“I ain’t ignorant,” snapped Graypate aloud.
“No need to reply vocally. I receive your thoughts exactly as you receive mine. Your responses are much stronger than the boy’s, and I can understand you easily.”
“Humph!” said Graypate to the world at large.
“I have been anxious to find an adult because the children can tell me little. I would like to ask questions. Do you feel inclined to answer questions?”
“It depends,” answered Graypate, becoming leery.
“Never mind. Answer them if you wish. My only desire is to help you.”
“Why?” asked Graypate, searching around for a percentage.
“We need intelligent friends.”
“Why?”
“Our numbers are small, our resources poor. In visiting this world and the misty one we’ve come near to the limit of our ability. But with assistance we could go farther. I think that if we could help you a time might come when you could help us.”
Graypate pondered it cautiously, forgetting that the inward workings of his mind were wide open to the other. Chronic suspicion was the keynote of his thoughts, suspicion based on life experiences and recent history. But inward thoughts ran both ways, and his own mind detected the clear sincerity in Pander’s.
So he said. “Fair enough. Say more.”
“What caused all this?” inquired Pander, waving a limb at the world.
“War,” said Graypate. “The last war we’ll ever have. The entire place went nuts.”
“How did that come about?”
“You’ve got me there.” Graypate gave the problem grave consideration. “I reckon it wasn’t just any one thing; it was a multitude of things sort of piling themselves up.”
“Such as?”
“Differences in people. Some were colored differently in their bodies, others in their ideas, and they couldn’t get along. Some bred faster than others, wanted more room, more food. There wasn’t any more room or more food. The world was full, and nobody could shove in except by pushing another out. My old man told me plenty before he died, and he always maintained that if folk had had the boss-sense to keep their numbers down, there might not-“
“Your old man?” interjected Pander. “Your father? Didn’t all this occur in your own lifetime?”
“It did not. I saw none of it. I am the son of the son of a survivor.”
“Let’s go back to the cave,” put in Speedy, bored with the silent contact-talk. “I want to show him our harp.”
They took no notice, and Pander went on, “Do you think there might be a lot of others still living?”
“Who knows?” Graypate was moody about it. “There isn’t any way of telling how many are wandering around the other side of the globe, maybe still killing each other, or starving to death, or dying of the sickness.”
“What sickness is this?”
“I couldn’t tell what it is called.” Graypate scratched his head confusedly. “My old man told me a few times, but I’ve long forgotten. Knowing the name wouldn’t do me any good, see? He said his father told him that it was part of the war, it got invented and was spread deliberately-and it’s still with us.”
“What are its symptoms?”
“You go hot and dizzy. You get black swellings in the armpits. In forty-eight hours you’re dead. Old ones get it first. The kids then catch it unless you make away from them mighty fast.”
“It is nothing familiar to me,” said Pander, unable to recognize cultured bubonic. “In any case, I’m not a medical expert.” He eyed Graypate. “But you seem to have avoided it.”
“Sheer luck,” opined Graypate. “Or maybe I can’t get it. There was a story going around during the war that some folk might develop immunity to it, durned if I know why. Could be that I’m immune, but I don’t count on it.”
“So you keep your distance from these children?”
“Sure.” He glanced at Speedy. “I shouldn’t really have come along with this kid. He’s got a lousy chance as it is without me increasing the odds.”
“That is thoughtful of you,” Pander put over softly. “Especially seeing that you must be lonely.”
Graypate bristled and his thought-flow became aggressive. “I ain’t grieving for company. I can look after myself, like I have done since my old man went away to curl up by himself. I’m on my own feet. So’s every other guy.”
“I believe that,” said Pander. “You must pardon me-I’m a stranger here myself. I judged you by my own feelings. Now and again I get pretty lonely.”
“How come?” demanded Graypate, staring at him. “You ain’t telling me they dumped you and left you, on your own?”
“They did.”
“Man!” exclaimed Graypate fervently.
Man! It was a picture resembling Speedy’s conception, a vision elusive in form but firm and human in face. The oldster was reacting to what he considered a predicament rather than a choice, and the reaction came on a wave of sympathy.
Pander struck promptly and hard. “You see how I’m fixed. The companionship of wild animals is nothing to me. I need someone intelligent enough to like my music and forget my looks, someone intelligent enough to-“
“I ain’t so sure we’re that smart,” Graypate chipped in. He let his gaze swing morbidly around the landscape. “Not when I see this graveyard and think of how it looked in granpop’s days.”
“Every flower blooms from the dust of a hundred dead ones,” answered Pander.
“What are flowers?”
It shocked the Martian. He had projected a mind-picture of a trumpet lily, crimson and shining, and Graypate’s brain had juggled it around, uncertain whether is were fish, flesh, or fowl.
“Vegetable growths, like these.” Pander plucked half a dozen blades of blue-green grass. “But more colorful, and sweet-scented.” He transmitted the brilliant vision of a mile-square field of trumpet lilies, red and glowing.
“Glory be!” said Graypate. “We’ve nothing like those.”
“Not here,” agreed Pander. “Not here.” He gestured toward the horizon. “Elsewhere may be plenty. If we got together we could be Company for each other, we could learn things from each other. We could pool our ideas, our efforts, and search for flowers far away-also for more people.”
“Folk just won’t get together in large bunches. They stick to each other in family groups until the plague breaks them up. Then they abandon the kids. The bigger the crowd, the bigger the risk of someone contaminating the lot.” He leaned on his gun, staring at the other, his thought-forms shaping themselves in dull solemnity. “When a guy gets hit, he goes away and takes it on his own. The end is a personal contract between him and his God, with no witnesses. Death’s a pretty private affair these days.”
“What, after all these years? Don’t you think that by this time the disease may have run its course and exhausted itself?”
“Nobody knows-and nobody’s gambling on it.”
“I would gamble,” said Pander.
“You ain’t like us. You mightn’t be able to catch it.”
“Or I might get it worse, and die more painfully.”
“Mebbe,” admitted Graypate, doubtfully. “Anyway, you’re looking at it from a different angle. You’ve been dumped on your ownsome. What’ve you got to lose?”
“My life,” said Pander.
Graypate rocked back on his heels, then said, “Yes, sir, that is a gamble. A guy can’t bet any heavier man that.” He rubbed his chin whiskers as before. “All right, all right, I’ll take you up on that. You come right here and live with us.” His grip tightened on his gun, his knuckles showing white. “On this understanding: The moment you feel sick you get out fast, and for keeps. If you don’t, I’ll bump you and drag you away myself, even if that makes me get it too. The kids come first, see?”
The shelters were far roomier than the cave. There were eighteen children living in them, all skinny with their prolonged diet of roots, edible herbs, and an occasional rabbit. The youngest and most sensitive of them ceased to be terrified of Pander after ten days. Within four months his slithering shape of blue ropiness had become a normal adjunct to their small, limited world.