Of Men and Monsters

11

The old trap that Thomas the Trap-Smasher had long ago dismantled still hung uselessly on the other side of the wall. And none of the huge creatures was abroad. That horrifying white, white light again! This insane spaciousness!

Eric turned right and ran along the wall, counting paces. He took the same route as he had on his Theft. Fear made him breathe heavily, but he kept reminding himself that here he ran the same risks, no more and no less, as any other human being. Here, every man was an outlaw, an object of the chase, a thing marked for death. In Monster territory, you enjoyed no special advantages if you still belonged to a people.

Of course, you might have a woman waiting for you back in your burrows, ready to turn into useful articles all the good things with which this place was filled. But she wouldn’t be with you at such a moment. Women were the custodians of human life and history and all accumulated knowledge. And the magic rituals they recited were the most precious possession of a people, giving them pride and a fundamental sense of identity. Women were absolutely forbidden to engage in any enterprise for which more readily expendable men might be used. They never entered Monster territory.

And yet, according to his uncle, his mother had…

He reached the huge article of Monster furniture and turned left along it. There was just a chance that there would be some Strangers still left where he had met them in the course of his Theft. He could warn them of what was going on in the burrows—they might let him stay with them. Even the companionship of effeminate, talkative, overdressed Strangers would be better than nothing.

As he was about to turn into the dark entrance of the structure, Eric paused. He had been running as he had been taught to run in Monster territory: don’t look up, never look up. Well, he’d looked up once already, in the course of his Theft—and he’d survived. All that he’d been taught: what was it worth?

Therefore he stopped deliberately well outside the entrance. Making certain again that no Monsters were about, be shoved his hands on his hips belligerently, turned and surveyed the enormous burrow. Yes, it was still a little upsetting at first glance. But one got used to it, one got used to it. Given enough time, no doubt even those incredibly oversize bags and containers, those walls stretching up so high that it hurt one’s neck to try to see their upper limits—given enough time, you’d come to notice this place as casually as a narrow storage burrow full of Mankind’s odds and ends.

There was nothing he couldn’t eventually learn to live with, Eric told himself. As long as he could see clearly what it was.

Eyes open. Look at everything. Judge everything for yourself, with your own vision. He would be Eric the Eye.

He traveled cautiously inside the structure. If there were any Strangers about, they might be expecting attack. They might throw first and examine the spear-pierced body for explanations afterward. Certainly, now at least, if Arthur the Organizer had been alerted to what was going on in the burrows, he would have posted sentries.

And the sentries would be nervous.

He encountered no sentries. He heard voices, however, from the moment he stooped and entered the low tunnel. They grew louder and louder as he turned into the right fork. When he emerged into the large, square burrow he was fully prepared for what he saw: dozens of Strangers, suffering from various degrees of personal damage, talk-ing, gesticulating, arguing. Multitudes of forehead glow lamps created a tremendous flare of illumination.

The scene was like the aftermath of a large-scale raid on an entire people. There were men with slight wounds, the blood having long hardened upon their scratches; there were men with bad wounds, who limped about on a crushed foot or who desperately tried to get aid for the red rip in their chest or side; there were men as mortally hurt as his uncle had been, who—having managed to crawl to this place of comparative safety by themselves or having been helped here by friends-lay now, unnoticed and forgotten along the walls, sliding downward through coma after coma until they smashed into the unyielding surface of death.

And everyone—everyone who was at all conscious—was trying to make himself heard.

Those with relatively minor injuries had clustered about Walter the Weapon-Seeker and Arthur the Organizer at the far corner of the burrow, shrilly trying to tell their own experiences and criticizing the behavior of others. Those whose wounds made it impossible for them to jostle in the main crowd, stood on the outskirts or sat on the floor in groaning groups of two and three, and pointed out to each other the defects in Walter’s plans or Arthur’s leadership that had brought them to this pass. Even the dying muttered their recent experiences to the friendly floor and suggested, with their last, gasping breath, alternative courses of action that would have developed far better results.

In a sense, Eric thought, his first impression had been correct. It was an entire people after a battle. He was staring at the people of Alien-Science after the other inhabitants of the burrows had crushed them and spat them out.

But, whatever they were, this was his people now. The only one he had. He shrugged and strode into the sharp-angled, noisy place.

Somewhere in the crowd, a man’s head swung around and studied him. The face broke into a smile. “Eric,” it called out. “Hey, Eric!”

A head that was higher than the others near it. And hair that was loose, not caught by a back strap in the Stranger fashion. A warrior of Mankind.

They elbowed toward each other frantically through the gesticulating debaters, the two beams from their forehead glow lamps making a single line as they kept their’ eyes locked together.

Long before they met, Eric recognized the man. Tall, thin, nervous-bodied—it could be only one person. The member of his uncle’s band who had made his life as an initiate most difficult, the warrior with whom he’d almost fought a duel before setting out on his Theft: Roy the Runner.

Roy seemed to remember none of this as they came together. He threw his bony arms around Erie and embraced him. “A familiar face,” he sang out in delight. “Eric the Only, am I glad to see you!”

Eric stiffened and stepped back out of the hug. “Eric the Eye,” hes aid sharply. “I’ve become Eric the Eye.”

The other man held up both hands placatingly. “Eric the Eye. Sure. Eric the Eye. I’m sorry. I’ll remember it from now on. Eric the Eye. Anything you say, boy. Just be friendly, just talk to me a little. I’ve been going crazy standing here and listening to these fake warriors, these damn half-women gabble at each other. And trying to figure out what’s going on back in Mankind.” He grabbed Eric’s shoulders and begged: “What is going on with our people? How do we stand there?”

“We don’t.” Eric told him his experiences, beginning with the return from his Theft and the discovery that the door slab had been put back into place. “We’re outlaws,” he said, when he had finished. “You, I, everyone in the Trap-Smasher’s band are outlaws. Who else got away?”

“Nobody, so far as I know. I figured I was the only survivor until I saw you come in. The only reason I got away was because I was on sentry duty all the way at the other end of the corridor when the attack came. I heard the noise and ran back. There was Stephen the Strong-Armed’s men slamming it into our band and what looked like a hundred Strangers helping them. They saw me come up and a whole mob of them made for me. I didn’t stop to think. I just took off, warrior’s oath or no warrior’s oath. And believe me, if you ever think you’ve seen me run, you’re mistaken. I picked up each foot and I planted it so far ahead of the other one that I practically split down the middle. And all the time, there were those spears going over my head and past my shoulders and all around me. You never saw so many spears: I bet there was corridor after corridor littered with them.”

“And they all missed you? You don’t show a scratch.”

The Runner shrugged contemptuously. “Strangers. What do you expect? They couldn’t hit fat old Franklin himself if he were sitting at their feet. I was lucky none of Stephen’s men were in that mob chasing me. Besides, like I told you, I ran. I shook most of them off pretty fast: after about a dozen corridors or so, there were only about two or three still following me. Those aren’t such good odds for Strangers, not against a full warrior of Mankind, so they gave up too and turned back. I rested, got my breath back—and came here. I used another doorway to Monster territory, though.”

“You knew about this place? You’d been here before?”

“Not inside, not in this particular burrow. But }tou know, we were all Alien-Sciencers pretty much in the band, some a little more, some a little less. Your uncle had been working on us, converting us, for a long time. Lots of times, when we’d be out on an expedition, stealing food and suchlike, he’d make a special trip inside this structure, and he’d leave us on guard. outside. He told us how to get in to the square burrow, how to make contact with the Alien-Science headquarters, in case of an emergency. I figured that’s what this was—an emergency—and I came here to get help. Help!” Roy the Runner looked around and made a face. “From this bunch of yapping, half-female lunatics? More and more of them kept coming in, all banged up and all talking their heads off. That’s the one thing Strangers know how to do—talk, talk, talk, talk.”

Eric followed his derisive glances and tended to agree with him. There certainly was a lot of talk going on, a lot of unnecessary recapitulation. But what else was there to do?

A major political and religious movement—with adherents all over the burrows—had just been smashed at one stroke, a concerted blow arranged by chiefs who were normally in a state of unvarying war with each other. The survivors had made for their headquarters which no doubt had been deliberately placed in Monster territory for just such emergencies as this. Arriving here singly and in small groups, they could bind their wounds, rest and discuss alternatives still open to them. In this dangerous, unorthodox hideaway, they could talk and plan in freedom, relatively secure from attack.

But were they? Among this many men, limping and scuttling to doorways to Monster territory, there must have been a few careless enough to have been followed. All this movement in one direction and at one time couldwell have been noticed in the burrows. And, if they had been followed, if their activity had been observed, then this hideaway might turn out to be a terrible trap—a vast expedition organized by the chiefs might be on its way at this moment to exterminate once and for all the last remnants of the Alien-Science heresy.

No, not very likely, Eric decided upon reflection. With the immediate danger behind them, with their own Alien-Sciencers killed or in flight, the chiefs would have returned to a state of hostility and suspicion of each other. For a while, in fact, there would be even less communication than usual between the various peoples, while defense plans—which had been exposed to temporary allies—were being hurriedly altered. Mankind, for example, would be worrying right now about what the Strangers in their midst had noted: the total strength of fighting effectives, the location of the great central burrow and the specific corridors that led into it—and, possibly, particularly desirable women who might be worth a raid. Xenophobia would be snarling through the burrows once more, and alliances would be out of the question, especially an alliance as enormous and manifold as an expedition of this sort would require. After all, a people—no matter how great their need of food and equipment—rarely sent more than a half-dozen men into the complex dangers of Monster territory at one time. They were unlikely to risk the greater part of their warrior force in such a place.

While the Alien-Sciencers stayed here, then, they were relatively safe from that kind of attack. But still, sentries should have been posted just in case. It was more military, for one thing. And they would need every bit of military cohesiveness if they were to survive.

Roy the Runner agreed with him. “I told that to the leader—what’s his name—Arthur the Organizer—as soon as I got here. But these damn Strangers: what can you expect? They don’t know how to run an army. He sort of wobbled his head and asked me if there were any contacts, any secret organization of Alien-Sciencers, in the other bands of Mankind. Here we may soon be fighting for our lives, and he’s worrying about secret organita-ti(ins!”

“Well, he can’t help it,” Eric pointed out. “He’s an Organizer. Just like you’re a Runner and I’m an Eye. If you lost your legs or if I went blind, how would we feel? Well, he’s an Organizer who’s lost his organization. It’s a terrible thing to happen to a man.”

“Um. Maybe. But that’s his problem, not mine. Me, I can still outrun any man in the burrows. He also said that if you or your uncle managed to get here, he wants to ask you a couple of questions: I should bring you to him right away. That’s what he’s doing with all these beaten-up characters around him—filling in the total picture, he calls it.”

As they made their way through the crowd, the Runner bent down and muttered into Eric’s ear: “Let me tell you, Eric, what we need now—in the spot we’re in—is not an Arthur the Organizer. We need a first-rate band captain like your uncle. I’ve seen him when we won and when we lost, he always knew what to do. There was a man, there was a leader! When to push an attack home, when to retreat, when to regroup and attack from a different, unexpected direction—you could really trust his orders. He knew, he just knew.” The tall, thin warrior shook his head. “And now he’s riding the sewer! It’s hard to believe. Eric—what about my woman? Did they do anything to my woman?”

“I don’t think so. The only women I saw catching it were the wives of Thomas the Trap-Smasher.”

Roy nodded morosely. “Not my wife. Trust her. I’ll bet she’s where she always wanted to be—in Franklin’s harem. The way she’d repeat his name! Franklin, the Father of Many Thieves, she used to say, of Many Thieves. Whenever a woman gave birth who’d lain with the chief, Myra would tell me, ‘Five in the litter, Roy. Five! Franklin always fathers at least five.’ And her eyes would glitter like a pair of glow lamps. So what if I was the fastest runner in all of Mankind, what if I’d once run the whole length of a larder with two Monsters after me and lived to tell the tale? My family never had more than three to a litter, and Myra knew it damned well.”

Eric walked faster, pushing through the noisy, wounded men. Three to a litter! The sour taste of his personal curse filled him again. And it wasn’t diluted much by the knowledge that, as things stood, he now had very little chance of having a woman, any woman, to himself. The question of his paternal powers might never come up in this huge, all-male band of outlaws. Any woman they found…

Arthur the Organizer strode out from the clump of vociferous Strangers. He extended his arms in a warm greeting, but his peculiar eyes had nothing to do with warmth. They spun and spun in anxious multiple calculations.

“Welcome, Eric,” he said. “Welcome, welcome. I’ve been hearing a rumor about your uncle. I hope, I sincerely hope, it’s not so.”

“He’s dead. Dead and sewered.” Eric fought to control a sudden, murderous anger. His uncle, it was true, had used him, Eric, had used his band and his wives, but, after all, these had been his uncle’s own: they had been his to use if he so chose. His uncle had been his uncle, and a great one in Mankind.

This man—this Stranger—with his Stranger ambitions his Stranger contempt, based on pure ignorance, for whatever was truly majestic and noble—what did he know of Mankind? What did he know of what it had meant to Thomas the Trap-Smasher to be chief of such a people?

He gave the Organizer the same recent history he’d given Roy, skipping much of the personal detail. Partly, he knew the Organizer wouldn’t be interested in these minor touches; but partly, his rage at the outsider, standing there, nodding and grunting and checking off points to himself, his rage kept creeping into his voice and coul4l only_ be controlled by cutting the story as short as possible.

Arthur the Organizer heard nothing but the words.

“Well, now I know what happened to Thomas the Trap-Smasher and Mankind. So much for that,” his attitude seemed to be. Eric felt as if he had been filling a storage pouch with exactly the right amount for the Organizer who now thanked him, pulled the draw strings tight and dropped the pouch into his haversack.

“Pretty much like the others,” Arthur summed up. “Leader killed, all his known followers exterminated, one, maybe two, manage to get away. The whole business a sudden stoke—chief meshing with chief, tribe with hostile tribe—little or no warning. A beautiful job of organization, I’d say, smooth, smooth as hell. Except, of course, for this inexcusably sloppy business of escapees like yourself and Roy here. But that, I’d lay to the lack of any overall coordinating control—there was no single individual running the whole show who was able to see it all in the round and pick out the weak spots. For a piece of what was essentially committee work, nicely done. Very nicely done.”

“I’m glad you can enjoy it. Meanwhile, we—the movement—we’re smashed, we’re through.”

The Organizer smiled and put an arm around his shoulder. “Not at all, boy. Not in the slightest. We merely enter upon a new phase. To quote the Ancestor-Science of our enemies: Action equals reaction. At the moment, reaction is dominant, so action—our action—must build up its strength and search for other paths. All human burrows are closed to us, but the Monster burrows are wide open. How about it—are you up to a little expedition?”

Eric stepped back and away from the friendly arm. “An expedition? To deep Monster territory? Why? For what?”

“To get more Alien-Science to back us up. In other words, to practice what we preach. Here we are Alien-Sciencers, and how much Mien-Science can we exhibit to potential converts? A little of this, a smidgin of that. What we have is tremendous—you yourself have good reason to know that—hut it’s all bits and pieces, not fully connected, not fully understood. Now, I say this,” and here his voice rose, and Eric noticed that they had been slowly surrounded by most of the Strangers who could walk. ” I say: if we’re going to be Alien-Sciencers, let’s be Alien-Sciencers all the way. Let’s get the best, the strongest stuff the Monsters have. Let’s get something that, when we bring it back to the burrows, will be absolutely irresistible, not merely as a weapon to back us up, but as an irrefutable proof of the validity of our beliefs. Let’s get some Alien-Science that will blow Ancestor-Science to hell and gone forever.”

Tired faces around them lit up under their glow lamps. “He’s got it,” someone said enthusiastically.

“He sure has. Arthur’s found a way out.”

“Good old Arthur. The Organizer-The old Organizer himself.”

Even badly wounded men began to sit up and grin with excitement.

“What exactly,” Eric asked in a cold, practical voice, “what exactly is it that we get?”

The Organizer turned and lifted one eyebrow at him for a long moment. “Now if we knew that,” he chuckled and pointed up to the overhanging darkness, “we’d know as much as they, the Monsters, do, and our worries would be over. We don’t know exactly. But we know of a place, at least Walter does, where the Monsters keep their strongest, most powerful weapons. Right, Walter?”

A nod from the short, chunky Weapon-Seeker as everyone turned to question him with their eyes. “I’ve heard of it, and I think I can find it. It’s supposed to be the last word in Alien-Science.”

“The last word in Alien-Science,” Arthur repeated as if in awe. “Imagine what that must be like. Just imagine! Well, we go there and that’s what we come away with. The last word! Then let the chiefs and the Female Society reactionaries stand up to us. Let them try. We’ll show them what Alien-Science can do, won’t we? We’ll show them once and for all.”

A man threw his spear up into the air and caught it. He whirled on a blood-dripping leg and shook the spear over his head. “Attaboy, Arthur,” he yelled. “Let’s show them so they never forget it!”

Eric saw that everyone around him, Roy included, was cheering and waving spears. He shrugged and waved his too. Arthur looked at him; his smile grew bigger, more expansive.

“So they’ll never forget it,” he repeated. “Now, let’s get some sleep, and everyone who’s able will hit the trail in the morning. I hereby declare it night.”

Roy and Eric went to the edge of the crowd and bedded down together, back to back: they were, after all, the only two warriors of Mankind present. Just before he went to sleep, the Runner said over his shoulder: “What a great idea, isn’t it, Eric? Great!”

“Well, at least,” Eric muttered, “it keeps us busy and takes our minds off the fact that we’re outlaws for the rest of our lives.”

12

Wandering about next morning, before most of the others were up, Eric observed with contempt that sentries still had not been posted. He had taken it for granted that the leader of a war band would never let his men go through an entire sleep period without setting up a series of guard shifts to watch and give the alarm if enemies approached. True, he had reasoned out last night that, inthe present state of resumed hostility in the burrows, they had little to fear from that direction, but that was only a logical hypothesis: one could not be certain. Besides, if a war band was going to function as a war band, function and survive, it had to go through the motions of discipline whether or not they were necessary.

In the face of such sloppy command work, he and Roy had better set up a personal on-off guard system between themselves every night. They wouldn’t lose any rest: it was quite apparent that Strangers required much more sleep than the fighting men of Mankind.

Apparently, they also required much more talk. Never had Eric seen an expedition begin with so much discussion. He squatted off to one side, grinning and chuckling. Roy came over and sprawled beside him. He also found the Strangers hilarious.

First, there was the matter of who should go and who should stay. Badly wounded men definitely could not go. But how many should be left behind to take care of them? And what about a sewer detail to dispose of corpses? And should a reserve force be maintained here in their base: first, in case of an unexpected call on them from surviving Alien-Sciencers in the burrows, and second, if the main expeditionary body found that it needed help or supplies of any kind?

Where Thomas the Trap-Smasher would have announced his plans to respectfully nodding followers, Arthur the Organizer asked for suggestions on each point. There were plenty of suggestions.

Everyone had to be heard, complimented if he came up with something good, reasoned with if he didn’t. An incredible amount of time was spent persuading one able-bodied man who felt he belonged on the expedition that he would be much more useful staying here among the wounded. Of course, in the end, Eric noticed with a good deal of interest, the arrangements were pretty much those Arthur the Organizer had seemed to want in the first place.

And everyone got up with the feeling that it was what he had wanted too, all along.

He could handle men, even if he didn’t know the first thing about giving orders.

Nor did he know the first thing about commanding an expedition on the move, Eric decided. Leaving behind them the wounded and the dying, as well as those who would serve as nurses, sewer detail and reserve, they set off in an impossibly long line of twenty-three talkative, gesticulating men, a line that straggled here, straggled there, and that was bunched at various points by especially friendly or argumentative groups.

One such group milled about Arthur, the commander of this overgrown war band, this expedition that was more like a wandering mob. Even in the low tunnel, where the walls were narrow and everyone had to bend over, a steady hum of discussion flowed back toward Eric from Arthur and his closer associates.

“Security, that was why they were able to smash us so suddenly. Our security was never tight enough. There were leaks.”

“There are always leaks. The trouble was in our communications. We failed to hear about the leaks fast enough to plug them up.”

“I think Walter’s right. The trouble lay right there in security. All the chiefs had a spy system of one sort or another and we never really got going on counterespionage.”

“In that case, how do you account for—”

Eric glanced back at Roy who was staying the regulation distance of fifteen paces behind him. “Hear them?” be asked the Runner. “They’re still fighting yesterday’s battles. This is how they win. With their mouths.”

“Oh, they’re Strangers. What do you want? They don’t do things our way and we don’t do things theirs.”

Eric was surprised. He and Roy had evidently reversed positions since yesterday when they had first met. Roy still found Stranger ways very funny, but was forcing himself to be tolerant of them. Why?

As the harsh white light of Monster territory expanded ahead of them, he slowed down and waited for Roy to catch up with him. He was curious about what was going on inside the Runner, the only member of this ridiculous crowd for whom he felt any kind of kinship.

But just as Roy came abreast, all the way up front, the first man in the long line stepped out from the piece of Monster furniture and into whiteness.

There was a rapid, chattering sound. The man screeched once, danced a single, mad, despairing step—and fell over on his face. Everyone froze.

After a while, the man who was next in line edged forward carefully, poked his head out and stared upward. They watched him relax. “Only one,” he said in a loud, carrying whisper. “Only one and Dan’s sprung it. Nothing else in sight.”

Silently now, they crept forward and, one by one, slipped out of the exit. They formed a loose, nervous group around the dead man, eyes whipping from his contorted body to anywhere in the great Monster whiteness from which danger might abruptly materialize and focus on them.

The sprung trap hung from the enormous piece of furniture directly above, its wires hanging slack except for a fitful shudder which occasionally rippled through them like a last lingering memory of the life they had just taken.

Roy moved up to Eric and slung his spear. Then he put his hands on his hips and gestured at the trap with his chin. “We came across one of those about five auld tang synes ago. Your uncle knocked it out. You can’t poke a spear in front of it—it won’t go for a spear: there has to be living flesh. What you do, you stick your foot out under it and pull back fast. A bit too slow and,” he clicked his tongue, “no foot.”

Arthur the Organizer had been listening. “You know traps,” he said to Roy. “We can use you up front as, a scout. From now on, you travel well ahead of the main body.”

“I know a bit about traps,” Roy told him disgustedly, “but I’m no Trap-Smasher. I’m a Runner. You want a scout, at least use an Eye. Eric, here, is an Eye.”

“Both of you then. You’ll be our advance party. All right: somebody grab the body and take it back inside to headquarters for sewerage. We’ll wait for you.” He pointed to the trap and thought carefully for a few moments before speaking. “Now, the way I see it—and either of you feel free to correct me if you think I’m wrong—is that this trap was set in place a relatively short time ago. I base this hypothesis on a single fact: the trap wasn’t there last sleep-period, when refugees were still arriving. If this is so—and mind you, I’m only thinking out loud, not coming to anything hard and fast just yet—we can conclude that it was all that coming and going of refugees and messengers, the noise and inevitable clumsiness of the wounded making their way here that attracted the Monsters’ attention. They tend to set up traps in places where there are plentiful signs of our activity. All right: does my theory hold together so far?”

“Great, Arthur,” said a man who had edged up. “Terrific. You’re right on the head. What a mind! What I’m interested in is, where do you take the idea? How do you figure next?”

“What a mind!” Roy whispered bitterly to Eric. “To figure out that the trap was installed between last night and now—that takes an Organizer, that takes brains! Well, what can you expect? Guys don’t even know the difference between a Runner and an Eye!”

Arthur, arms folded on his chest, head down, was walking back and forth in front of his anxiously listening followers. “Here’s where I take the idea, at least as a preliminary approach. Understand, it’s not completely worked out just yet. It seems to me that if the Monsters are aware of our activity in the neighborhood of this particular piece of furniture, if they’ve seen enough of us swarming in and out of it to justify a trap, and a brand new type of trap, at that, then it’s likely that they’re on the alert in this entire area. And that, in turn, leads to three conclusions. One, that a scouting party in advance of the main body is doubly necessary, and that the scouts have to be watchful as hell. Two, that until we’re a good distance from here, the expedition proceeds in absolute silence, using nothing but hand signals for communication. And three, well, we ought to take a good hard look around before we start out. It’s possible we’re under observation by the Monsters at this very moment!”

At this, there was a startled look-around by the members of the expedition, all except Eric and Roy who exchanged disgusted glances. As a matter of course, in the last few minutes, they had each been turning periodically in one direction and another to see if there were any sign of the Monsters in the surrounding whiteness. After a trap had claimed a victim, who but a stupid Stranger would do anything else?

But, a bit later, as they had gone off ahead of the rest along the piece of Monster furniture on their way to the distant wall, Roy’s attitude seemed to have changed again.

“After all,” he said, as if arguing with himself, “it’s a pretty big war band, the size of Mankind’s whole damn army roster. Takes a real Organizer to handle a bunch this size. An ordinary band captain—like your uncle, I mean—he wouldn’t even know how to hold them together.”

Eric laughed. “Holding them together isn’t half as important as keeping them alive. I don’t think Arthur will be too good at that.”

The Runner grunted noncommittally. Eric puzzled over him in silence as they came to the junction of the furniture and wall, turning right in the direction of the doorway that Mankind had used to get back to the burrows. The door lay on the floor: it had still not been set in place since Eric had gone through. The two of them checked the area for new traps; then, without a word, they heaved the door up and worked it back into its socket. When they went on past it, further along the wall into Monster territory, they both grinned at each other happily: they had just acted as respectable warriors of Mankind.

But what was up with the Runner, Eric wondered? What was going on in his head that he should mock Arthur the Organizer one moment and determinedly find some way to praise him the next—even when he showed such obvious ineptitude as a band leader? There was no time to ask questions now: they were moving deeper into territory where only Roy had been before, and Eric’s job was to follow quietly, learning the way, keeping his ears alert for the first vibrations that would warn of a Monster’s floor-shaking approach.

Three hundred and twelve paces beyond the door was the rendezvous that the Organizer had set with them. Here, a block piece of Monster furniture came close to the wall, a smaller piece than the one they had been in during the night. Eric could see the top of it by twisting his head far back on his neck: it was oddly curved and there were great green knobs sticking out of it. They stopped there, grateful for its cover, and took their first deep breaths. Far off behind them, along the wall, they watched the main body of the expedition trudging a slow single file in their direction. Eric and Roy waved their hands high to indicate that the way was safe.

When the answering waves indicated that the signal had been received, he turned to the Runner and put the question at last. Why this backing and filling, why this talking Arthur up when he was so unequivocally, ridiculously wrong?

Roy thought a moment before answering.

“He’s not wrong. I mean he can’t be: he’s our leader.”

“You know better than that, Roy! Not sending scouts ahead from the beginning, letting the men talk and clump up on expedition, not checking the exit overhang for a Monster trap—how far off can he be?”

“He’s our leader,” the Runner repeated doggedly. “Was your uncle any smarter, with all of his march discipline and trap-smashing? All right, just one mistake—enough to finish him and most of his band. Arthur’s alive.”

“He’s alive because he was safe in Alien-Science Head-quarters all through the blowup.”

“I’m not interested in why, Eric. He’s alive, and he’s the only leader we’ve got. This band’s the only people we’ve got. We’ve got to make the best of it and kind of, you know, show them we belong to them.”

Eric stared past him into the glaring whiteness. Far off, hundreds upon hundreds of paces away, he could make out the dim outlines of the larder sacks in which the Monsters kept their food. Once, the powerful bands of Mankind had come to swarm upon those sacks and bring minute portions of the contents home to their women and their chief. Once, he and Roy had been proud to be reckoned warriors of Mankind. Now were they to start all over again and learn pride at being Strangers? And Strangers on the run, at that, Strangers without even women to guide them, to tell them what was right and what was wrong!

No, he didn’t see it, and he said as much. “I’m not running my head into a spear any more for somebody else and his private plans.”

“That’s you,” Roy agreed. “That’s the way you’ve always been: a rebel, a trouble-maker, an outsider. Me, I’ve always asked only to be allowed to go along with the other guys. Why do you think I became an Alien-Sciencer? Because our band was Alien-Science. If I’d been in an Ancestor-Science band, I’d be backing up the chief right next to Harold the Hurler and Stephen the Strong-Armed and all those reactionary bastards. I’d be carving up people like you and your uncle any time the Female Society told me to. And I’d believe in what I was doing, just as I believed in what I was doing when I followed your uncle and went around saying that Chief Franklin had to go and that the Female Society stood in the way of progress. Being in the center of a bunch of guys that you can trust because you know their thoughts and their thoughts are exactly the same as your thoughts—that’s home, that’s the only home there is. Everything else is hunger and danger and sleeplessness, with no one to guard your back.”

Arthur the Organizer came up at this point, with the rest of the expedition. He gave his scouts orders as to the next advance point they were to reach.

Once more, Eric followed Roy, his senses alert for a sudden change in the environment, his mind busy with personal problems. He couldn’t argue with the Runner: the Runner was right for himself. But would Eric the Eye ever find a home, where friends who thought like him could be trusted to guard his back? He didn’t want to think-like other people—least of all Strangers. Going into great danger to find a weapon which might or might not exist!

The entire expedition camped for the night—once Arthur had officially declared it—in the crevice of a gigantic archway that led out of the Monster larder and into another great white burrow. At least sentries were posted, Eric noticed. They had filled their knapsacks with fresh food from the alien containers in the larder, although Eric’s stomach twitched uneasily at the prospect of eating anything that women had not first examined. And they had filled their canteens from an opening in a fresh-water pipe to which Walter the Weapon-Seeker had led them.

“This tribe I used to belong to,” Roy the Runner commented to a group of men huddling up for sleep. “Mankind, they called themselves—can you imagine that? Mankind!—they had a superstition about only using water from the pipes in the burrows. Once in Monster territory, no eating, no drinking. They could die of thirst—better that than give up the superstition.” He guffawed. “They were afraid their dead ancestors would get mad and—”

Eric walked out of earshot. Loneliness crouched on his chest.

13

When the expedition started again after the night’s rest, Eric found Roy even more unbearable. The Runner had found a small strap somewhere and had bound his hair on the back of his head, Stranger fashion.

And there were three of them now in the scouting party that led the advance through the archway into the next great burrow. Arthur had detailed Walter the Weapon-Seeker to accompany Eric and Roy. The heavy, squat man with the huge, gnarled hands was the only member of the expedition who had penetrated further into Monster territory than the larder. In search of alien artifacts which could be turned into usable human weapons, he had journeyed many, many times into unbelievably distant Monster burrows.

Roy found this fascinating. He refused to let go of the subject. “This funny little tribe I used to go around with—they’d have called you a back-burrower, they’d have thought you weren’t up to them in guts or anything a warrior ought to have. But not one of them had ever gone as far as you, or taken the chances you’ve taken. The bravest band leader in this tribe, he’d have thought he was really something if once in maybe two or three auld lang synes he’d have gone to the edge of the Monster larder and poked his head into the next burrow.”

“We turn right,” the Weapon-Seeker said as they came to the end of the archway. “Watch out for traps. There are always a couple at the larder exit.”

“I’ll bet you’ve seen traps that his old band leader—” Roy jerked a thumb in Eric’s direction, “—never even knew existed. And he was supposed to be a Trap-Smasher. Hey, Eric,” he inquired solicitously, “doesn’t all that hair get in your face? It’s not good for an Eye to get hair in his face.”

“I manage,” Eric said shortly.

“Well, you know. You’re an Eye. At least around your people you’re an Eye. You’re supposed to lead on expeditions, to show the way to the rest. But Walter here, he’s only a Weapon-Seeker, he’s not an Eye, but he knows the way we’re going better than you. That’s because Walter and his people, they’re the kind of guys who really—”

“Do you want me to move up ahead?” Eric asked the Weapon-Seeker. “How about I act as point?”

“Good idea, young fellow. Your vision’s better than mine. We’ll just be going along this stretch of wall until the next rest period. If you see anything suspicious, stop right away and signal.”

Eric edged around the two of them, the tall, bony Runner and the short, muscular Weapon-Seeker. He moved rapidly off about thirty paces ahead and kept going. At this distance, their low voices were barely audible. He began to feel better immediately.

And he realized how accustomed he had become to the fantastic spaces of Monster territory. It was still difficult to look up and out into the dazzling white illumination-. every time he tried it he felt as if his mind were about to wander away and get lost—but he could jog along with the wall brushing his right shoulder, peering all the way ahead and experiencing only the slightest discomfort.

Three times he came to small obstacles which could possibly be traps. Then he signaled to the men behind him who did the same to the main expedition in the rear. After that, it was a matter of walking cautiously away from the wall in a wide semicircle to avoid the obstacle and continue on his way. He still felt as frantic as ever until he got back to the wall and had to fight hard for self-control. Something about being out in the open in all that spacious whiteness made him want to scream and panic and run madly in absolutely any direction.

He tried hard to analyze the feeling and come to grips with it. He was an Eye, after all: some day it might be necessary for him to lead a group right into the middle of a Monster burrow where there was no wall to provide bearings and a sensation of solidity. But the hysteria seemed to remain in spite of all his efforts; each detour caused by a possible trap was as frightening as the one before it.

After passing the last obstacle, he noticed an odd buzzing sound from the wall. Eric stopped and considered it. A new kind of trap, an invisible one? A warning system that the Monsters used to tell them of the approach of humans? He indicated the sound to Walter and Roy by pointing. The Weapon-Seeker listened too, then shrugged and waved Eric on.

But suddenly the stretch of the wall between Eric and the man behind him developed a fissure. It widened rapidly, as if the fabric of the wall were being rolled back. And then the wall in their immediate neighborhood was no longer there, and they were staring into another great white burrow—and at a Moister who was walking placidly in their direction!

Despite all his warrior training, Eric froze. His arms and legs seemed locked into place. He knew, somewhere in his brain, that he hadn’t been noticed, but he stood there, unable to move, while one of the six great legs began to come down immediately over his head. The creature was merely strolling from one Monster burrow to another—it might not even realize it had stepped on a human being.

Walter moved.

He darted away from Roy, who had also become immobilized by terror, and ran around in front of the creature. Then he yelled, waved his arms wildly—and ran straight toward it.

The immense Monster seemed to go into paralysis. It stood rigidly still for a moment as Walter, screaming, waving his arms, his face contorted, kept coming at it. Staring upward, in fear-anguish, Eric could see the flat gray circle that was the underside of its leg—a circle at least twice the thickness of his own body—barely vibrating and poised in the middle of a step as the creature assessed the situation and made up its mind what to do.

Then it reared on its two hind legs, and the entire body as well as the portion of it that had been about to come down on Eric, went up and up into the dizzying distances overhead. A deafening, low register, wailing sound came out of it and rolled massive echoes in all directions. It had jumped, Eric realized, and screamed as it jumped. He saw it turn around in mid-air to face the direction from which it had come: the long, long neck with the tiny head at the end strained forward as if to pull the body behind it as far from Walter the Weapon-Seeker as possible. It came down a substantial distance away in the other burrow, and the floor developed incredible solid waves in response to the impact. Eric was flung off his feet and bounced bone-crackingly from wave to wave. When the waves began to dwindle into ripples and then to mere violent vibrations, when the agitated floor was relatively flat again, Eric got his hands on it and lifted his head.

Far off, in the other burrow, the Monster was still running away from them. Its head, held high in the air by the thin and now-rigid neck, was still bellowing mad panic out of an open mouth. Just behind the head, the little pink growths that encircled the neck were standing out stiffly like so many frozen flames. An incredible stink hung in the air. Then the creature rounded a far-distant corner and was lost to sight.

But the fissure that had opened in the wall—through which the Monster had apparently intended to walk—the fissure was closing. And Walter was on the other side of it!

Eric saw the heavy little Weapon-Seeker scrambling frantically toward him. If the wall closed Walter would be lost to them forever in the unknown depths of Monster territory!

Roy had run up and stood beside Eric. “Move, Walter, move!” the Runner breathed. Walter’s face was torn with fear as he forced his short legs to their utmost.

The gap in the wall through which they were watching the Weapon-Seeker narrowed smoothly. When he was about a pace and a half away, there was barely enough opening for a man’s body to squeeze through.

Without words, both getting the same desperate idea at the same moment, Eric and Roy grabbed the fissure edge at each side and hopelessly tried to keep it from closing further. To their astonishment, no effort was required. The wall stopped coming together the moment their hands were on it: the gap got no narrower.

Walter panted through and flung himself on the floor. Eric and Roy took their hands away. And immediately the wall closed and became solid once more.

Eric poked at it, scratched at it unbelievingly. It was solid enough to break a man’s hand if he hit it too hard. And yet it had opened and closed—and temporarily stopped closing when he and the Runner had merely touched it.

And what had been wrong with the Monster? Had it actually been afraid of Walter the Weapon-Seeker, so tiny in comparison with its own fantastic bulk that it could have crushed, squashed, smeared him with one single casual step?

That was exactly what it had been, Walter assured them, once he had gotten back his breath. “Some of the Monsters are scared to death of us, some aren’t at all. The ones who are afraid will bolt every time if you run directly at them making a lot of noise. Of course, the trick is to know which will bolt and which won’t. The ones’ who aren’t scared will just get a better opportunity to tread on you.”

“I’ve heard of that,” Roy said, nodding. “Some of the older warriors sing stories of being trapped outside the burrows by a Monster and seeing the damned big thing turn tail and take off. But there are other warriors who got trapped and didn’t come back to sing the tale. You never can tell with a Monster.”

“Yes you can. You know those pink tentacles at the top of the neck, right near the head? They’re the things to look for. If they’re short and a dark pink, almost red, then the Monster will bolt when a human being runs at it. Those Monsters are as safe to be around as a newborn baby in the burrows. But if the neck tentacles are long and are colored a whitish pink—look out. A Monster with those kind of tentacles isn’t afraid of you and will step on you every time.”

“Why?” Eric asked. “What’s the size and color of the tentacles got to do with it?”

The Weapon-Seeker spread his hands wide. “How should I know? And who cares why? Not even the Aaron People know—with all their piles of records. It’s a fact, that’s all, a very useful fact.”

“Saved your life, that fact did,” Roy told Eric. “I ll say it’s useful. More useful than most of the facts that your uncle knew—your uncle and the whole people you used to belong to, you know, that bunch you used to call Mankind. Mankind, he used to call them,” Roy said, turning back to Walter. “As if they were the whole human race!”

“Does anyone have any idea, any theory, why it’s so?” Eric kept at the Weapon-Seeker.

Walter glanced back a short distance to where Arthur the Organizer and the rest of the expedition were hurrying up. “What good’s a theory? It’s only worthwhile if you know something for sure. Something that’s usable. Do you remember that other piece of Monster furniture, the first rendezvous back in the larder? Wide and black with green knobs?”

“Yes. I wondered about it.”

“So did I. Last auld lang syne, I was leading a band from my tribe on a weapon bunt. The pickings had been poor, we hadn’t found anything at all good. So on the way back, I thought: who knows, why not, maybe those green knobs are worth something. I sent one of the younger lads shinnying up the piece of furniture. He got all the way to the top, crawled out near the edge and started working away at one of the green knobs. It turned round and round, and he called down that it was getting looser as he turned it. All of a sudden there was a flash of red from the green knob straight up into the air. The lad comes down in a lump, all black and burned, dead long before he hits the floor. Then, the next thing, all the lights go out. Pitch black in Monster territory, none of that whiteness, nothing. We have to pick our way back to the burrows with our forehead glow lamps. And just before we get to the doorway my people use, the light comes back on, all clear and white, as if nothing had happened. Well, what did happen? I don’t know, I don’t care. If I could ever figure out a way to turn it into a usable weapon, I might care a lot. Till then, just another Monster doodad.”

“Of course, you understand, Eric,” said Arthur the Organizer who had come up and been listening, “you understand that we are interested in the why and wherefore of everything that pertains to the Monsters. As devout Alien-Sciencers, we have to be. It’s just that there is, if you follow me, a time and a place for everything. All safe and sound, Walter?”

“Damned well safe and sound,” the Weapon-Seeker growled. “It was touchy for at bit, though. Is it all right with you if I keep the kid on point and let him lead us the rest of the way? He is an Eye, a first-class Eye. He heard the buzz of a Monster doorway about to open and warned me. I shrugged it off.”

Arthur smiled warningly. “Don’t start shrugging at your age. We need you. You know the saying about Monster territory: ‘A step in time saves nine in the sewer.’ ”

Now officially lead-off man for the expedition, Eric received his instructions from Walter the Weapon-Seeker and moved off. He saw Roy scowling. The Runner was to act as liaison between the scout group and the main body: it was evident that he considered it a demotion. Too bad—he just didn’t have the blood-line of Eric the Storeroom-Stormer, and he should have learned to live with that fact.

The Storeroom-Stormer had been out somewhere deep in Monster territory with his wife, Eric’s mother, when he had been killed. That was what his Uncle Thomas had told him. And it had been on a most unusual Theft. Unusual enough to have called for a woman’s assistance. What conceivable kind of Theft could that have been?

Eric stared ahead and around into the bright, white distances of the Monster burrow. Here and there, he could see strange, huge objects, not at all like those in the larder. Were they furniture? Weapons? And had his parents once passed this way and seen the same objects, wondered as he was wondering? Or had they possibly known?

But all the time, his mind was on the alert for danger: that was the prime function of an Eye. And all the time, his mind recorded the route, making whatever deductions, whatever generalizations it could for future use: that was the best part of being an Eye.

He knew so little. Walter, uninterested in theory, knew a lot.

Whenever they stopped for a meal, squatting against the wall, he sought Walter out and explored the older man’s knowledge, whatever there was of it. Were there human burrows on the other side of this stretch of wall—how could you tell if there were or if there weren’t? That pitout there in the floor, in the middle of Monster territory, could it possibly denote a section of plumbing large enough to sewer a Monster corpse? Why, whenever they saw a Monster humping along in the middle of the floor and froze into absolute stillness in response to Eric’s signal, was there no likelihood whatever that it would come over and travel along the wall like humans did? Why did humans journey close to walls and Monsters a substantial distance from them?

“You can think up a lot of crazy questions, young fellow,” the Weapon-Seeker chuckled. “But that one’s easy. Work it out.”

Eric thought. “We travel along the wall for cover. We’re in a strange place, a dangerous place. We want to keep our visibility down. But to the Monsters this is home. They walk where it’s most comfortable, in the middle, just as we would in our own burrows. They have nothing to be afraid of, nothing to hide from. Is that it?”

“I think so. Makes sense, doesn’t it? Only thing, don’t expect every aspect of the Monsters to be as logical. They’re different from us, they’re alien. That’s the whole point.”

Eric would nod, but immediately come back with another question. Even if the Weapon-Seeker didn’t know the answer, he could have a fact which might relate, or which might, upon examination, turn into an important clue—or which might just be important, worth knowing, in and of itself. There was so much to learn, to be worked out. He tore at the Weapon-Seeker’s mind as if it were a sack in a Monster larder and he, Eric, were a starving man.

As soon as Arthur declared it night, and they all stopped for sleep, Eric would crawl to where Walter was curled up and begin his questions again. He would. ignore a loud remark addressed by Roy to the empty air—“Assistant scouts will go sucking around their chief scout every damn time. Never seen it to fail!”—and ask about any oddity he had observed on the route that day, what he might be expected to see on the next.

Walter had apparently developed a great liking for Eric. He answered the young man’s questions with great good humor. “You remind me of a kid in the band I used to lead back with my own people,” he said one night. “The kid asks me: ‘Our burrows are in the walls of the Monster burrows, right? The Monster burrows are outside and all around us?’ ‘Right,’ I tell him. ‘Well, then,’ he says, ‘what’s outside the Monster burrows?’ I look at him as if he’s crazy. ‘What the hell do you mean?’ ‘I mean,’ he says, ‘maybe the Monster burrows are in the walls of even bigger burrows. Maybe there are creatures living in those burrows who’d make the Monsters look tiny. Maybe there are such things as Monster Monsters.’ Ever hear anything as wild as that?” The Weapon-Seeker lay on his back and roared with delight.

“It’s an idea,” Eric said, intrigued. “Why is it wild?”

“Oh, kid, please! You know why. You can’t have Monsters, and Monster Monsters a hundred times bigger, and Monster-Monster Monsters a hundred times bigger than that. You just can’t have it. The whole thing has to stop some place.”

“All right. But suppose—”

“Stop supposing,” the Weapon-Seeker admonished. “Stick to facts. They’re tough enough and complicated enough. Tomorrow, we’ll be heading into the burrow where the Monsters keep the weapon we’re after. And don’t ask me about that weapon!” he ordered, holding up his hands. “I told you, not a word about it until I see it and we get set to grab it up. I’ll know it when I find it—that’s my job. But your job is to lead the way, and you’re going to need a good night’s sleep.”

“This burrow we’ll be going into—” Eric began.

“And don’t ask me about the burrow, either! It’s the place where the Monsters keep their best and most powerful weapons. That’s all you have to know. Now, for the sweet love of Alien-Science, will you let me get some sleep?”

Eric gave up. He lay on his side, as he did part of every sleep period, reviewing and reviewing. The conclusions came just as he began to doze. He was_more convinced than ever that there was no specific weapon that Walter was leading them to, merely the hope of one. This burrow they were to enter, on the other hand …

A low, urgent call from the man on guard duty brought him and all the others awake.

When they saw what had startled the guard, they scrambled to their feet, faces turning pale, bodies sweating and shuddering with overwhelming fear.

Two hundred or so paces away, a Monster, one of the largest they’d ever seen, stood staring at them calmly. The great gray legs supporting the enormous gray body were set wide apart, as a man might stand to study carefully an interesting phenomenon. The extended neck waved slightly to and fro, bringing the head with its unblinking eyes first here, then there. The tentacles at the base of the head—they were quite long, Eric noticed, and a very light shade of pink—undulated in sympathy with the neck as if they too had some sort of eyes and were trying to see as well as they could. But there was no suggestion of imminent attack.

On both sides, there was a dead silence. Neither the trembling humans nor the gigantic, watching Monster made a sound. Eric found himself breathing rapidly: he made up his mind that if sudden panic developed, he would try to run in a different direction from the rest.

What did the terrifying creature want? What precisely was it looking at? And what was happening inside its alien mind?

Abruptly, it wheeled and presented its back to them. Then it strode away, off, off into the white distance. Despite its size, the floor shook only slightly as it went. They watched it until it was no longer visible. And the moment it was gone, everyone began to babble, more than a few hysterically.

“Walter,” Arthur the Organizer called out. “What do you think? What was going on?”

They all turned to the Weapon-Seeker. He shook his head. “I don’t know,” he said. “I’ve never seen one of them do a thing like that before.”

14

A council of war was held on the incident, to determine whether it should be allowed to affect their plans. There were three men in the council: Arthur the Organizer, who presided, Walter the Weapon-Seeker, since he alone knew anything at all about this area to which they had come, and the oldest member of the expedition, a white-haired and surprisingly spry old fellow by the name of Manny the Manufacturer, selected apparently out of deference to his age and nothing else.

Roy and Eric were asked to participate in a non-voting advisory capacity, it being presumed, Eric decided with a wry, internal giggle, that as scouts and front-burrowers they would know something the others did not about unusual circumstances and extraordinary dangers.

“We can go on or we can go back,” Arthur the Organizer pointed out. “If we go back, we’ve failed and we don’t have much. If we go on, we have to take it for granted that we might be—and please notice that I say no more than might be—walking straight into disaster.”

Walter the Weapon-Seeker drummed on the floor with an impatient foot. “Sure. They’ll be expecting us. And they’ll be laying for us.”

“Possibly. And then again, possibly not.” Arthur held up a finger and faced each one of them in turn. “The Monsters don’t think as we do: we have no reason to believe that they react as we do, or give alarms as we do. This creature might have been simply curious about us. The way it went on about its business would argue for that point of view. It’s one of the things we must consider seriously.”

“Consider!” the Weapon-Seeker spat. “Considering is your job, not mine. Doing something is my job. I say we go ahead and do what we started out to do.”

“We don’t have a choice, anyway,” said Manny the Manufacturer. “If we go back without the weapon we came for, we spend the rest of our lives as outlaws. I don’t think lives like that are worth a hell of a lot. And neither do most of the men. I say let’s take our chances.”

Arthur turned to his two front-burrowers. “Eric?”

Eric the Eye tried to give as much formal dignity as possible to his first opinion in a council. “I believe we should go on. As planned.”

“Mind telling us your reasons?”

“Well,” Eric unbent a bit. “If there’s been an alarm, the Monsters know we’re here. There’s no nearby doorway into the burrows: we can’t escape. They could be waiting for us both ways—whether we go on or whether we go back. At least if we go on, we stand a chance of getting something. And I agree with Manny that an outlaw’s life is a pretty damn unappetizing prospect.”

“Roy?”

The Runner shuffled and made a large, indeterminate gesture with his left hand. “There’s this and there’s that. There’s a lot to consider. It’s awfully easy for some people to sound off and say they know for sure what the Monsters are doing—that we should follow our original plans, no matter what. Some people still have hair all over their eyes. The only thing I heard that makes sense is what you said, Arthur—that we should consider. It sounds like an intelligent thing to do. I vote to do what you suggested: to consider.”

“You don’t have a vote,” the Weapon-Seeker told him. “All you have a right to give is your opinion. What the kid said,” he pointed to Eric with his thumb, “is about it. If they’re laying for us, they’re laying for us both Ways, ahead and behind. Ahead’s where we want to go. So let’s go.”

Arthur summed up. “The sense of this meeting is that at least two of you, Walter and Manny, feel we risk as much by turning back as by going on—and that there are substantial advantages to going on. I’m inclined to go along with that majority view, so long as we proceed with all the caution that these new circumstances make necessary. You see, Roy,” he said placatingly, “it’s not that we reject your advice, but in a democratic discussion you have to give a little and take a little. You can’t always have your own way.”

The tall, thin young man looked from Arthur to Eric, then pulled a spear out of his back sling and walked off to the head of the column.

“You give Eric some idea of what to look out for,” Arthur suggested to Walter. “I’d like to start moving as soon as possible—before there’s much more talk among the men.”

“Right!” growled Manny the Manufacturer. “Let’s get this expedition off the floor.”

There wasn’t much that the Weapon-Seeker could tell him, Eric found out. It was now quite clear that Walter had only seen this new Monster burrow from the entrance, and very briefly. He could describe the first piece of Monster furniture in the place—and that was all.

From now on, Eric realized, he would really have to be an Eye.

He went through the archway into the burrow that was the goal of the expedition, Walter some thirty paces behind him. When he saw the succession of tall black rods standing on the floor, crisscrossed horizontally with dozens of other rods, he waved to the Weapon-Seeker, who passed the wave on to the men in his rear. Then the chunky chief scout pointed forward, giving Eric the order to move on.

Now came the hard part, the truly frightening part. At least, there were no Monsters about—none that he could see.

Eric swallowed. He left the archway, and the wall. He crept out into open Monster territory, where there was nothing but the harsh white light and stretching vistas of floor.

His heart began pounding. He found that his regular, cautious breathing was turning into noisy gasps. He felt exposed, terrifyingly vulnerable, completely alone. And lost—he felt as if he would be lost in that whiteness forever.

What was he doing here? He belonged back there, cowering against the blessedly safe wall!

But he put his head down and continued to creep forward. Another step. And another. Now he had to force himself to slow: he’d been about to burst.,into a mad dash at nowhere.

Easy. Another step. And don’t look up—just as when you first came into Monster territory, days ago as an initiate warrior. Another step without looking up, without going wild with panic.

How far away was that rod-supported piece of Monster furniture? Did this floor go on forever? Another step. A great frightened gasp. Another step. And another—

He had arrived. His shoulder touched a rod. He flung his arm around it and hauled his mind back to calmness. He had arrived. He was near cover again. And at last he could look up.

Still no Monsters that he could see anywhere in the place. He held on to the rod with the crook of his elbow and signaled to Walter at the archway. Walter passed the signal on, shuddered, and then left the wall himself.

Eric watched him sympathetically for a moment, then turned back to examine the thing he was standing under.

It was composed of these black rods, each as thick as his arm and each rising perpendicularly from the floor straight into the dizzy heights above. Every fifteen or so paces, another rod reared into the air. And at intervals, each many times the height of a man, there were the rods running across at right angles to the others.

Here and there, high among the rods, where a horizontal crossed a vertical, there was a small, semitransparent cube at the junction point. The light was sharply reflected from these cubes, making it difficult to look at them steadily, but some of them had strange shadows flickering inside them. Did the shadows have anything to do with a weapon they might be able to use?

Eric found it was impossible to stare upward very long; he looked back at Walter to see how the chief scout was progressing. Not well: the man’s face was almost purple with the overseasoned mixture of effort and fear. His feet were beginning to splay; his knees were folding forward and down. He wouldn’t make it.

Taking a deep breath, Eric flung himself away from the relative safety of the rod and leaped across the floor. By the time he reached Walter, the man had almost collapsed. He grabbed Eric’s arm with both hands—his eyes were tightly shut by now—and would have pulled him down if fright had not so thoroughly loosened his muscles.

“The wall—” he babbled. “Give it up—let’s get back to the wall!”

“Easy,” Eric said. “Easy, Walter. We’re almost there.”

He guided the Weapon-Seeker the last few paces to the rod. Walter held on to the upright post as desperately as Eric had and fought for breath. It was no simple thing for a human being to leave the wall in Monster territory.

Fortunately, there were plenty of upright rods in this structure. They weren’t thick, but they were solid: they would give the feeling of cover and at least the semblance of cover to all the men in the expedition. But he and Walter would have to distribute them down the rows of rods—no point in having too many men grouped around any one post. And they’d be dealing with panic-stricken lunatics who would tend to hang on as if for life itself to the first solid things they encountered.

Roy came across next. He had a hard time, but he didn’t do nearly as badly as Walter. It was obvious that the younger the man, the more resilient he was psychologically, and the more capable of taking the shattering experience of negotiating open Monster territory. They guided Roy to a rod: he wound himself around it for a dozen tortured breaths before coming to and taking a look up, down, forward, backward.

The rest of the expedition came over in groups of three. They had their hands full with men who slumped to the floor and wound themselves up in tight little balls of refusal, with men whose eyes suddenly rolled up in their heads and who wandered jerkily off in this direction or in that, with men who started to run away and who would bite and kick and gouge when they were caught. But fully half of the men made it across by themselves.

When they had been distributed, one or two men to each upright post climbing above their heads into emptiness, Eric, Roy and Walter discussed the next move with Arthur.

“I think we’ll stay here for a while and take a break for a meal,” the Organizer decided. “Do you agree? I think we should. We’ll wait till everybody calms down and comes back to normal. Meanwhile, do you three feel like going on ahead arid taking a look at what we’ve got coming up? How many more open spaces—you know, problems we might be facing—anything that looks like a weapon—whatever strikes you as a good idea.”

Eric and Roy followed Walter to the last row of standing rods. They shaded their eyes and stared across a long empty stretch of floor—to where there was another rod-like structure, very much like the one they were in.

“What do you think those shiny cubes are?” Eric asked, pointing. Here and there, high in the other structure, were semitransparent boxes just like the ones above them. A few contained liquid shadows.

“I don’t know,” Walter admitted. “But I intend to find out. They’re what I noticed when I passed this way before. They look as if they might be useful. Only, how will we get up to them? Think a spry man might climb up one of these rods?”

Eric and Roy considered the height and the lack of handholds. They both shook their heads. The Weapon-Seeker nodded ruefully.

“Then there’s only one thing to do. We go on until we find a structure low enough to climb. Monster furniture comes in all kinds of different sizes. We’ll find a low one with some shiny boxes close to the floor. And we’ll find other stuff, too. In this place, I have a real strong feel—”

“Hold it!” Eric grabbed his arm. “Listen! Do you hear it?”

The short, heavy man, listened anxiously for a moment, then shook his head. “Not a thing. What do you hear?”

But Roy had also tensed at Eric’s warning and leaned forward alertly. “Something’s coming this way. It’s not much of a sound yet, mostly vibration. You can feel it with your feet.”

The Weapon-Seeker listened again. This time he nodded rapidly. “Monsters. And more than one.” He whirled to face the expedition, strung out at the bases of the rods behind them. Pointing his forefinger straight up in the air, he rotated one hand rapidly over his head. This, the most fearful alarm of all to any band, had to be given silently. It meant: “Monsters are upon us—up there—look out!”

No reaction from the others, and the three of them groaned to themselves. The members of the expedition were stuffing food into their mouths, taking swallows out of canteens, chatting together in low, friendly voices. No one was bothering to watch the scouts.

What a bunch, Eric raged hopelessly. Baby warriors, his uncle, Thomas the Trap-Smasher, would have called them.

The rumbling noises were getting louder. Walter made up his mind to dispense with expedition security precautions. “You damn fools!” he yelled. “Monsters! Don’t you hear them?”

That got a reaction. Every man leaped to his feet, knapsacks and canteens rolling away. White faces turned rapidly in their direction, looked off to examine the brilliantly lit spaces above.

Eric slapped the backs of the two scouts on either side of him. “Let’s get out of here,” he said urgently. This was traditionally an every-man-for-himself situation among the peoples of the burrows. He pointed across the floor to the other rod-like structure. “There! They’ll be after the bulk of the men in this one. Let’s go!”

Without waiting for a reply, he darted out into the open. From the corners of his eyes, he was conscious as he ran of huge gray Monsters materializing out of the whiteness on all sides. Those things could move fast when they wanted to! And in relative silence, too—the floor was vibrating no more than it had this morning when the creature watching them had walked away.

He ran fast, forcing every bit of speed out of his legs, not at all aware now of the openness of the space he was on. The only thought in his mind concerned the Monsters all about him. Would he be stepped on? When? Would he feel it when it happened—or would it be over too fast?

A moment before he reached the other set of rods, somebody passed him and leaped into hiding among the posts of the structure. Roy the Runner, starting late, had the legs to make up for lost time. Then Eric was there too, cowering behind a rod. He watched Walter the Weapon Seeker stumble the last couple of paces and fall gasping two rods away from him.

But the rest of the expedition was in trouble. The men scrambled about, mindlessly, shrieking, inside the rod structure they had quit. Five Monsters now stood around it in silence, making any escape to the outside almost impossible.

The Monsters had known where the expedition lay hidden—they had made directly for it. And they were doing something in an organized fashion. What?

Eric strained his eyes to see, but the movements of the gray bodies were unfamiliar and unclear. Suddenly, from each one of them, a long green rope dropped to the floor. The ropes seemed almost alive: as they lay on the floor they quivered and bits of darker color slid up and down their coils.

There was a click from one of the Monsters, then a long, scraping musical note. The ropes began acting even more like live things. They slid into the rod-like structure and among the upright posts. Wherever they touched a man, they turned completely dark and he was carried along with them, apparently stuck to their surface.

“All together, now!” Eric heard Arthur the Organizer yelling. “Stay together and work on these ropes. All we have to do is get each man free—” Then a rope touched him in passing and he became just another shrieking attachment, alternately tugging and pushing at it. In a few brief moments, every man m the other structure was a madly wriggling prisoner.

“They seem to want us alive,” Walter whispered to Eric. “And do you notice how these Monsters move around? They’re a lot more deliberate than any I’ve ever seen before.”

With their clusters of screaming, arm-waving humanity, the green ropes were picked up one at a time by the Monsters. Eric saw that the long necks came down and the pink tentacles near the head did the grasping. The tentacles, then, were the equivalent of hands—or fingers.

“There goes the entire expedition!” Roy called out hysterically. “What do we do now? What the hell do we do now?”

Walter shot an angry scowl in his direction. “Keep your voice down, you damn fool! If you lose control of yourself, we’re all three dead.”

As if in corroboration, a long neck twisted down out of the whiteness above, and a -Monster’s head swung to and fro inquiringly outside the rod-like structure in which they were hiding. It was only a man’s height above the floor and Eric, nauseated with fear, felt that the eyes, in each of which a narrow, purple iris swam, were staring directly at him. And that pointed, stinking mouth—at least three men could disappear into it without creating a noticeable bulge!

He forced himself to stand absolutely still, although every muscle in his body yearned to leap off and make a run for it. Those pink tentacles—this close, for the first time, he saw how incredibly long they were—they could probably grab him up with ease.

But the monster, though staring directly in his direction, did not seem to see him. The head poked around among the rods and a corner of it touched Roy where he stood rigidly a short distance away.

The Runner threw his hands up, screamed—and ran. Instantly, the head was pulled up out of sight. Roy flung himself to the other end of the structure.

“Now we’re in for it,” said Walter the Weapon-Seeker grimly. The two of them saw a rope drop among the rods near Roy. It slid toward him smoothly, caught him—and kept going. It was going for them.

“We scatter,” the Weapon-Seeker ordered. “Good luck, kid.”

They leaped apart in opposite directions. Eric bent over, trying to keep his body low, for minimum visibility, and sped in a zigzag course among the rods. If he could get to the other side, there might be another structure nearby–

He heard Walter yell, and he spent a precious moment on a look. The Weapon-Seeker was now caught on the green rope only a few paces from the struggling Runner. And the rope was sliding swiftly at Eric, pulling both men along with it.

Eric straightened. Visibility was unimportant now—he might as well be running as fast as he could.

He heard the yells of Walter and Roy coming closer and closer behind him. He could not run any faster. He just could not run any faster…

Swift, terrible cold touched his side and he was pulled off his feet. He found himself screaming. He hammered at the green rope, dark black where it was attached to his hip. It was like a part of him—it couldn’t be pulled off. He screamed and screamed and screamed.

A Monster head came down and one of the pink tentacles grasped an end of the rope. Up they went, the three of them, screaming, flailing their arms and legs, beating against the rope with their fists, up they went, higher wad higher, into the dizzying whiteness, up, up they went to where the floor was no longer visible, to where the Monsters could examine them, the Monsters whose prisoners they were.

15

Eric was never able to remember clearly what happened afterward. It was as if a massive hysteria had crashed into his mind and obliterated most of the record. There were isolated, scattered impressions: the rope from which he hung being passed from one neckful of pink tentacles to another, a great purple eye coming intently close, a gust of stinking, suffocating Monster breath—but over all beat the memory of men screaming as they dangled from the heights in clusters all around him, his own will and self-awareness completely lost in that hoarse, unending chorus of the doomed.

The impressions he retained of that moment became coherent only after the rope to which he, Walter and Roy were attached had been dipped by a Monster into a large, transparent box and he suddenly found himself able to walk again on a floor. Near him, the other two scouts were getting to their feet, yells subsiding into painful, sobbing breaths; while over their heads, the rope, of which they were at last gratefully free, was being pulled back into the heights, its color no longer bright but a dirty greenish gray. A large proportion of the expedition was already standing all around him, and the rest arrived in the next few moments as rope after rope was lowered into the transparent box, discharged its prisoners, went limp and was pulled away.

Boxes? Transparent boxes? Eric stared down intently. Through the bottom, he saw layer after layer of intersecting rods under his feet. Every once in a while, at the junction of a set of rods there would be a large box, such as the one he was in. Some of the boxes contained humans; others were empty.

Walter met his eyes when he looked up. “Sure,” the Weapon-Seeker said with a grimace. “Those shiny boxes with shadows in them. The shadows were men. The boxes are cages.” He cursed. “Walter the Weapon-Seeker, they call me. And this big, new weapon I was going to get from the Monsters turns out to be—We got it all right. We got it good.”

The other men had been listening. Manny the Manufacturer came up, holding a forefinger in the air. He looked right past them, his old, wrinkled face heavy with thought. “Cages,” he muttered. “There was a legend about these things in the old religion—in the Ancestor-Science we used to believe in. What was it? Something about what happened to people who fooled around with Alien-Science, who had too much to do with the Monster’s—Let me remember—”

They waited while he shook the forefinger slowly at his mind. “Cages. Yes. Once, when I was a boy, I heard these things described in terms of Ancestor-Science. The Cages of Sin. That was it—the Cages of Sin! And there was a line about them that went like this: The cages of sin is death.”

“Are death, you mean,” someone corrected. “The Cages of Sin are death.”

“That’s not the way the line went,” Manny insisted. “Not the way I heard it. It went: The cages of sin is death. Just like that”

A chilled silence followed. After a while, a man dropped to his knees and began muttering an Ancestor-Science litany used by his own people. Another man from the same tribe knelt beside him and joined in. The chant filled the cage, awoke guilty memories in all of them.

O ancestors, O ancestors, I have failed and I have forgotten. Forgive me. I have failed to hit back at the Monsters in the ways you taught. Forgive me. I have forgotten to follow your ways. Forgive me, forgive me…

Eric shook himself out of the hypnosis of misery the words induced. Give in to this sort of thing and they’d be worth nothing. The whole bunch of them would be so much sewerage.

He still burned with shame when he thought of how the mass panic had swept him up a short while ago. That was no way for an Eye to act—and he was an Eye. An Eye should observe and record, no matter how fearfully unusual the circumstances, even if death seemed imminent. Wherever and however he found himself, an Eye must store impressions for future use: he must act like an Eye.

This cage, now—He walked away from the group surrounding the kneeling men. Roy the Runner and Walter the Weapon-Seeker gave him a startled glance, then fell in behind him. They passed Arthur the Organizer, sitting on the floor, his head in his hands. “Forgive me,” Arthur was intoning. “Forgive me, forgive me… ”

Less than ten paces by twelve paces, those were the dimensions of the cage. Not very much room for so many men—they were pretty crowded. The Monsters would probably make some provision for feeding them: there was no point in taking them alive if they weren’t intended to be fed. But there would be the problem of garbage and body waste. Eric studied the floor and saw how it sloped to one corner of the cage where there was a rod junction. A hole in that corner went down into a rod: evidently the rod was hollow. But a very small, single hole for such a large number of men—how did the Monsters propose to keep the cage from becoming foul?

Eric put the problem aside temporarily and walked to one of the four perpendicular walls, Walter and Roy still following him and trying to read the reactions on his face. The wall was transparent and solid: Eric made sure of that by thumping it with his knuckles and trying to scratch it with a spear point. He threw back his head, estimating the distance to the top. About three and a half men high, with a lip that curved in and down for about an arm’s length. Still—

“We could get four husky men to stand side by side against it,” he suggested to Walter. “Three men standing on their shoulders, two men on theirs. A pyramid. Then a man could scramble up their bodies and pull himself over the lip.”

The Weapon-Seeker considered. “He might. But four and three and two—that would leave nine men behind in the cage. Who’d volunteer to be left behind?”

“That’s not your problem,” said a weak voice behind them. “Your problem is what you do when you get out of here.”

They turned. There was an oddlooking man lying on the floor in the midst of the woebegone expedition. He didn’t appear to be a Stranger, Eric decided, and he certainly wasn’t a member of Mankind. While his hair was tied in the back of his head Stranger-fashion, he was dressed in some ridiculous garment that was not a loincloth and certainly not loin straps—a short leather skirt with pockets all around its circumference. From several pockets, unfamiliar articles protruded.

And he was badly hurt. The upper part of his face and the whole right side of his body showed wide, dark bruises; his right arm and leg were limp and apparently broken.

“Were you already in the cage when they dropped us in?” Eric asked.

“I was. But you people had too many troubles of your own to notice me.” He groaned and shut his eyes before going on. “You see, if you get out of here, you’ve nowhere to go. The walls of the cage are as smooth outside as inside—you’d just drop to the main floor, a full Monster-height below. And even if you made it to one of the rods—what good would that do? No handholds, nothing to grip anywhere along their length. Now, what I’ve been lying here wondering is this: could you pool your hair straps and your loin straps, braid them into a rope—”

“We could!” Walter broke in excitedly. “I know how, and there are other men here who-”

“But then I dismissed that idea, too. At most, you’d get a rope that only one of two men could use and would have to take with them from rod to rod. You’re dealing with fantastic heights, remember. And from what I know of the quality of the leather you people turn out—no, it would just be another way to get killed.” He paused, thought a bit. “Although, maybe not a bad way. Not a bad way to get killed at all.”

The three of them soaked that in, shuddered. “Speaking of people,” the Weapon-Seeker said in a low voice. “What are yours?”

“My tribe, you mean? That’s my business. Now—kindly go away. I’m—I’m afraid I’m going to suffer a bit.”

Roy the Runner grunted angrily. “We’ll go away. Be glad to. Get in touch with us when you learn some manners and friendliness.”

He walked off. The Weapon-Seeker scratched his head, looked at Eric, shrugged. He caught up to the Runner.

Eric squatted next to the wounded man. “Can I help you in any way?” he asked. “Could you use some water?”

The man licked his lips. “Water? How would you get water up here when it’s not feeding time? Oh, I forgot. You warrior types, you carry canteens around with you. Yes, I’d very much appreciate some water.”

Unslinging his canteen, Eric brought it to the man’s mouth. The fellow certainly was no warrior—he seemed to know nothing of drinking discipline while on expedition. He would have finished the whole canteen, if Eric, conscious always of what must be set aside for an emergency, had not gently pulled it back and stoppered it.

“Thanks,” the man sighed. “I’ve been taking pills for the pain, but I haven’t been able to do anything about thirst. Thank you very much.” He looked up. “My name’s Jonathan Danielson.”

“Mine’s Eric. Eric the Eye.”

“HeIIo, Eric. You’re from a—” pause, as a twinge of pain arched through the prone body “—from a front-burrow people, aren’t you?”

“Yes, my tribe calls itself Mankind. The only one that’s left from it, who’s still with me, is that tall fellow, Roy the Runner. The one who got mad at you.”

“The only one that’s left—” the man seemed to be talking to himself. “I’m the only one left. Fourteen of us, and they got every one. Just one kick from a Monster. Broken bodies all over the place. I was lucky: the foot barely touched me. Smashed my ribs—internal hemorrhages—I don’t think anyone else got off so lightly.”

When his voice trailed off, Eric asked hesitantly: “Is that what we can expect? Is that what the Monsters will do to us?”

Jonathan Danielson jerked his head impatiently, then winced as the movement hurt him. “Uhh! No, of course not. All of that happened when I was captured. Anything as crude as a kick—that’s the last thing the Monsters are likely to do to you here. You know where you are, don’t you?”

“This cage, you mean?”

“This place. This place where all these cages are. It’s a Pest Control Center.”

“Pest? Control Center?”

The battered face grinned up at him sourly. “You and me. Humans, generally. We’re pests as far as the Monsters are concerned. We steal their food, we upset them, we infest their houses. They’d like to get rid of us. This is a place where they do research on ways and means to get rid of us. It’s a laboratory where they test all kinds of homicides: sprays, traps, poisoned lures, everything. But they need laboratory animals for the tests. That’s what we are, laboratory animals.”

Later, Eric made his way back thoughtfully to the center of the cage where Roy and Walter sat dispiritedly with their arms about their knees.

“People are getting tired, Eric,” the Runner said. “They’ve had a hard day, a real bad day. They’d like to go to sleep. But Arthur just sits there mumbling his prayers. He won’t talk to anyone.”

Eric nodded. He cupped his hands at his mouth. “Listen, everybody!” he called. “You can go to sleep. I hereby declare it night!”

“Do you hear that?” Roy sang out beside him. “Our leader has declared it night. Everybody go to sleep!”

All over the cage, men began stretching out gratefully on the floor. “Thanks, Eric. Good night. Good night, Eric.”

He pointed to Walter and Roy. “You’ll be sentries on the first watch. Pick any two men you trust to relieve you. And give orders to wake me if anything out of the ordinary ppens.”

When they had taken their posts at opposite walls of the cage, he lay down himself and put his arms behind his head. He had a lot to think about, and it was hard to fall asleep.

Pest Control Center… Laboratory animals…

Where they test all kinds of homicides…

16

There was no need to declare it morning. They were awakened by breakfast, quantities of food being dropped into their cage out of a long transparent tube held over the edge by a Monster. Some of the food was familiar to those of them who had seen it freshly stolen from a Monster larder; some of it was new and disquietingly different; but all of it was edible.

After a great pile of the variously colored lumps had rained into their midst, the tube was withdrawn and they saw it inserted in other cages of the rod structure. Shortly after they had finished eating, the Monster brought the tube back and hung it over one corner. Water poured out of it now, so that the men could drink, but it also poured down the sloping floor to the hole in the opposite corner, washing away all leftovers and whatever waste matter had accumulated during the night.

Simple enough, Eric thought. So much for sanitation.

There was a dense crowd pushing and—shouldering around the stream of water—he’d have to organize them better the next time. Meanwhile, it would compromise a leader’s dignity to join their scramble. He gave his canteen to Roy, telling the Runner to fill it and also see that the wounded man had plenty to drink.

When the Runner looked doubtful, he said simply and definitely: “That’s an order, Roy,” and turned away. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw the Runner trot off immediately and follow his instructions. Eric felt relieved—after a night’s sleep and the general recovery of nerve, he’d been afraid that his position might be questioned.

The important thing, he decided, was to give the men plenty to do. It would keep them from worrying and would at the same time emphasize his new status as leader.

Arthur, his predecessor in command, was a good place to start.

The water from the tube abruptly died to a trickle and the tube itself was pulled away from the lip at the top of the cage. Several of the men who hadn’t managed to fill their canteens protested loudly, but the Monster, its pink tentacles holding the dripping tube firmly near its spear-point-shaped head, walked off about its business.

The Organizer brought his canteen down after a long swallow and wiped his mouth with the back of a hand. Eric crossed to him, conscious that most of the expedition was watching.

“We have a problem in organization here, Arthur,” he said. “Something for you to handle. We can’t have all the men jostling in a bunch, each man trying to fill his own canteen. That way there’ll always be somebody doing without. Think you could work out a better system?”

Arthur was apparently quite content to have given up the function of command decision in favor of the second-level administration planning which he knew so well. He smiled affirmatively. “Yes. I’ve been thinking about it. I don’t see why we couldn’t—”

Eric gave him a friendly slap on the shoulder. “Don’t tell me. Show me. I’ll leave it completely in your hands.” He had seen his uncle, Thomas the Trap-Smasher, talk to his men in precisely this way—and he knew it worked.

It worked. Arthur began detailing a group of men to act as guards around any future water supply and another group to practice as a canteen brigade. Eric called Walter the Weapon-Seeker to his side.

“I want you to requisition all spare leather straps that the men are carrying. Braid them into experimental ropes. Try it different ways, two strands, three strands, whatever occurs to you. Let’s see how strong a rope we can get.”

The Weapon-Seeker shook his head. “Don’t expect it to work. We can’t do much braiding with the short lengths the men are liable to come up with. I’ve been turning it over in my mind, and that wounded Stranger was right. The kind of straps we have—they’re fine for holding hair in place or even a knapsack, but if you tie them into any kind of length and expect them to support real weight, say three or four men, they’ll just snap.”

“Try it anyhow,” Eric urged. “And use as many men as you can. If they’re busy enough, they won’t have the time to get scared.” He paused. “How come you called the wounded man a Stranger? Isn’t that a front-burrow term?”

“Sure. But we back-burrowers use it too. For people like him.” Walter gestured with his thumb. “I ve seen that kind of skirt before, with pockets all over. You know who wears those skirts? The Aaron People.”

Intrigued, Eric stared in the direction that Walter was indicating. The Aaron People again. The legendary people from which his grandmother had come. The people who had refused to join in the Alien-Science revolution, but who also, it seemed, had not particularly opposed it. The man did not look so very different. He was responding to Roy’s ministrations feebly, but—except for his clothes—he might just as well have been any one of the men in the expedition who had been wounded.

“Why wouldn’t he identify himself? Why keep it a secret?”

“That’s the Aaron People for you. They’re goddam snobs. They think they’re better than the rest of us and that we shouldn’t have any idea of what they’re up to. They’re always like that, the bastards.”

Eric was amused to note again that a back-burrower like Walter was as uncertain intellectually relative to the Aaron People as a warrior of Mankind might be when confronted with the superior material culture of almost any Stranger at all.

But he himself was a warrior of Mankind—and most of the expedition was probably aware of it. How long would they follow a front-burrower?

“Get on with those ropes,” he said. “We may need them. I’m planning on a mass escape.”

“Seriously?” There was a momentary flash of hope in Walter’s eyes. “How?”

“I’m not too sure, just yet. I’m still working on it. Something we used to do back in my home tribe.”

The Weapon-Seeker went off to organize groups of men for rope research. He must have passed on what Eric had said to him: from time to time, a group would whisper excitedly when its young leader walked by.

Eric had seen them sitting around glumly the night before: he knew that men without hope are wdrse than useless. And he—or somebody else—might come up with a usable idea at any time. The men should be on their toes and ready to move when that happened.

But there was no sense in lying to himself about his primary reason for starting the rumor. He needed it to reinforce his position. Men had to be given reason for believing in their leader—especially when the leader came from a background most of them despised.

He had reached the quiet, flat conviction that he was the best chief they could have, under the circumstances. It was not simply that he’d been the first to recover last night and had taken over because somebody had to. No. He’d seen more than enough of back-burrow methods on expedition: their poor march discipline, their disorganized reactions to the unexpected, their interminable talk when a quick decision was necessary. He was willing to admit now that almost any Stranger knew more facts and possessed more processing skills than he, was a better man when it came to large-scale burrow politics or the intricate details of religious discussion—but it took a warrior of Mankind, trained from childhood in the dangerous front burrows, to point the way to survival amid the constantly recurring catastrophes of Monster territory. And he was a warrior of Mankind, the son of one famous band leader and the nephew of another, a proven Eye in his own right. He was the best chief this bunch could have.

Meanwhile, they must be kept occupied and hopeful until a good plan for escape materialized. If a good plan for escape materialized.

A Monster’s neck writhed out of the harsh white illumination in the direction of their cage. Pink tentacles held a jerking green rope above them for a moment, while the wet purple eyes looked here and there as if making a choice. Then the rope came down near an upward-staring man and fused itself to his back, ripples of darkness pulsating along the part of it that touched him.

When the rope was pulled up, there was a single, startled yelp from the man who went with it. After that, he relaxed and stared curiously about, awaiting developments while he was being carried off. He was evidently not nearly as frightened of this strange method of locomotion as he’d been the day before, the first time he’d experienced it.

Eric strode over to the wounded man whom Roy was tending. “What’s going to happen to him?”

Jonathan Danielson had grown worse. His entire body was blotchy and discolored. He gestured toward a corner of the cage with dull, uncaring eyes. “You can see from there. Take a look,” he said weakly.

Most of the men followed Eric to the corner. From that point, with a view pretty much unobstructed by rods or other cages, they could see a flat, white surface supported by rods coming up from the floor all around its circumference. At such an enormous distance, it looked rather small, but when the Monster had deposited the captured man on it—carefully fastening down his spread arms and legs with great clips attached to the surface—Eric realized that the entire population of his own tribe, Mankind, could be accommodated there with plenty of room to move about.

At first it was hard to see clearly just what the Monster was doing. A collection of green ropes was assembled near the fastened man. Some of the ropes were short and thick and curled, others were thin and seemed fairly rigid. The Monster would pick up a rope, poke it at the man or touch him with it, then put the rope down and select another one.

The man’s body seemed to strain against the fastenings more and more violently. They all leaned forward squinting their eyes… Suddenly, Eric understood what was happening. A long, low groan heaved itself from his chest and tore out of his mouth.

“It’s pulling his skin off!” someone behind him said in horrified disbelief.

“It’s tearing him to pieces. Look, it’s ripping his arms and legs apart!”

“Those bastards! Those bastards! What do they want to do a thing like that for?”

Now, long red lines were radiating from the man’s broken body in every direction on the circular white surface. He must have been screeching from the moment the Monster bent to its work, but this far away they could hear nothing.

And still the Monster went on calmly and studiously, this rope, that rope, poking, prodding, slicing, tearing.

All around Eric, the members of the expedition were turning away. Some were throwing up, others were cursing monotonously and hopelessly to themselves. One man kept asking himself in a dazed, pleading voice: “What do they want to do a thing like that for? What do they want to do a thing like that for?”

But Eric forced himself to watch. He was an Eye, and an Eye must see all there is to see. He was also responsible for his men—and anything he could learn about the Monsters might help them.

He saw what was left of the man’s body grow still and quiet in its puddle of blood. The Monster’s neck bent to one side, came back with a transparent tube. Its pink tentacles unfastened the corpse. Then they held the tube directly over the body. A stream of water shot out, washing the dead man and all the blood that had poured out of him into the center of the white surface where there was a dark round hole. He disappeared into the hole. The Monster played the stream of water over its collection of green ropes, apparently cleansing them. It put the tube down and walked away from the circular surface, now all white and clean again.

Head bent, his stomach rolling hideously inside him, Eric stumbled back to where Jonathan Danielson lay all alone. The Stranger answered his question before he put it:

“Dissection. They want to find out if you people are like the other humans they’ve taken apart. I think they dissect one man in every group they capture.” He moved his head restlessly back and forth and drew a deep breath. “When they placed me up here, there was another man from my party still alive. Saul Davidson. They kept Saul down there and dissected him.”

“And the rest of us,” Eric said slowly, “are to be used up in other experiments.”

“From what I’ve seen happening in the cages below—yes.” Jonathan Danielson’s lips curved in a gray, humorless smile. “Remember my saying that if a rope broke and you fell to the floor of the Monster burrow, it would not be a bad way to die?”

“Those green ropes, the ones the Monsters use—do you know how they work?”

“The basic principle is protoplasm affiliation. The Monsters have been doing a lot with protoplasm affiliation lately. That’s why my band was sent out here.”

“What kind of affiliation?”

“Protoplasm affiliation,” the injured man repeated. “Ever see one of those doorways they set up in walls? They open and close like a curtain; if they’re so mpch touched, they stop moving.”

Eric nodded, remembering the fissure that had sudden y appeared, and which he and Roy had been able miraculously to hold open long enough for Walter the Weapon-Seeker to run back through.

“The doorways reverse the principle. Protoplasm rejection.

“I think I understand you, but what’s this word you keep using—this protoplasm?”

Jonathan Danielson swore softly. “Sweet Aaron the Leader!” he said. “I’ve been carrying on a conversation with a savage who’s never even heard of protoplasm!” He turned his face away, sighing hopelessly.

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.

As he spun from the rope’s end, facing first one way, then another, in the soaring white space, Eric weighed the irregular red ball in his right hand and waited for an opportunity. It was going to be complicated: he had to spit on the stuff before he threw it, and, once it was moistened, he had to get rid of it immediately. That meant he had to figure his opening exactly right—if the spin were turning him away from the Monster once he’d spat on the red ball, he’d have to get rid of it anyway; he’d have to throw his only real weapon away into emptiness and waste it.

Obviously, then, as he began to face the Monster, a moment before it was in full range—that was the time to go into action.

Eric began paying careful attention to the duration of each spin, absorbing the rhythm with his mind. There was no fear in him now; instead there was the beginning of an exultation that almost burst from his lips in a song. If he were successful, he knew, it would be the end of him. Once the explosion occurred, once the Monster was killed, he, Eric, would fall—with or without the rope—an enormous distance to the floor. He would be dashed to pieces upon it. But the life of his captor would have been extinguished first. At last a man would have done what so many men had dreamed of for so long—

Hit back at the Monsters!

The members of his own expedition would see it, Roy, Walter the Weapon-Seeker, Arthur the Organizer, they would see it and cheer themselves hoarse. Hit back at the Monsters! Hit back at them, not as a nibbling annoyance, as a thief of food or artifacts, but as a full and deadly antagonist. Hit back at the Monsters—and with their own weapon!

He hoped the expedition could still see him. The Monster had passed the circular table used for dissection and testing and was going on. Where?

It didn’t matter. Nor was it important if he were out of sight of his caged friends. Only one thing counted: get the rhythm of the spin right, make a throw at the exactly correct moment—and take a Monster with him into the sewers. What a trophy to exhibit before the ancestors!

Eric was positive he had the timing now. He allowed himself one more spin, however, and went through the whole process in his mind…

Here I spit. Here 1 throw. Here it hits, just as I begin to turn. Here the explosion. And here, as my back is toward him, the Monster begins to topple!

Yes, he had the rhythm. He started turning toward the Monster again and held the soft mass near his mouth, working up saliva. He began to see the creature out of the corner of one eye.

Now.

Slowly, carefully, he spat on the ball, turning it round and round in his hand. The arm went back and waited while a portion of his mind beat out the pulsations it had learned. Then, when the Monster was almost in front of him, he threw. He threw in a high arc, aiming for the creature’s head which quivered to and fro at the end of that impossibly long neck. It would hit. Holy Ancestors, he had thrown right!

But, as he began the turn away, Eric saw that something had gone wrong. The Monster had noticed the red ball. And its head had moved down to meet it, mouthopened avidly! The Monster was swallowing it! It was swallowing the weapon!

The last thing Eric saw on that turn was a ripple that went down the length of the great throat. And in the ugly purple eyes—unmistakable enjoyment.

Then the spin had turned his back to the Monster. He waited despairingly for the sound of an explosion—a cataclysm that would tear the immense creature apart from the inside. He didn’t hear it. There was a sound at last behind him, not at all an explosion, but loud and odd nonetheless. Eric allowed himself to hope again. The rope from which he hung jerked back and forth.

He twisted his head and strained his eyes as the spin back began. Where was it?

There!

Yes, there it was. He could see the Monster again. And his whole body went limp with defeat.

Ripples continued to run down that long stretch of throat, smaller and smaller ripples as the effect, whatever it was, evidently began wearing off. Whenever a ripple came down to the point where the neck joined the body, there was a repetition of the loud, odd’ sound Eric had heard when his back was to the Monster. Now, facing it and seeing the entire creature, Eric could almost recognize the sound: not quite a sneeze, a little more than a cough, and more than reminiscent of a human moan of pleasure—with the same enjoyment-filled upbeat at the end.

Yes, the effect was definitely wearing off. The odd sounds came at longer and longer intervals; they were less and less loud. At the end of the curving neck, the triangular head probed about restlessly in great arcs, searching, with what seemed to be a delighted hunger, for more red balls. The Monster’s eyes were alight with ecstasy.

Apparently, it did not in any way connect its tiny human captive with the pleasures it had experienced.

That was just as well, Eric decided, hanging from the green rope where it adhered to his back. There was enough of a humiliation involved in having the knowledge all to himself.

Eric the Monster-Toppler. Eric the Alien-Killer. That’s how he had seen himself in those few fierce moments of anticipation.

“How about Eric the Monster-Tickler?” he asked himself bitterly. “That’s a good name.”

What had gone wrong with the weapon? Well, to begin with, he realized, it had probably not been a weapon in the first place. Walter the Weapon-Seeker had stolen it from the Monsters and found it could be used as one—against humans. You added your saliva, threw it against a man—and he exploded. But among the Monsters, it could have been something totally different. A food, a condiment of some sort. A drug, perhaps even an aphrodisiac. Or, conceivably, part of some complex game that they played. Mixed with human saliva, its properties had no doubt been altered. But not in the direction of any danger to the Monster. Eric’s carefully mounted attack had given the alien no more discomfort than a concentrated, highly individualized orgy.

There was an important lesson here, something that attacked the foundations of Alien-Science with its belief that man could learn important and useful information from the Monsters. What was utterly inimical to humans could be salutary to the Monsters: it might be healthful, it might be merely pleasant, it might be both. And, logically, the proposition should be sometimes true in its reversed form. What nourished or stimulated humans might destroy Monsters—if such a thing could ever be isolated or discovered!

The thought suggested a line of approach to a weapon that men had dreamed of for countless downtrodden centuries—a true Monster-killer.

Eric began to get excited, to run through possibilities for research in his mind. But his captor’s abrupt halt brought him back to where he was at the moment: he had no weapons at all except his good right arm and a couple of spears. And if he was going to do any fighting before he was torn to pieces, he’d better get ready.

They had arrived at the Monster’s destination. The green rope to which he was attached was being lowered purposefully. He pulled at his back sling and, after a moment’s thought, selected a light spear for his right hand and a heavy one for his left.

If he had a chance, if the creature’s head came at all close, he would try a cast with the throwing spear. And he would use the heavy one to ward off the various dissecting ropes and implements. Not that he had much hope: the distances were too great for any decent aim, the power and strength which he faced were too far beyond his own.

But he was Eric the Eye, a warrior and a man.

He looked down. Odd, there was no flat white surface below him. Instead, there was—there was another cage! He was merely being transferred!

Eric sighed out his relief gustily. He was about to replace the spears, but just then the rope lowered him into the exact center of the cage and withdrew from his back. He looked about, examining the place.

The spears he held were what saved his life when the naked girl came at him.