“Yes, but the subject died,” said Gargarin.
“How’s that?”
“I said, ‘Yes, but the subject died.’”
“Oh.”
“Why don’t you leave your hood down so you can hear me?”
“I don’t like the cold.”
Gargarin gave him an odd look and looked down. “Neither did he.”
“He was adapting though, wasn’t he? Ahh, what do you think got him?”
“Cold probably. Though if he had better leaves or more head hair, he might’ve wove himself a better shirt.” Biev didn’t answer. “Or more food. You could have left him more food.” Gargarin said this with censure, not being as professionally detached as his superior.
“Ahh,” said Biev with a sneer, “more food. Then what do we learn? When a man survives what do we learn? It’s when he almost makes it that we learn; we learn the uttermost limits of his adaptability.”
“The cold,” said Gargarin. “He couldn’t find enough protein to keep his metabolism going. All the bugs and insects go into hiding when it gets cold.”
“This we know,” said Biev. “But look here . . . and here. His system learned to metabolize cellulose. See there. He was living on grass, too.”
“The other ones died.”
“Yes, the other ones died,” said Biev with some vigor and in cadence to his stomping feet, “but do you know why they died, do you know why? Here we placed them out under ideal conditions, in the spring of the year, and they died quickly. In less than a month. All of them. This one went admirably well.” He was staring down with professional detachment at the smooth sculptured features of a frozen man.
“What I told you at the beginning,” said Gargarin. He had the little eyes and ruddy complexion of the prairie tribes. “We should have given them some indoctrination.”
Biev waved the thought away, “As I told you at the beginning, he would have survived longer. We first seek out the limits of a common, ordinary man. Then we build our army, our shock troops. There’s a frontier here,” his eyes shone, “a frontier that’s just beginning to be explored.”
Gargarin felt a little exercise would go good now, so he said before Biev got himself wound up, “We still have one more man.”
They strode off across the sparse, rocky landscape, scuffing the tufts of grass showing through the snow.
Biev continued with his monologue, as he had to continue with his monologue; not even a river to swim across would have interfered with his monologue; such matter lay coiled and ready in his brain, every dot and comma in place, only waiting to be reeled out. “Man is lazy. He does only what is required of him, not much more. What I mean is guilt, fear, love, honor, what have you, are the drives that get him off his dead behind. Every one of us, if we dared, would do nothing but sleep and drink all day. But we don’t; we produce the minimum that we or our society sets for us. It’s a rare one that drives himself past that minimum.
“So we wonder, what would a man do if he were forced to drive himself further, I mean to the ultimate limit of his physical endurance and the limit of his mental capacity.
“What do we do: We put him out in the field, no food, no water, no shelter. Nothing. We first, of course, allow ourselves the requisite of an intelligent being so incarcerated. Hell, you wouldn’t use an animal and you wouldn’t use a moron. You use an intelligent man, not necessarily college-trained but commonsensical and the like.
“Animals do not thrive in alien environments. Some refuse to eat in captivity, some refuse to breed. Some simply die from the sheer despair of being confined. But man, ah, man. So much has history proven about man. He is almost universally adaptable to any bad environment. He adjusts well.
“Now thrust him into an environment hitherto intolerable to him, and he will find himself embracing one of three alternatives. He can escape. He can accept his lot and do his best to survive. Or, he can die. In our experiment one of the three alternatives allowed the subject was eliminated: escape was made impossible.
“And what do we learn? Ah, what do we learn. Already so much do we learn. So much. Ah, Pavlov, if he only knew what he began.”
“Pavlov!” said Gargarin. He said it as an oath.
“Already we know the thought processes by which man can cut out the unpleasantness of reality and paint a rosy glow to his world.”
“Could use some of that rosy glow about now,” said Gargarin, a little out of breath in the poor footing in going up the hill. “A half kilo would do.”
Biev went on as if the other hadn’t spoken. “And parapsychology. Ah, the fields of parapsychology. Did you know that two of them, two of them, students—” Biev was in the habit of lecturing—”were able by sheer mind power to bring crows down to within a stone’s throw, within the radius of the chain? What would Rhine have thought, what would he have said?”
“Rhine,” said Gargarin, who was proud, haughty, and kowtowed to no one, “is a cardsharp charlatan.”
“These two,” continued Biev, “were able to bring crows down because they wanted to bring those crows down, because they wanted to so badly, because they wanted to so very badly. Because their very survival depended upon it.”
“We’re almost there,” said Gargarin. He meant the top of the hill.
“Some beings are able, by sheer will, to bring a victual animal within their jaws, whereas man is lazy; he’d earn his bread by his back rather than think for a few minutes a day. Imagine then, if man, superior man, were thus forced to survive? What could he do? What could he do above and beyond the animals? It would be ... it would be just . . . just fantastic! Already we’ve learned so much .. . and maybe we’ll learn more.”
Gargarin pointed over the crest of the hill. “If he’s still alive, you mean.”
“We’ll still learn,” said Biev. Gargarin knew from the direct reply that the other had left the lecture hall and was in the here-now, puffing up a hill with him through the ankle-deep snow.
They were now at the top of the hill, looking at the clearing below. Instead of a wide arc of tramped down snow that had been expected there was just a white, virtually undisturbed blanket.
“Oh, no,” said Biev in a disappointment that excluded any trace of humane pity. “Oh, no. He died.”
“Let’s get closer.” They walked down the hill. And stopped. “He didn’t die,” said Gargarin, and they walked to the chain.
Biev’s jaw almost dropped, he was that surprised.
“No, I guess he didn’t die,” continued Gargarin, and he kicked at the chain. “Guess your man had three alternatives after all.” He said this last in a chaffing tone.
Biev squatted down in the snow and scrutinized the chain. “The shackle...it’s not cut!”
Gargarin had a look too. “Sometimes an animal would prefer disfigurement. As would a man.”
“But there’s no blood.”
“And no foot.”
The men stood up and looked at one another. Biev was stunned; first, by the fact of the escape and, then, by some other thing not yet shaped in his consciousness.
Gargarin began by bringing the something to the forefront. “Not counting ours, there’s only two sets of tracks.”
Biev made a definite count of the fact and nodded, “He must’ve returned and left.”
“You mean,” answered Gargarin, “he must’ve left and returned!” Biev’s eye caught him the instant the other realized the illogic of his statement.
“Do you see it?” Biev asked.
“Yes.”
“If he escaped and didn’t return—one set of tracks.” Gargarin regarded him with the clear animal eyes of the prairie tribes. “If he escaped, returned, and left again...”
“Three sets of tracks.”
“If he escaped,” continued Biev, “returned, and we caught him just then. . . .”