“I met your uncle,” he told Eric, “about a dozen auld lang synes ago, when he came to us on a trading expedition—back in our burrows, I mean. A fine man, your uncle, very progressive. He’s attending our secret meetings regularly, and there’s going to be an important place for him in the great burrows we will dig, in the new world we are making. He reminds me a lot of your father. But so do you, my boy, so do you.”
“Did you know my father?”
Arthur the Organizer smiled and nodded. “Very well. He could have been a great man. He gave his life for the Cause. Who among us will ever forget Eric the—the—Eric the Storekeeper or something, wasn’t it?”
“-The Storeroom-Stormer. His name was Eric the Storeroom-Stormer.”
“Yes, of course. Eric the Storeroom-Stormer. An unforgettable name with us, and an unforgettable man. But that’s another story; we’ll talk about it some other time. You’ll have to be getting back to your uncle very soon.” He picked up a flat board covered with odd markings and studied it with his glow lamp.
“How do you like that?” one of the men working with the unfamiliar materials muttered to his neighbor. “You ask him his people, and he says, ‘Mankind.’ Mankind!”
The other man chuckled. “A front-burrow tribe. What the hell do you expect—sophistication? Each and every front-burrow tribe calls itself Mankind. As far as these primitives are concerned, the human race stops at their outermost burrow. Your tribe, my tribe—you know what they call us? Strangers. In their eyes, there’s not too much difference between us and the Monsters.”
“That’s what I mean. They’re narrow-minded savages—practically Wild Men. Who needs them?”
Arthur the Organizer glanced at Eric’s face. He turned sharply to the man who had spoken last.
“I’ll tell you who needs them, Walter,” he said. “The Cause needs them. If the front-burrow tribes are with us, it means our main lines of supply to Monster territory are kept open. But we need every fighter we can get, do matter how primitive. Every single tribe has to be with us if Men-Science is to be the dominant religion of the burrows, if we’re to avoid the fiasco of the last rising. We need front-burrow men for their hunting, foraging skills and back-burrow men for their civilized skills. We need everybody in this thing, especially now.”
The man called Walter put down his work and leaned against the wall. ”
And I’ll tell you who we need most,” he said. “Who we need a hell of a lot more than these front-burrow characters. I said they’re one step away from being Wild Men, and I’ll stick by what I said. But the Aaron People, if the Aaron People were with us…”
The Organizer’s face darkened. He seemed to be remembering one major plan that had gone awry. “Those snobs,” he muttered. “Those selfish, stuck-up bastards. Damn them. But listen, Walter. If you think there’s no difference between a front-burrow tribe and a bunch of Wild Men from the Outside, you go up to the Wild Men next time a mob of them comes through the burrows and try to start a conversation. You know what will happen?”
“He’ll be eaten raw,” one of the other men called out. “Torn to pieces and eaten raw. A handful of Walter the Weapon-Seeker for anyone who can grab.”
There was a grim laugh in which Eric joined after some uncertainty. He’d heard about the Wild Men, hordes who supposedly poured into the burrows at irregular intervals from some strange place called “the Outside,” undisciplined, slavering cannibals who used grunts in place of speech—but he’d always understood them to be merely the stuff of legend. If you were an Alien-Sciencer did you have to make believe that Wild Men really existed?
Real or legendary, though, to be compared with Wild Men was an ugly insult.
These arrogant back-burrowers with their ornamented straps and unmilitary manners! Men from different tribes sitting around and talking, when—if they had any sense of propriety at all—they should be killing each other!
And the Aaron People, who or what was this Aaron People, he wondered? A people referred to by these strutting, conceited, dressed-up pseudo-warriors as snobs and stuck-up bastards! He’d never heard of the Aaron people before. He wondered what they would be like.
Suddenly, the floor shook under him. He almost fell. He staggered back and forth, trying to grab at the spears in his back-sling. He finally got used to it, managed to find a solid footing in the upheaval. The spear he held vibrated in his hand.
From far away came a series of ear-splitting thumps. The floor swung to their rhythm. “What is it?” he cried, turning to Arthur. “What’s going on?”
“You’ve never heard a Monster walking before?” the Organizer asked him unbelievingly. “That’s right—this is your Theft, your first time out. It’s a Monster, boy: a Monster’s moving around in the Monster larder, doing whatever it is that Monsters do. They have a right, you know,” he added with a smile. “It’s their larder. We’re just visitors.”
Eric noticed that none of the others seemed particularly concerned. He drew a deep breath and reslung his spear. How the floor and the walls shook! What a fantastic, enormous creature that must be!
As an apprentice warrior, he had often stood with the rear-guard on the other side of the doorway to Monster territory while the band went in to steal for Mankind. A few times there had been heavy, thumping noises off in the distance, and the walls of the burrow had quivered slightly. But not like this. It had never been remotely as awesome as this.
He raised his eyes to the straight, flat ceiling of the burrow above them. He remembered the dark space further back stretching up limitlessly. “And this,” he said aloud. “This structure we’re in. What is this to them?”
Arthur the Organizer shrugged. “A piece of Monster furniture. Something they use for something or other. We’re in one of the open spaces they always leave in the bases of their furniture. Makes the furniture lighter, easier to move around, I guess.” He listened for a moment as the thumps drifted farther away and then died out. “Let’s get down to business. Eric, this is Walter the Weapon-Seeker. Walter the Weapon-Seeker of the Maximilian people. Walter, what do you have for Eric’s tribe—for, uh, for Mankind?”
“I hate to give anything even halfway good to a front-burrow tribe,” the squatting man muttered. “No matter how much you explain it to them, they always use it wrong, they botch it up every single time. Let’s see. This should be simple enough.”
He rummaged in the pile of strange stuff in front of him and picked up a small, red, jellylike blob. “All you do,” he explained, “is tear off a pinch with your fingers. Just a pinch at a time, no more. Then spit on it and throw it. After you spit on it, get it out of your hands fast. Throw it as fast and as far as you can. Do you think you can remember that?”
“Yes.” Eric took the red blob from him and stared at it in puzzlement. There was a strange, irritating odor: it made his nose itch slightly. “But what happens? What does it do?”
“That’s not your worry, boy,” Arthur the Organizer told him. “Your uncle will know when to use it. You have your third category Theft—a Monster souvenir that no one in your tribe has ever seen before. It should make them sit up and take notice. And tell your uncle to bring his band to my burrow three days—three sleep periods—from now. That will be the last time we meet before the rising. Tell him to bring them armed with every last spear they can carry.”
Eric nodded weakly. There were so many complex, incomprehensible things going on! The world was a bigger, more active place than he had ever imagined.