Feeling as inadequate and inferior as when he had first met Arthur the Organizer in the huge piece of Monster furniture, Eric stared down and shifted his weight from one foot to the other.
“Are you from the Aaron People?” he asked at last in an uncertain voice.
No answer.
“My grandmother was from the Aaron People—so they tell me. Deborah the Dream-Singer. Have you heard of her?”
“Oh, go away, go away,” Jonathan Danielson murmured. “I’m dying, and I have a right to die with a few civilized thoughts in my head.”
Eric tried to bring himself to ask another question and found he couldn’t. He wandered away disconsolately, feeling less like a leader than the youngest initiate ever assigned to a war band.
Someone was trying to attract his attention. Walter the Weapon-Seeker. The chunky man was waving a rope made up of many short straps knotted together and then braided. “We’re ready to test the first one. Want to watch?”
“Yes. I guess so. Listen, Walter,” Eric said with great casualness. “You have all kinds of specialists here from the back-burrow tribes. Do you know anybody who’s done work in protoplasm?”
“In what?”
“Protoplasm. Protoplasm affiliation or rejection. I don’t care which. You know what protoplasm is, don’t you?” “I do not. I never heard of the stuff.”
“Well, then, don’t bother,” Eric told him, feeling immensely better. “I’ll take care of it. Let’s try the rope.”
They set a man at either end of the rope and had him pull against the other. It held. But when the men let the rope go slack and abruptly jerked it taut, it broke in the center.
“So much for the first experiment,” Walter said. He placed the palms of his hands together and bowed his head over them. “Oh, well,” he said in a low voice, “back to the drawing boards.” He looked up shyly at Eric. “I hope you don’t mind my using a little Ancestor-Science. That’s one of the oldest invocations known to my people.”
“Use anything, from any faith. We’ve had far too much religious narrowness and fanaticism.”
The next morning, after they were fed and watered, a Monster appeared again with a searching green rope. But this time, the man selected was removed only after a gook deal of uproar. The occupants of the cage stampeded in a tightly packed, roaring mass from one end of it to the other. Eric, fighting for the self-control necessary in a leader, tried to stand aside, but the hysterical mob picked him up and absorbed him in one of its headlong swoops across the cage.
Through it all, the Monster was quite patient, its tentacles twirling the length of green just above the cage until the man it was after was temporarily separated from his fellows. It evidently knew exactly which human being it wanted. Down came the rope, touching the man on the shoulder and pulled him up again. A few of his friends tried to hold on to his legs, but they were forced to let go when they were drawn as high as the upper lip of the wall. Some other men angrily and helplessly threw spears, but these bounced off the Monster’s skin. Then they stood weeping in the corner and watched him being carried to the flat white surface.
At least he died quickly. This was no prolonged dissection, but a brief though quite nasty moment of agony in an experimental trap. Again, Eric observed to the end, memorizing the features of the trap for possible use some time in the future.
Again, bloody fragments were washed down a round hole in the middle.
“Hit back at the Monsters,” a man near him was praying. “I don’t care how. All I ask is one day to know that I’ve hit back at them.”
Eric agreed. The truth in these ancient chants! Mien-Science or Ancestor-Science—whichever would work—anything to hit back—anything!
The stampede had resulted in a casualty. Roy the Runner showed Eric where Jonathan Danielson lay, life trampled out of him by scores of feet. “I saw him try to roll out of the way. He was too weak, poor guy.”
They examined the dead man’s possessions. Most of the articles in the pockets of his skirt were unfamiliar except for an odd, short spear which someone recognized and called a clasp knife. It looked useful, a bigger version of the shaving tool used by warriors, and Eric appropriated it. Arthur the Organizer removed Jonathan’s skirt and spread it over his face.
“If he’s one of the Aaron People,” Arthur explained, “that’s the way he should be sewered. They always cover the faces of their dead.”
Sewering was a problem, however, despite the stern injunction of the burrows that it be done immediately. They couldn’t get him down the tiny hole in the corner. But they couldn’t leave a rotting corpse among them.
Just as Eric had arranged to get the body up the cage wall and have it dropped down the other side, Monster watchfulness and observation took the problem out of his domain. A green rope fell from above and coiled about the body, lifting it into the air with the skirt still held carefully against the face, exactly as Arthur had disposed it.
Did the Monsters understand and respect human religious observances, Eric wondered? No, they probably just took men’s bodies as they found them. He saw the corpse carried to the circular dissecting surface and dropped with an unceremonious splash into its central black hole.
Then, astonishingly, the Monster came back to the cage, lowered the green rope once more—and plucked Eric out.
17
It all happened so fast, so utterly without warning, that Eric had no time to think of running across the cage or struggling to evade capture. One startled yelp escaped him as he rose high into the air and saw the upturned faces of his companions recede into indistinguishable white dots.
And then he was moving through vastness, dangling from the end of the Monster’s rope. There was a cold streak making a diagonal across his back where the rope had welded itself to his flesh. But worse was the cold dampness in his mind, the liquid terror that was congealing into the certainty of imminent and very painful death.
Dissection? No, according to Jonathan Danielson, the Monsters were satisfied with a single sample from each group. More likely another trap to be tried out, something as ugly as the one he’d just seen chew up a man.
… a laboratory where they test all kinds of homicides: sprays, traps, poisoned lures, everything …
Which of these was he to experience? In what Monster test was he to scream out the last tortured shreds of life?
In one respect he was fortunate. He knew roughly what to expect. He would be no docile laboratory animal—that at least. He would fight, as long as he could, in any way that he could. His hand moved to the back sling for a spear, then stopped.
No. Don’t waste a spear until there was a chance of a good cast. Wait until he was set down and was close to a vital organ, an eye, say, or a mouth open enough to expose the inside of the throat. A badly thrown spear now would only alert the Monster to his murderous determination. Not that he had too much hope in human weapons: he’d already seen spears bounce harmlessly off that thick gray hide.
What he needed now was one of the unusual implements of warfare that a man like Walter the Weapon-Seeker might come up with. That soft red stuff the chunky man had given him on their first meeting—it had blown the head off Stephen the Strong-Armed—
He still had some of that left! His first Theft—Eric had intended to keep evidence of it until his dying day. But, from the appearance of things, that day had moved into the immediate present.
A weapon Walter had stolen from the-Monsters, to be used now against them!
He reached behind him, felt around in the knapsack until he located the stuff. How much should he tear off? A very little bit had done for Stephen quite spectacularly. But the Monster: look at the size of the creature! Better use it all—and make it count.