Otherwise the male and female had set up no guardian engines and kept no dogs. Belike they supposed none would be needed, since they slept in the long vehicle which bore them. But such contempt of the Queen’s strength could not be tolerated, could it?
Metal sheened faintly by the light of their campfire. They sat on either side, wrapped in coats against a coolness that Mistherd, naked, found mild. The male drank smoke. The female stared past him into a dusk which her flame-dazzled eyes must see as thick gloom. The dancing glow brought her vividly forth. Yes, to judge from Ayoch’s tale, she was the dam of the new cub.
Ayoch had wanted to come too, but the Wonderful One forbade. Pooks couldn’t hold still long enough for such a mission.
The man sucked on his pipe. His cheeks thus pulled into shadow while the light flickered across nose and brow, he looked disquietingly like a shearbill about to stoop on prey.
“—No, I tell you again, Barbro, I have no theories,” he was saying. “When facts are insufficient, theorizing is ridiculous at best, misleading at worst.”
“Still, you must have some idea of what you’re doing,” she said. It was plain that they had threshed this out often before. No Dweller could be as persistent as she or as patient as he. “That gear you packed—that generator you keep running—”
“I have a working hypothesis or two, which suggested what equipment I ought to take.”
“Why won’t you tell me what the hypotheses are?”
“They themselves indicate that that might be inadvisable at the present time. I’m still feeling my way into the labyrinth. And I haven’t had a chance yet to hook everything up. In fact, we’re really only protected against so-called telepathic influence—”
“What?” She started. “Do you mean… those legends about how they can read minds too…” Her words trailed off and her gaze sought the darkness beyond his shoulders.
He leaned forward. His tone lost its clipped rapidity, grew earnest and soft. “Barbro, you’re racking yourself to pieces. Which is no help to Jimmy if he’s alive, the more so when you may well be badly needed later on. We’ve a long trek before us, and you’d better settle into it.”
She nodded jerkily and caught her lip between her teeth for a moment before she answered, “—I’m trying.”
He smiled around his pipe. “I expect you’ll succeed. You don’t strike me as a quitter or a whiner or an enjoyer of misery.”
She dropped a hand to the pistol at her belt. Her voice changed; it came out of her throat like knife from sheath. “When we find them, they’ll know what I am. What humans are.”
“Put anger aside also,” the man urged. “We can’t afford emotions. If the Outlings are real, as I told you I’m provisionally assuming, they’re fighting for their homes.” After a short stillness he added: “I like to think that if the first explorers had found live natives, men would not have colonized Roland. But too late now. We can’t go back if we wanted to. It’s a bitter-end struggle, against an enemy so crafty that he’s even hidden from us the fact that he is waging war.”
“Is he? I mean, skulking, kidnapping an occasional child—”
“That’s part of my hypothesis. I suspect those aren’t harassments, they’re tactics employed in a chillingly subtle strategy.”
The fire sputtered and sparked. The man smoked awhile, brooding, until he went on:
“I didn’t want to raise your hopes or excite you unduly while you had to wait on me, first in Christmas Landing, then in Portolondon. Afterward we were busy satisfying ourselves that Jimmy had been taken further from camp than he could have wandered before collapsing. So I’m only now telling you how thoroughly I studied available material on the… Old Folk. Besides, at first I did it on the principle of eliminating every imaginable possibility, however absurd. I expected no result other than final disproof. But I went through everything, relics, analyses, histories, journalistic accounts, monographs; I talked to outwayers who happened to be in town and to what scientists we have who’ve taken any interest in the matter. I’m a quick study. I flatter myself I became as expert as anyone—though God knows there’s little to be expert on. Furthermore, I, a comparative stranger to Roland, maybe looked on the problem with fresh eyes. And a pattern emerged for me.
“If the aborigines had become extinct, why hadn’t they left more remnants? Arctica isn’t enormous, and it’s fertile for Rolandic life. It ought to have supported a population whose artifacts ought to have accumulated over millennia. I’ve read that on Earth, literally tens of thousands of paleolithic hand axes were found, more by chance than archaeology.
“Very well. Suppose the relics and fossils were deliberately removed, between the time the last survey party left and the first colonizing ships arrived. I did find some support for that idea in the diaries of the original explorers. They were too preoccupied with checking the habitability of the planet to make catalogues of primitive monuments. However, the remarks they wrote down indicate they saw much more than later arrivals did. Suppose what we have found is just what the removers overlooked or didn’t get around to.
“That argues a sophisticated mentality, thinking in long-range terms, doesn’t it? Which in turn argues that the Old Folk were not mere hunters or neolithic farmers.”
“But nobody ever saw buildings or machines or any such thing,” Barbro objected.
“No. Most likely the natives didn’t go through our kind of metallurgic-industrial evolution. I can conceive of other paths to take. Their full-fledged civilization might have begun, rather than ended, in biological science and technology. It might have developed potentialities of the nervous system, which might be greater in their species than in man. We have those abilities to some degree ourselves, you realize. A dowser, for instance, actually senses variations in the local magnetic field caused by a water table. However, in us, these talents are maddeningly rare and tricky. So we took our business elsewhere. Who needs to be a telepath, say, when he has a visiphone? The Old Folk may have seen it the other way around. The artifacts of their civilization may have been, may still be unrecognizable to men.”
“They could have identified themselves to the men, though,” Barbro said. “Why didn’t they?”
“I can imagine any number of reasons. As, they could have had a bad experience with interstellar visitors earlier in their history. Ours is scarcely the sole race that has spaceships. However, I told you I don’t theorize in advance of the facts. Let’s say no more than that the Old Folk, if they exist, are alien to us.”
“For a rigorous thinker, you’re spinning a mighty thin thread.”
“I’ve admitted this is entirely provisional.” He squinted at her through a roil of campfire smoke. “You came to me, Barbro, insisting in the teeth of officialdom that your boy had been stolen, but your own talk about cultist kidnappers was ridiculous. Why are you reluctant to admit the reality of nonhumans?”
“In spite of the fact that Jimmy’s being alive probably depends on it,” she sighed. “I know.” A shudder. “Maybe I don’t dare admit it.”
“I’ve said nothing thus far that hasn’t been speculated about in print,” he told her. “A disreputable speculation, true. In a hundred years, nobody has found valid evidence for the Outlings being more than a superstition. Still, a few people have declared it’s at least possible that intelligent natives are at large in the wilderness.”
“I know,” she repeated. “I’m not sure, though, what has made you, overnight, take those arguments seriously.”