The second gorilla made a hooing and hawing sound in Salsbury's face which made no sense to the man, though he could discern patterns to the speech. The smell that came from its mouth was bad enough to derail a train and corrode the locomotive into a pile of worthless scrap. He tried not to breathe until he saw the thing inhaling, then sucked in air before his atmosphere could be contaminated again.
As the two Tarzan movie rejects hooted at each other, he began to understand what a butterfly must feel like when picked up to be examined for the beauty of its wings. He didn't like the feeling one bit. If they were planning to rip him up and divide him for supper, he wished to hell they would get on with it. But they continued to stare where he dangled from the first beast's mitt. When he could take it no longer, he released a horrendous scream and began flailing at the same time, remembering from his judo combat knowledge that a good scream will often frighten the opponent bad enough to throw him off balance, as well as having a therapeutic effect on the screamer.
The gorilla holding him was not impressed by such tactics, however. Perhaps it knew judo too, he thought. It only snorted and batted at him with its free paw. The blow rattled his brains back and forth from side to side of his skull, left his teeth trembling in their sockets. He decided to just hang there and be an exhibit no matter how nerve-wracking that might be. It was safer.
A few minutes later, tired of examining him, the gorilla dropped him. The ground came up hard, but it was a welcome relief from the scrutiny he had just undergone. He came to his knees, spat out a little blood that was leaking from the gums around half the teeth in his mouth, grabbed handfuls of rocks to pull himself erect. While he was going through that tedious process, the two heavies stood and watched, blinking huge eyelids and showing fat, wet tongues now and again. They looked like two boys watching a housefly crawl about after they had torn off its wings.
Vic called them a string of foul names.
They didn't react.
As the world settled down and ceased the slightly nauseating wobble that had made the trees and rocks move around him in jerky circles, Salsbury looked for a way out of there. To his right, the path led down into the new valley. But he had a strong suspicion his brute friends had come that way, and he did not relish the opportunity to meet more of their kind. That left the path he had taken to get here. He could double back on it, perhaps leave it and pass the vacii search party coming up. He started back that way, walking backwards, smiling, trying to look nonchalant but not knowing what expression these creatures would take nonchalance for. The gorillas watched him stupidly, blinking their lids and yawning. When he was thirty feet away, he turned and ran.
It looked good. They might have brute strength, but he was the one with the brains, the cleverness. He could outwit them every time now that he had gotten a head start. He was thinking all sorts of glorious thoughts like that when one of the monsters went leaping past him, covering three times the ground Salsbury could manage in a single stride. Fifty feet along the path, it stopped and turned to face him, grinning so that its broad yellow teeth gleamed in the thin moonlight.
Salsbury turned and started back, came face to face with the second beast. It was grinning too.
He turned, jumped from the path into the ferns and rocks, ran a short distance and stopped to look back. The first gorilla was loping easily after him.
He felt like a mouse in cats' territory.
Desperately, he looked around for something to use as a weapon, wishing he had managed to recover his gun from the clearing before making his break. The bombs in the rucksack were useless, because he couldn't detonate them, and because a nuclear explosion would mean his death as well as theirs. A fist fight was out of the question. One blow to the jaw or chest of those monstrosities, and he would shatter every bone in his hand. He bent over and found some two and three pound rocks. He hefted one in each hand, threw them. One bounced off the beast's chest, the other off its shoulder.
It came on, oblivious of his attack.
He tossed six other stones before it was on top of him. It batted his last missile out of his hands, struck a blow alongside his head that sent him sprawling.
Victor started to get up, doggedly plotting more resistance, clutching at rocks to throw even as he used his hands to support himself. But before he was even properly on his feet, the jumbo slapped him again with a back of the hand blow across the seat of his pants and sent him crashing forward onto the ground again.
He laid still for a while, then got his feet under him, stood, feeling like a man three hundred and ten years old, turned in time to collect another paw in the chest that sent him down hard. Furious, he grabbed a rock, rolled, and threw it with all his strength. It bounced off the massive skull with a loud and hollow tok, but didn't fell the ogre. In fact, the thing didn't even stop grinning. It just waited until he was on his feet once more, then shoved him backwards so that he plopped hard on his behind.
At last, he got the point. He wasn't supposed to try to get away or to fight back. As long as he attempted either of these, he was a target for their blows, nothing more. He sat still and did not reach for anything to throw. A few minutes later, the gorilla nodded its head appreciatively, satisfied Salsbury had learned his lesson.
The other beast came up beside Salsbury's self-appointed keeper. They grumbled back and forth in low, guttural voices. When they made their mysterious decision, the keeper lifted Salsbury, slung the man beneath its hairy arm as if he were a babe, and loped back the path, back to the clearing where the other gorilla collected the gas pellet gun. Then, moving with a swift, jarring steadiness, they went down the trail into the new valley, where the trees once again grew thick over their heads, the floor beneath them smoother and less cluttered.
Half an hour later, they came out of the trees into a clearing before an impressive face of sheer rock that formed an unscalable wall of this side of the valley. Far overhead, the moon was half-hidden by the thrusting cliff top which looked, in silhouette, like a broken tooth. There was a fire going at the base of the wall, the flames spitting four feet or more into the cool night air. In the orange-red glow of the fire, Salsbury could see the gorilla settlement strung out along the cliff and built up the side of it, utilizing the caves as well as crude mud and wood buildings constructed to use the cliff as their fourth wall. He raised his appraisal of the gorillas. They were not merely beasts, but in the first intriguing stages of civilization. In this time line, perhaps man had not developed intelligence, while creatures of this sort had. Not much intelligence. And of a distinctly ugly hostile nature.
Then he was impressed with a thought that seemed absurd yet realistic, and surveyed his captors again. He had been calling them gorillas because, in the darkness and from the manner in which they acted and moved, that was the most appropriate comparison he could make. Now in the light of the campfire, he could see that he had been wrong; these were not men, surely, but neither were they apes. They did not, after all, have truly simian features. Their faces were broad, heavy, with none of the typical monkey sharpness. As he looked at them, he fancied there really were more human genes in them than animal. They were most likely a freak of evolution. In his world, his probability, they had not come along. Or, if they had, their line of intelligence was defeated by Cro-Magnon man, and they had become extinct. Here, they were going to flourish one day, possibly even reach the point of a highly technical civilization.
Salsbury's keeper dropped him in front of the fire with the same brutish carelessness he had used earlier. He called out to a sentry located ten feet above the ground in a dark nook of stone. The guard came down in a single leap that would have shattered a man's ankles, bounded to them and jabbered with the two with Salsbury. He took his turn staring at the man, prodding him with stubby fingers, breathing in his face and pitting his skin (or so it seemed to Salsbury) with his halitosis. When he was finished, he grunted some more with the other two. Then the keeper picked Victor up again, and they continued their hairy, smelly odyssey.