpillar larva—heaved itself into sight, to lie exhausted on the discoloured flesh. Overcoming his disgust, Tim pulled a specimen jar from his pack and imprisoned the larva in it.
 
‘I don’t doubt that that’s what Dangerfield calls a fiffln,’ he said. He discovered his hands were shaking. Sickly, he forced himself to disinfect and dress the hermit’s wound. He was still bending over the bed when Craig came in to relieve him, carrying a tape recorder. Tim explained what had happened and staggered into the open air.
 
Outside, in the darkness, the five cayman-heads still fought their intermittent battle. On every plane, Tim thought, endless, meaningless strife continuing; strife and life—synonymous; he wanted to stop trembling.
 
* * * *
 
The dead hour before the dawn: the time, on any planet in the universe, when the pulse of life falters before quickening. Craig, walking a little stiffly, entered the overlander with his tape recorder under one arm. Setting it down, he put coffee on the hot-point, rinsed his face with cold water, and roused the two sleepers.
 
‘We shall be busy today,’ he said, patting the recorder. ‘We now have plenty of data on Kakakakaxo to work on—very dubious material, I might add. I recorded a long talk with Dangerfield, which I want you to hear.’
 
‘How is he?’ Tim asked as he slipped on his tunic.
 
‘Physically, not in bad shape. Mentally, pretty sick. He’s a manic-depressive, I should say. Suddenly he is chummy and communicative, then he’s silent and hostile. An odd creature. . . . Not that you’d expect other than oddity after twenty years in this stagnation.’
 
‘And the fiffin?’
 
‘Dangerfield thinks it is the larval stage of a dung beetle, and says they bore through anything. He has had them in his legs before, but this one only just missed his lungs. The pain must have been intense, poor fellow. I gave him a light hypalgesic and questioned him before its effect wore off.’
 
Barney brought the boiling coffee off the stove, pouring it expertly into three beakers.
 
‘All set to hear the play-back,’ he said, lighting a mescahale.
 
Craig switched the recorder on. The reels turned slowly, re-creating his voice and Dangerfield’s. Barney and Tim sat down to listen: Craig remained standing.
 
‘Now that you are feeling better,’ Craig-on-tape said, ‘perhaps you could give me a few details about life on Kakakakaxo. How much of the language of these so-called pygmies have you been able to pick up? And just how efficiently can they communicate with each other?’
 
A long silence followed before Dangerfield replied.
 
‘They’re an old race, the pygmies,’ he said at length. ‘Their language has gradually worn down, like an old coin, I’ve picked up all I can in twenty-odd years, but you can take it from me that most of the time, when they sound as if they’re talking, they’re just making noises. Nowadays, their language only expresses a few basic attitudes. Hostility. Fear. Hunger. Determination....’
 
‘What about love?’ Craig prompted.
 
‘I never heard one of them mention the subject. . . . They’re very secretive about sex; I’ve never seen ‘em doing it, and you can’t tell male from female. They just lay their eggs in the river mud. . . . What was I saying? ... Oh yes, about their manner of speech. You’ve got to remember, Hodges, that I’m the only human—the only one—ever to master this clicking they do. When my first would-be rescuers asked me what the natives called this place, I said “kakakakaxo”, and now Kakakakaxo it is; that’s the name on the star charts and I put it there. It used only to be called Cassivelaunus I. But I made a mistake, as I found later. “Kakakakaxo” is the pygmy answer to the question, “Where is this place?”; it means “where we die, where our elders died”. That’s funny, isn’t it?’
 
‘Have you been able to explain to them where you came from?’
 
‘That’s a bit difficult for them to grasp. They’ve settled for “Beyond the ice”.’
 
‘Meaning the glaciers to the north and south of this equa torial belt?’
 
‘Yes; that’s why they think I’m a god, because only gods can live beyond the ice. The pygmies know all about the glaciers. I’ve been able to construct a bit of their history from similar little items------’
 
‘That was one of the next things I was going to ask you about,’ Craig-on-tape said, as Barney-in-the-flesh handed round more coffee to the other listeners.
 
‘The pygmies are an ancient race,’ old Dangerfield said. ‘They’ve no written history, of course, but you can tell they’re old by their knowing about the glaciers. How would equatorial creatures know about glaciers, unless their race survived the last Ice Age? Then this ornamented cliff in which many of them live . . . You’ve seen it, I suppose—sort of temple—they could build nothing like that now. They haven’t the skill. I had to help them build this hut. Their ancestors must have been really clever; these contemporary generations are just decadent.’
 
After a brief silence, Craig’s voice came sceptically from the loudspeaker: ‘We had an idea that the temple might have been built by another, vanished race. Any opinions on that?’
 
‘You’ve got the wrong end of the stick, Hodges. The pyg mies look on this temple as sacred; somewhere in the middle of it is what they refer to as “the Tomb of the Old Kings”, and even I have never been allowed in there. They wouldn’t behave like that if the place hadn’t a special significance for them.’
 
‘Do they still have kings now?’
 
‘No. They don’t have any sort of rule now, except each man for himself. These five of them fighting outside the hut, for instance; there’s nobody to stop them, so they’ll go on until they are all dead.’
 
‘Why should they fight over the pelts?’
 
‘It’s a custom, that’s all. They do it every night; sometimes one of them wins quickly, and then it’s all over. They sacrifice their slaves in the day and squabble over their bodies at night.’
 
‘Can you tell me why they attach such importance to these little animals—their slaves, as you call them? The relation ship between pygmies and slaves has its puzzling aspects.’
 
‘Oh, they don’t attach much importance to the slaves. It’s just that they make a habit of catching them in the forest, since they regard the pekes and bears as a menace to them; certainly their numbers have increased noticeably since I’ve been here.’
 
‘Hm. I don’t understand why the pygmies don’t kill them. And why do they always keep the two groups separately? Anything significant in that?’
 
‘Why should there be? The pekes and bears are supposed to fight together if they are allowed to intermingle, but whether or not that’s true, I can’t say. You mustn’t expect reasons for everything these pygmies do ... I mean, they’re not rational in the way a man is.’
 
‘As an ecologist, I find there is generally a reason for every thing, however obscure that reason may be.’
 
‘You do, do you?’ The hermit’s tone was pugnacious. ‘If you want a reason, you’d better go and find one. All I’m say ing is that in nineteen years here, I haven’t found one. These pygmies just go by—well, instinct or accident, I suppose. . . . Look, it’s no good staring at me with one eyebrow cocked. I don’t like your superior ways, whether you’re a good doctor or not. I thought you’d come here to make a solid.’
 
‘You were saying the pygmies were not rational.’
 
‘Nor they are. They’re not like Earth animals or Earth men. They’re living automatically on past glory. You can’t do any thing with ‘em. I’ve tried. At first I thought I was getting somewhere. At least they acknowledged my authority. . . . It’s a terrible thing to grow old. Look at my hands-----’
 
Craig reached forward and switched the recorder off. He lit a mescahale and looked searchingly at Barney and Tim. Outside, beyond their heads, he could see the first light pen cilling in the outlines of trees.
 
‘That’s about all that’s relevant,’ he said. ‘The rest of Dangerfield’s remarks were mainly autobiographical.’
 
‘What do you make of it, Craig?’ Barney Brangwyn asked.
 
They heard the first weaver birds wake and cry in the trees as Craig replied.
 
‘Before Dangerfield crashed on Kakakakaxo, he was a sales man, a refrigerator salesman, I believe, hopping from one frontier planet to another. He was untrained as an observer.’
 
‘That’s so,’ Barney agreed. ‘You obviously feel as I do: that he has misinterpreted just about everything he has seen, which is easy enough to do on a strange planet, even if you are emotionally balanced. Nothing in his statement can be trusted; it’s useless, except perhaps as case history.’
 
‘I wouldn’t go so far as to say that,’ Craig remarked, with his usual caution. ‘It’s untrustworthy, yes, but not useless. For instance, he gives us several leads-----’
 
‘Sorry, but I’m adrift,’ Tim Anderson said, getting up and pacing behind his chair. ‘Why should Dangerfield be so wrong? Most of what he said sounded logical enough to me. Even if he had no anthropological or ecological training to begin with, he’s had plenty of time to learn.’
 
‘True, Tim, true,’ Craig agreed. ‘Plenty of time to learn correctly or to learn wrongly. I’m not trying to pass judgement on Dangerfield, but as you know there is hardly a fact in the universe which is not open to two or more interpretations. Dangerfield’s attitude to the pygmies is highly ambivalent, a classical love-hate relationship. He wants to think of them as mere animals, because that would make them less something to be reckoned with; at the same time, he wants to think of them as intelligent beings with a great past, because that makes their acceptance of him as their god the more impressive.’
 
‘And which are the pygmies in reality, animals or intelligent beings?’ Tim asked.
 
Craig smiled.
 
“That is where our powers of observation and deduction come in,’ he said.
 
The remark irritated Tim. Both Craig and Barney could be very uninformative. He turned to leave the overlander, to get away from them both and think things out for himself. As he went out, he remembered the jar with the fiffin larva in it; he had forgotten to place it in the overlander’s tiny lab. Not wishing to give Craig cause for complaint, Tim slipped it in now.
 
Two jars were already clipped in the rack above the lab bench. Tim picked them up and examined them with interest. They contained two dead tapeworms; by the labels on the jars, he saw that Craig had extracted them from the entrails of the animals sacrificed the afternoon before. The cestodes, one of which came from the peke, one from the little bear, were identical: white tapes some twenty-four inches long, with suckers and hooks at the head end. Tim stared at them with interest before leaving the overlander.
 
Outside, the dawn was seeping through the thick trees. He drew the cold air down into his lungs; it was still flavoured with fish. The weaver birds were beginning to call or preen drowsily overhead. A few pygmies were about, moving slug gishly in the direction of the river, presumably in search of breakfast. Tim stood there, shivering slightly with the cold, thinking of the oddity of two diverse species harbouring the same species of tapeworm.
 
He moved into the clearing. The night-long fight over the dead animals was ended. Of the five pygmies involved, only one remained alive; it lay with the gutted bear in its jaws, unable to move away for its injuries. Three of its legs had been bitten off. Tim’s horror and compunction dissolved as he saw the whole situation sub specie aetemitatis, with cruelty and kindness as mere facets of blind law, with pain and death an inevitable concomitant of life; perhaps he was acquiring something of Craig’s outlook.
 
With a sudden inspiration, Tim picked up three of the dead pygmies, shouldered them, and, staggering slightly under their combined weight, carried them back to the overlander. At the door, he met Craig about to take some breakfast over to Dangerfield.
 
‘Hello,’ Craig exclaimed cordially. ‘Bringing home the lunch?’
 
‘I thought I’d do a little dissection,’ Tim said guardedly. ‘Just to see how these critters work.’
 
But once in the lab with his burden, he merely donned rubber gloves and slit open the pygmies’ stomachs rapidly one by one, paying attention to nothing else. Removing the three intestinal sacs, he found that two of them were badly damaged by worms. Soon he had uncovered half a dozen roundworms, pink in coloration and still alive; they made vigorous attempts with their vestigial legs to climb from the crucible in which he placed them.
 
He went excitedly in to Barney Brangwyn to report his findings. Barney was sitting at the table, manipulating metal rods.
 
‘This contradicts most of the laws of phylogeny,’ Tim said, peeling off his gloves. ‘According to Dangerfield, the pekes and bears both are recent arrivals on the evolutionary scene here: yet their endoparasites, which Craig has preserved in the lab, are well adapted to their environment inside the creatures, and in all respects resemble the ancient order of tapeworms para sitic in man. The roundworms from the cayman-heads, on the other hand, bear all the marks of being recent arrivals; they are still something more than virtual egg-factories, they retain traces of a previous more independent existence—and they cause unnecessary damage to their host, which is always a sign that a suitable status quo has yet to be reached between host and parasite.’
 
Barney raised his great bushy eyebrows approvingly and smiled at the eagerness on Tim’s face.
 
‘Very interesting indeed,’ he said. ‘What now, Doctor Anderson?’
 
Tim grinned, struck a pose, and said, in a creditable imita tion of Craig’s voice, ‘Always meditate upon all the evidence, and especially upon those things you do not realize are evidence.’
 
‘Fair enough,’ Barney agreed, smiling. ‘And while you’re meditating, come and give me a hand on the roof with this patent fishing-rod I’ve made.’
 
‘Another of your crazy ideas, Barney? What are you up to now?’
 
‘We’re going hunting. Come on! Your worms will keep.’
 
Getting up, he produced a long, telescopic rod which Tim recognized as one of their spare, collapsible aerials. The last and smallest section was extended, and to it Barney had just finished tying a sharp knife.
 
‘It looks like a gadget for shaving by remote control,’ Tim commented.
 
‘Then appearances are deceptive. I’m still hankering after catching myself one of the local pets, without getting eaten at the same time.’
 
Climbing up the stepped pole that led into the tiny radio-room, Barney undogged the circular observation dome which gave an all-round view of their surroundings. With Tim fol lowing closely, he swung himself up and on to the roof of the overlander. He crawled forward on hands and knees.
 
‘Keep down,’ he muttered. ‘If possible, I’d like this act of folly to go unobserved.’
 
Under a gigantic tree which spread its boughs over them, they were well concealed. Cassivelaunus was only just break ing through low cloud, and the clearing below was still fairly silent. Lying flat on his stomach, Barney pulled out the sections of aerial until he had a rod several yards long. Steadying this weapon with Tim’s aid, he pushed it forward.
 
The end of it reached to the nearest pygmy shelter. Outside the shelter, the two captive animals sat up, scratched, and watched with interest as the knife descended. Its blade hovered over the bear, shifted, and began rubbing gently back and forth across the thong which secured the little animal. In a moment, the thong was severed.
 
The bear was free. It looked owlishly about, hardly daring to move, and undecided as to what should happen next. It scratched its yellow poll in a parody of bewilderment. The neighbouring peke clucked encouragingly at it. A procession of pygmies appeared among the trees some distance away. Hearing them, the bear was spurred into action.
 
Grasping the aerial in its little black hands, the bear swarmed nimbly up it. It jumped on to the overlander roof and stood facing the men, apparently without fear. Barney retracted the aerial as Tim made coaxing noises. Unfortun ately, this manoeuvre had been glimpsed by the returning pygmies. A clacking and growling began and swelled in volume. Other pygmies emerged from their shelters, scuttling towards the overlander and staring up.
 
The line of cayman-heads emerging from the forest wore the look of tired hunters, returning with the dawn. Over their shoulders, trussed with crude thongs, lay freshly captured bears and pekes, defeated by their opponents’ superior turn of speed. These pygmies unceremoniously dropped their burdens and scuttled at a ferocious pace to the P.E.S.T. vehicle.
 
Alarmed by the sudden commotion, the weavers poured from their treetop homes, screeching.
 
‘Let’s get in,’ Barney said hastily.
 
Picking up the little bear, which offered no resistance, he swarmed down inside the overlander, closely followed by Tim.
 
At first, the creature was overcome by its new surroundings. It stood on the table and rocked piteously from side to side. Recovering, it accepted milk and chattered to the two men vivaciously. Seen close, it bore little resemblance to a bear, except for its fur covering. It stood upright as the pygmies did, attempting to comb its bedraggled fur with its fingers. When Tim proffered his pocket-comb, it used that gratefully, wrench ing diligently at the knots in its long coat, which was still wet with dew.
 
‘Well, it’s male, it’s intelligent, it’s quite a little more fetch ing than its overlords,’ commented Tim. ‘I hope you won’t mind my saying so, Barney, but you have got what you wanted at considerable cost. The wolves are at the door howling for our blood.’
 
Looking through the window over Tim’s shoulder, Barney saw that the pygmies, in ever-growing numbers, were surround ing the overlander, waving their claws, snapping their jaws. Their ire was roused. They looked, in the blue light, at once repulsive, comic, and malign. Barney thought to himself, ‘I’m getting to hate those squalid bastards; they’ve neither mind nor style!’
 
Aloud he said, ‘Too bad we’ve attracted so much attention. Evidently we have offended against a local law of property, if not propriety. Until they cool down, Craig’s return is blocked; he’ll have to tolerate Daddy Dangerfield for a while.’
 
Tim did not reply; before Craig returned, there was some thing else he wished to do. But first he had to get away from the overlander.
 
He stood uncertainly behind Barney’s back, as the latter lit a mescahale and turned his attention again to his new pet. Seizing the chance, Tim climbed up into the radio nest un observed, opened the dome, and stood once more on the roof of the overlander. Catching hold of an overhanging bough of the big tree, he pulled himself into it; working his way along, screened from the clacking mob below, he got well away from them before dropping down from a lower branch on to clear ground. Then he walked briskly in the direction of the cliff temple.
 
* * * *
 
Dangerfield switched the projector off. As the colours died, he turned eagerly to Craig Hodges.
 
‘There!’ he exclaimed, with pride. ‘What do you think of that?’
 
Craig stared at him. Though his chest was still bandaged, the hermit moved about easily. Modern healing treatments had speeded his recovery; he looked ten years younger than the old man who had yesterday suffered from fiffins. The excitement of the film he had just been showing had brought a flush to his cheeks.
 
‘Well, what do you think of it?’ he repeated, impatiently.
 
‘I’m wondering what you think of it,’ Craig said.
 
Some of the animation left Dangerfield. He looked round the stuffy confines of his hut, as if seeking a weapon. His jaw set.
 
‘You’ve no respect,’ he said. ‘I took you for a civilized man, Hodges. But you’ve no respect, no reverence; I can tell by your tone of voice; you persist in trying to insult me in under hand ways. Even the Droxy solid makers recognized me for what I am.’
 
‘You mean for what you like to think you are,’ Craig said, rising. Dangerfield swung a heavy stick. Craig brought up his arm in an instinctive gesture of protection. The blow landed close to his elbow. He seized the stick, wrenching it from Dangerfield’s grasp and tossing it out of the door.
 
The two men stood confronting each other. Dangerfield’s gaze wavered, and he turned away.
 
‘You insult me! You think I’m mad!’ he muttered.
 
‘Certainly your sanity is not a type that appeals to me,’ Craig said.
 
He left the hut. Dangerfield sank into a chair.
 
Craig walked briskly across the clearing. The first indication Barney had of his return was when the besieging pygmies set up an increased noise outside. Looking through the windows of the overlander, Barney could see Craig approaching; he drew his blaster, alert for trouble. The cayman-heads were still in an aggressive mood.
 
Craig never hesitated. As he drew nearer, part of the rabble detached itself from the overlander and moved towards him, jaws creaking open. He ignored them. Without slackening his stride, he pushed between their scaly green bodies. Barney stood rigid with apprehension; he knew that if one of the pygmies moved to the attack, Craig would be finished. The mob would swarm over him before anyone could save him.
 
But the cayman-heads merely croaked excitedly as Craig passed. Jostling, shuffling their paws in the dirt, they let him get by. He mounted the steps of the overlander and entered unmolested.
 
The two men faced each other, Craig reading something of the relief and admiration on Barney’s face.
 
‘They must have guessed how stringy I’d taste,’ he remarked; and that was all that was said.
 
He turned his attention to Barney’s bear-creature, already christened Fido. The animal chattered perkily as Barney explained how he got it.
 
‘I’ll swear Fido has some sort of embryo language,’ Barney said. ‘In exchange for a good rub down with insecticide, he has let me examine his mouth and throat. Appearances sug gest he’s well enough equipped for speech. His I.Q.’s in good trim, too. Fido’s quite a boy.’
 
‘Show him how to use a pencil and paper, and see what he makes of it,’ Craig suggested, stroking the little creature’s yellow crest.
 
As Barney did so, he asked Craig what had kept him so long with Dangerfield.
 
‘I was beginning to think the lost race of Kakakakaxo had got you,’ he said, grinning.
 
‘Nothing so interesting,’ Craig said, ‘although it has been an instructive session. Incidentally, I think we have an enemy in Dangerfield; he resents having had to accept our help; it lessens his feeling of superiority. He has been showing me a solid intended to impress me with the greatness of Dangerfield.’
 
‘A documentary?’
 
‘Anything but. A squalid solid made by Melmoth Solids Studios on Droxy, and supposedly based on the old boy’s life. They presented him with a copy of it, and a viewer, as a souvenir. It’s called “Curse of the Crocodile Men”.’
 
‘Ye Gods!’ Barney exclaimed. ‘I mustn’t miss that when it’s on circuit again! I’ll bet you found it instructive.’
 
‘In many ways, it was instructive,’ Craig said. ‘The script writers and director spent two days—just two days!—here on Kakakakaxo, talking to Dangerfield and “soaking up atmo­sphere”, so-called, before returning to Droxy to cook up their own ideas on the subject. No other research was done.’
 
Barney laughed briefly. ‘It sounds like that sort of thing. Who gets the girl?’
 
‘There is a girl, of course, and Dangerfield gets her. She’s a coy blonde stowaway on his spaceship. You know.’
 
‘I know. Now tell me why you found it instructive.’
 
‘It was all oddly familiar. After the usual preliminaries— spectacular spaceship crash on mountain-side, etcetera—a Tarzan-like Dangerfield is shown being captured by the bear-race, who stand six feet high and wear tin helmets, so help me. Dangerfield could not escape because the blonde twisted her ankle in the crash. You know how blondes are in solids.
 
‘The pekes, for simplicity’s sake, never appear. The bears are torturing our hero and heroine to death when the Croco dile Men raid the place and rescue him. The Crocodile Men are Melmoth’s idea of our cayman-headed pals outside.’
 
‘Stop giving me the trailer,’ Barney said, feigning suspense. ‘Get on with the plot. I want to know how the blonde makes out.’
 
‘The Crocodile Men arrive in time to save her from a fate worse than a sprained ankle. And here’s an interesting point— these Crocodile Men, according to the film, are a proud and ancient warrior race, come down in the world through the encroachment of the jungle. When they get Dangerfield back to their village by the river, they don’t like him. They, too, are about to put him to death and ravage the blonde when he saves the leader’s son from foot-rot or something equally decisive. From then on, the tribe treats him like a god, builds him a palace and all the rest of it.’
 
‘To think I missed it! It sounds a real classic!’ Barney cried, overdoing the sham disappointment. ‘Perhaps we can get Dangerfield to give a matinee tomorrow. I can see how such a bit of personal aggrandizement would be dear to his heart.’
 
‘It was very sad “B” Feature stuff,’ Craig said. ‘Nothing rang true. False dialogue, false settings. Even the blonde wasn’t very attractive.’
 
‘You don’t surprise me,’ Barney said. He sat silent for a minute, looking rather puzzledly into space, tweaking his beard. ‘But it’s odd that, considering this hokum was cooked up on Droxy, it all tallies surprisingly well in outline with what Dangerfield told you last night about the great past of the cayman-heads, their decline, and so on.’
 
‘Exactly!’ Craig agreed with satisfaction. ‘Don’t you see what that means, Barney? Nearly everything Dangerfield knows, or believes he knows, comes from a hack solid shot in a Droxy studio, rather than vice versa.’
 
They stared at one another with slowly growing amusement. Into both their minds, like the faint sound of a hunter’s horn, came the reflection that all human behaviour, ultimately, is inexplicable; even the explicable is a mystery.
 
‘Now you see why he shied away from us so violently at our first meeting,’ Craig said. ‘He’s got almost no first-hand in formation on conditions here because he is afraid to go out looking for it. Knowing that, he was prepared to face Droxy film people—who would only be after a good story—but not scientists, who would want hard facts. Once I had him cornered, of course, he had to come out with what little he’d got, presumably hoping we would swallow it as the truth and go.’
 
Barney made clucking noises. ‘He’s probably no longer fit to remember what is truth, what lies. After nineteen years alone here the old boy must be quietly crazy.’
 
‘Put the average person, with the mental conflicts to which we are all prey, away on an unlovely planet like Kakakakaxo for nineteen years,’ Craig said, ‘and he will inevitably finish as some sort of fantasist. I don’t say he’ll be insane, for a human mind is very resilient, but his realities will be those that make his existence tolerable.
 
‘Fear has worked steadily on Dangerfield all this time. He’s afraid of people, afraid of the cayman-heads, the Crocodile Men. He takes refuge from his terrors in fantasy. He’s become a “B” feature god. And you couldn’t budge him off the planet because he realizes subconsciously that reality would then catch up with him. He has no choice but to remain here, in a place he loathes.’
 
Barney stood up.
 
‘Okay, doctor,’ he said. ‘Diagnosis accepted. Brilliant field work, my congratulations. But—all we have collected so far are phantoms. Tell me where exactly P.E.S.T. work stands after you’ve proved the uselessness of our main witness. Presumably, at a standstill?’
 
‘By no means,’ Craig said. He pointed to Fido. The little bear was sitting quietly on the table cuddling the pencil.
 
He had drawn a crude picture on the paper. It depicted a room in which a bear and peke were locked in each other’s arms, as if fighting.
 
* * * *
 
A few minutes later, when Craig had gone into the labora tory with an assortment of coleoptera and anoplura culled from Dangerfield’s hut, Barney saw the old hermit himself coming across to them, hobbling rapidly among the pygmy shelters with the aid of a stick. Barney called to Craig.
 
Craig emerged from the lab with a curious look on his face, at once pleased and secretive.
 
‘Those three pygmy carcasses which Tim brought into the lab,’ he said. ‘I presume Tim cut them up—it certainly doesn’t look like your work. Did he say anything to you about them?’
 
Barney explained the point Tim had made about the round worms.
 
‘Is there anything wrong?’ he inquired.
 
‘No, nothing, nothing,’ Craig said in an odd voice, shaking his head. ‘And that’s all Tim said...Where is he now by the way?’
 
‘I’ve no idea, Craig; the boy’s getting as secretive as you are. He must have gone outside for a breath of fish. Shall I give him a call?’
 
‘Let’s tackle Dangerfield first,’ Craig said. ‘I wonder what he’s after now?’
 
They opened the door. Most of the cayman-heads had dis persed. The rest of them sped away when Dangerfield waved to them. The old man agitatedly refused to come into the overlander, his great nose standing out from his head like a parrot’s beak as he shook his head. He wagged a finger angrily at them.
 
‘I always knew no good would come of your prying,’ he said. ‘It was foolish of me to condescend to have anything to do with you. Now that young fellow of yours is being killed by the pygmies, and serve him right, too. But goodness knows what they’ll do when they’ve tasted human flesh—tear us all apart, I shouldn’t wonder. I doubt if I’ll be able to stop them, for all my power over them.’
 
He had not finished speaking before Craig and Barney had leapt from the overlander.
 
‘Where’s Tim? What’s happened to him?’ Craig asked. ‘Tell us straightforwardly what you know.’
 
‘Oh, I expect it’ll be too late now,’ said Dangerfield. ‘I saw him slip into the cliff temple, the interfering young fool. Perhaps you will go away and leave me-----’
 
But the two P.E.S.T. men were already running across the clearing, scattering brilliant birds about their heads. They jumped the shelters in their path. As they neared the temple in the cliff, they heard the clacking of the cayman-head pack. When they reached the heavily ornamented doorway, they saw that it and the corridor beyond were packed tight with the creatures, all fighting to get farther into the cliff.
 
‘Tim!’ bawled Barney. ‘Tim! Are you there?’
 
The clacks and croaks died. The nearer cayman-heads turned to stare at the men, swinging their green snouts in quisitively round. In the silence, Barney shouted again, but no answer came. The pack continued its struggle to get into the temple.
 
‘We can’t massacre this lot,’ Craig said, glaring at the cay man-heads before them. ‘How’re we going to get in there to Tim?’
 
‘We can use the cry gas in the overlander!’ Barney said. ‘That will shift them.’ He doubled back to their vehicle, and in a minute brought it bumping and growling across the clear ing towards the temple. The high roof of the overlander snagged several branches, breaking the weavers’ carefully con structed roof and sending angry birds flying in all directions. As the vehicle lumbered up, Craig unstrapped an outside con tainer, pulling out a hose; the other end of it was already connected to internal gas tanks. Barney threw down two respirators. He emerged from the cab wearing one himself.
 
Donning his mask, Craig slung the spare over his arm and charged forward with the hose. The gas poured over the nearest cayman-heads, who fell back like magic, coughing and pawing at their goat-yellow eyes. The two men entered the temple; they moved down the corridor unopposed, impeded only by the bodies fighting to get out of their way. The croak ing was deafening; in the dark and mist, Craig and Barney could hardly see ahead.
 
The corridor changed into a pygmy-sized tunnel, working gently upwards through the mountain. The two ecologists had to struggle past kicking bodies.
 
The supply of cry gas gave out. Craig and Barney stopped, peering at each other in surprise and some apprehension.
 
‘I thought the gas tanks were full!’ Craig said.
 
‘They were. One of the cayman-heads must have bitten through the hose.’
 
‘Or Dangerfield cut it...’
 
Dropping the now useless hose, they ran forward. Their retreat was cut off: the cayman-heads at the mouth of the temple would have recovered by now, and be waiting for them. So they forged ahead, throwing off their respirators and pulling out blasters.
 
They turned a corner and stopped. This was the end of the trail. The tunnel broadened into a sort of ante-room, on the far side of which stood a wide wooden door. A group of cayman-heads had been scratching at this door; its panels were deeply marked by their claws. They turned and confronted the men. Tears, crocodile tears, stood in their eyes: a whiff of the gas had reached them, and served only to anger them. Six of them were there. They charged.
 
‘Get ‘em!’ Barney yelled.
 
The dim chamber twitched with blinding blue-white light. Blue hieroglyphs writhed on the walls. Acoustics, in the roar of the blasters, went crazy. But the best hand weapon has its limitations, and the cayman-heads had speed on their side. Terrifying speed. They launched themselves like stones from a sling.
 
Barney scarcely had time to settle one of them than another landed squarely on his stomach. For a small creature, it was unbelievably solid. Every claw dug a point of pain through Barney’s thick suit. He jerked his head back, falling backwards, bellowing, as the jaws gaped up to his face. Its grey tongue, its serried teeth, the stink of fish—he tried to writhe away from them as he fired the blaster against a leathery stomach. Even as he hit the ground, the creature fell from him, and in a dying kick knocked the weapon from his hand.
 
Before Barney could retrieve his blaster, two other assailants had landed on him, sending him sprawling. He was defenceless under their predatory claws.
 
The blue light leapt and crackled over him. An intolerable heat breathed above his cheek. The two cayman-heads rolled over to lie beside him, their bodies black and charred. Shakily, Barney stood up.
 
The wooden door had been flung open. Tim stood there, bolstering the blaster which had saved Barney’s life.
 
Craig had settled with his two attackers. They lay smoulder ing on the floor in front of him. He stood now, breathing deeply, with only a torn tunic sleeve to show for his trouble. The three men looked at each other, grimed and dishevelled. Craig was the first to speak.
 
‘I’m getting too old for this sort of lark,’ he said.
 
‘I thought we’d had it then; thanks for the Deus ex machina act, Tim,’ Barney said.
 
His beard had been singed, its edges turned a dusty brown. He felt his cheek tenderly where a blister was already forming. Sweat poured from him; the heat from the thermo-nuclear blasts had considerably raised the temperature in the ante room.
 
‘Why did I ever leave Earth?’ he growled, stepping over one of the scaly corpses. ‘To think I once turned down a safe job in a bank!’
 
‘You got yourself into a nasty spot,’ Craig said to Tim. The young man instantly became defensive.
 
‘I’m sorry you came in after me,’ he said. ‘I was safe enough behind this door. I’ve been doing a little research on my own, Craig—you’d better come and see this place for yourself, now that you’re here. I have discovered the Tomb of the Old Kings that Dangerfield told us about! You’ll find it explains quite a lot we did not know.’
 
‘How did you manage to get as far as this without the cayman-heads stopping you?’ Craig asked, still stern.
 
‘Most of them were clustered round the overlander calling for Barney’s blood when I entered. They only started creeping up on me when I was actually inside. Are you coming to view the Tomb or not?’
 
They entered. Tim barred the door behind them before picking out the details of the long room with his torch beam. The proportions of the place were agreeable. Despite its low roof, it was architecturally impressive. Its builders had known what they were doing. Decoration had been left at a minimum, except for the elaborate door arch and the restrained fan-vaulting of the ceiling. Attention was focused on a large catafalque, upon which lay a row of several sarcophagi. Everywhere was deep in dust, and the air tasted stale and heavy.
 
Tim pointed to the line of little coffins, which were embel lished with carvings.
 
‘Here are the remains of the Old Kings of Kakakakaxo,’ he said. ‘And although I may have made myself a nuisance, I think I can claim that with their aid I have solved the mystery of the lost race of this planet.’
 
‘Good!’ Craig exclaimed encouragingly. ‘I should be very interested to hear any deductions you have made.’
 
Tim looked at him penetratingly, suspecting sarcasm. Re assured, he continued.
 
‘The mystery is like a jigsaw puzzle of which we already possessed most of the pieces. Dangerfield supplied nearly all of them—but he had fitted them together upside down. You see, to start with, there is not one lost race but two.’
 
‘A nice build-up, Tim. Now let’s have some facts,’ Craig said.
 
‘You can have facts. I’m showing them to you. This temple—and doubtless others like it all over the planet—was hewn out of the rock by two races who have engraved their own likenesses on these sarcophagi. Take a look at them! Far from being lost, the races have been under our noses all the time: they are the beings we call the pekes and bears. Their portraits are on the sarcophagi and their remains lie inside. Their resemblance to Earth animals has blinded us to what they really are—the ancient top-dogs of Kakakakaxo.’
 
Tim paused for their approval.
 
‘I’m not surprised,’ Barney said, to Tim’s regret, turning from an inspection of the stone coffins. ‘The bear people are brighter than the cayman-heads. As I see it, the caymans are pretty stodgy reptiles whom nature has endowed with armour but precious little else. I had already decided that that was another thing Great God Dangerfield had garbled: far from being an ancient race, the caymans are neoteric, upstart usurpers who have only recently appeared to oust the peke and bear people.
 
‘Dangerfield said they know about the glaciers. Probably so. Probably they drifted down from the cold regions until the river brought them to these equatorial lands. As for the bear people—and I suspect the same goes for the pekes—their chatter, far from being the beginning of a language, is the decadent tail-end of one. They’re the ancient races, already in decline when the parvenu, pygmies descended on them and completed their disintegration.’
 
‘The helminthological evidence supports this theory,’ Tim said eagerly. He turned to Craig. ‘The cayman-heads are too recent to have developed their own peculiar cestodes; they were almost as much harmed by interior parasites, the round worms, as was Daddy by his fiffin. In a long-established host-parasite relationship, the amount of internal damage is minimal.’
 
‘As was the case with the peke and bear cestodes I un covered,’ Craig agreed.
 
‘Directly I saw these roundworms, I realized that Dangerfield’s claim that the pygmies were the ancient species and their “pets” the new might be the very reverse of the truth. I came over here hoping to find proof: and here it is.’
 
‘It was a good idea, Tim,’ Barney said heartily, ‘but you shouldn’t have done it alone—far too risky.’
 
‘The habit of secretiveness is catching,’ Tim said.
 
He looked challengingly at Craig, but the chief ecologist seemed not to have heard the remark. He marched to the door and put an ear to it. Barney and Tim listened too. The noise was faint at first; then it was unmistakable, a chorus of guttural grunts and croaks. The cry gas had dispersed. The pygmies were pressing back into the temple.
 
The noise took on weight and volume. It rose to a climax as claws struck the outside of the door. Craig stood back. The door shook. The cayman-heads had arrived in strength.
 
‘This is not a very healthy place for us,’ Craig said, turning back to the others. ‘Is there another way out?’
 
They moved down the long room. Its walls were blank. Behind them, the door rattled and groaned dangerously. At the far end of the chamber stood a screen. There was a narrow door behind it. Barney pushed the screen away and tried the latch. It would not open. With one thrust of his great shoul ders, Barney sent the door shattering back. Rusted hinges and lock left a red bitter powder floating in the air. Climbing over the door, they found themselves in a steep and narrow tunnel. They were forced to go in single file.
 
‘I should hate to be caught in here,’ Tim said. ‘Do you think the cayman-heads will dare to enter the tomb-room? They seem to regard it as sacred.’
 
‘Their blood’s up. A superstition may not bother them,’ said Barney.
 
‘What I still don’t understand,’ Tim said, ‘is why the cay man-heads care so much for the temple if it has nothing to do with them.’
 
‘You probably never will,’ Craig said. ‘The temple must be a symbol of their new dominance for them, and one man’s symbol is another man’s enigma. I can hear that door splinter ing; let’s get up this tunnel. It looks like a sort of priest’s bunk-hole—it must lead somewhere.’
 
One behind the other, Barney leading, they literally crawled along the shaft. It bore steadily upwards at an angle of forty-five degrees. They seemed to crawl forever. On all sides, the mountain made its presence felt, dwarfing them, threatening them, as if they were cestodes working their way up a vast alimentary canal.
 
The shaft at last turned upwards still more steeply. They had climbed no distance at this difficult angle when Barney stopped.
 
‘The way’s blocked!’ he exclaimed.
 
In the confined space, it sounded like a death sentence.
 
Tim shone his torch. The tunnel was neatly stoppered with a solid substance. ‘Rock fall!’ he whispered.
 
‘We can’t use a blaster on it in this space,’ Barney said, ‘or we’ll cook ourselves.’
 
Craig passed a knife forward.
 
‘Try the blockage with this,’ he said, ‘and see what it’s made of. Is it rock?’
 
The stopper flaked reluctantly as Barney scraped. They examined the flakes; Tim recognized them first.
 
‘This is guano—probably from bats!’ he exclaimed. ‘We must be very near the surface. Thank goodness for that!’
 
‘It’s certainly guano,’ Craig agreed, ‘but it’s almost as hard as stone with age. You can see that a limestone shell has formed over the bottom of it: it may be hundreds of years old. Which means there may be many feet of guano between us and the surface.’
 
‘Then we’ll have to dig through it,’ Barney said.
 
There was no alternative. It was an unpleasant task. The ill-smelling guano rapidly became softer as they dug upwards, until it reached the consistency of moist cake. They rolled lumps of it back between their knees, sending it bounding back, down into the mountain. It clung stickily to them, and emphasized the parallel between their situation and a cestode in an alimentary canal. They worked at it grimly, wishing they had kept the respirators.
 
Twenty-five feet of solid guano had to be tunnelled through before they struck air. Barney’s head and shoulders emerged into a small cave. A dog-like creature backed growling into the open and ran for safety. It had taken over the cave for a lair long after the bats had deserted it.
 
Barney climbed out and the other two followed, to stand blinking in the intense blue light. They were plastered with filth. Hardly uttering a word to each other, they left the cave and drew in great breaths of fresh air.
 
Trees and high bushes surrounded them. The ground sloped steeply down to the left. When they had recovered, they began to descend in that direction. They were high up the mountain­side; Cassivelaunus gleamed through the leaves about them.
 
‘Thank goodness there’s nothing else to keep us any longer on Kakakakaxo,’ Barney said at last. ‘We just file our report to P.E.S.T. H.Q., and we’re off. Dangerfield will be glad to see the back of us. I wonder how he’ll like the colonists? They’ll come flocking in once H.Q. gets our clearance. They’ll find a quiet little planet—there’s nothing here the biggest fool can’t handle.’
 
‘Except Dangerfield,’ Craig added.
 
‘The man with the permanent wrong end of the stick!’ Tim said, laughing. ‘He will probably see out his days selling the colonists signed picture postcards of himself.’
 
They emerged from the trees suddenly. Before them was a cliff, steep and bush-studded. The ecologists went to its edge and looked down.
 
A fine panorama stretched out before them. In the distance, perhaps fifty miles away, a range of snow-covered mountains seemed to hang suspended in the blue air. Much nearer at hand, winding between mighty stretches of jungle, ran the cold, wide river. On the river banks, the ecologists could see cayman-heads basking in the sun; in the water, others swam and dived, performing miracles of agility.
 
‘Look at them!’ Craig exclaimed. ‘They are really aquatic creatures. They’ve hardly had time to adapt properly to land life. The dominating factor of their lives remains—fish!’
 
‘They’ve already forgotten us,’ Barney said.
 
They could see the crude settlement was deserted. The overlander was partially discernible through the trees, but it took them an hour of scrambling down hazardous paths before they reached it. Never had the sight of it been more welcome.
 
Craig went round to look at the severed cry gas hose. It had been neatly chopped, as if by a knife. This was Dangerfield’s work; he had expected to trap them in the temple. There was no sign of the old man anywhere. Except for the melancholy captives, sitting at the end of their tethers, the clearing was deserted.
 
‘Before we go, I’m setting these creatures free,’ Barney said.
 
He ran among the shelters, slashing at the thongs with a knife, liberating the pekes and the bears. As soon as they found themselves loose, they banded together and trotted off into the jungle without further ado. In a minute they were gone.
 
‘Two more generations,’ Barney said regretfully, ‘and there probably won’t be a bear or a peke on Kakakakaxo alive out side a zoo; the colonists will make shorter work of them than the cayman-heads have. As for the cayman-heads, I don’t doubt they’ll only survive by taking to the rivers again.’
 
‘There’s another contradiction,’ Tim remarked thoughtfully, as they climbed into the overlander and Barney backed her through the trees. ‘Dangerfield said the peke and bear people fought with each other if they had the chance, yet they went off peacefully enough together—and they ruled together once, as the Tomb proves. Where does the fighting come in?’
 
‘As you say, Dangerfield always managed to grab the wrong end of the stick,’ Craig answered. ‘If you take the opposite end of what he told us, that’s likely to be the truth. He has always been too afraid of his subjects to go out and look for the truth.’
 
‘And I suppose he just doesn’t use his eyes properly,’ Tim remarked innocently.
 
‘None of us do,’ Craig said. ‘Even you, Tim!’
 
Barney laughed.
 
‘Here it comes,’ he said. ‘I warn you, Tim, the oracle is about to speak! In some ways you’re very transparent, Craig; I’ve known ever since we left the Tomb of the Old Kings that you had something up your sleeve and were waiting for an appropriate moment before you produced it.’
 
‘What is it, Craig?’ Tim asked curiously.
 
Barney let Fido out of the overlander; the little creature hared off across the clearing with one brief backward wave, running to catch up its fellows.
 
‘You were careless when you opened those three pygmies in the lab, Tim,’ Craig said gently. ‘I know that you were looking for something else, but if you had been less excited, you would have observed that the cayman-heads are parthenogenic. They have only one sex, reproducing by means of unfertilized eggs.’
 
Tim’s face was a study in emotion, then he said in a small voice, ‘How interesting! But does this revelation make any practical difference to the situation?’
 
Barney had no such inhibitions. He smote his forehead in savage surprise.
 
‘Ah, I should have seen it myself! Parthenogenic, of course! Self-fertilizing! It’s the obvious explanation of the lack of vanity or sexual inhibition which we noticed. I swear I would have hit on the answer myself, if I hadn’t been so occupied with Fido and Co.’
 
He climbed heavily into the driver’s seat, slamming the door. The air-conditioning sucked away the invading smell of fish at once.
 
‘Yes, you have an interesting situation on Kakakakaxo,’ Craig continued. ‘Try and think how difficult it would be for such a parthenogenic species to visualize a bisexual species like man. The concept would probably be beyond them; it is easier for us to visualize a four-dimensional race. Nevertheless, the cayman-heads managed to do something of the sort— they’re not so brainless as you may think, for all their limita tions. What is more, they grasped the one fatal weakness of the bisexual system: that if you keep the two sexes apart, the race dies out.
 
‘Without realizing clearly what they were doing, they did just that, separating male and female. That is how they man age to hold this place. Of course, no scheme is perfect, and quite a few of both sexes escaped into the forest to breed there.’
 
Barney revved the engine, moving the overlander forward, leaving Tim to ask the obvious question.
 
‘Yes,’ Craig said, ‘As Fido tried to explain to us with his drawing, the “bears” are the males, the “pekes” the females of one species. It just happens to be a dimorphous species, the sexes varying in size and configuration, or we would have guessed the truth at once. The cayman-heads, in their dim way, knew. They tackled the whole business of conquest in a new way that only a parthenogenic race would think of—they segregated the sexes. That is how they managed to supersede the intellectually superior peke-bear race: by applying the old law of “Divide and conquer” in a new way! I’m now trying to make up my mind whether that is crueller or kinder, in the long run, than slaughter. . . .’
 
Tim whistled.
 
‘So when Dangerfield thought the pekes and bears were fighting,’ he said, ‘they were really copulating! And of course the similar cestodes you found in their entrails would have put you on the right track; I ought to have twigged it myself!’
 
‘It must be odd to play God to a world about which you really know or care so little,’ Barney commented, swinging the big vehicle down the track in the direction of their space ship.
 
‘It must indeed,’ Craig agreed, but he was not thinking of Dangerfield.
 
* * * *
 
The old man hid behind a tree, silently watching the overlander leave. He shook his head sadly, braced himself, hobbled back to his hut. His servants would have to hunt in the jungles before he got today’s offering of entrails. He shivered as he thought of those two symbolic and steaming bowls. He shivered for a long time. He was cold; he was old; from the sky he had come; to the sky he would one day return. But before that, he was going to tell everyone what he really thought of them.
 
Going to tell them how he hated them.
 
How he despised them.
 
How he needed them.