Balance of Power Read online

  I took along my own rifle, not because I didn’t trust Roach’s aim (though I had my suspicions) but because it seemed a more civilized weapon. And if anything dangerous turned up, I didn’t want to rely entirely on one man and a rather primitive shotgun. I hoped that we wouldn’t run into any aliens until the occasion was more propitious.

  We scored trees as we went so that we could be sure of finding our way back.

  Fruits and nuts aren’t as common in forests as is generally made out...especially not forests full of fruit-eating birds. Nor, when you do find them, are they always easy to get at. For the first half hour or so I was taking samples in some profusion, more out of scientific interest than because I thought many of them would offer a supply of useful food, but curiosity for curiosity’s sake began to wane after a while, and I began to search more rigorously for hopeful growths. In the meantime, Roach grew steadily more impatient. Maybe he had expected to see small deer or big fat birds lurking around every bush. The pace at which we moved irritated him. He wanted to cover more ground in a hurry, stalking his prey with single-minded intensity. He fancied himself quite a hunter, and he thought that the rest of us were cramping his style.

  Eventually, he began drifting apart from us—slightly ahead or to one side. Periodically, Ling, the cook and I would stop for discussions about some particular vegetable, considering its abundance, recognizability and possible usefulness. At other times we would dig up roots in search of tubers or other storage organs. These pauses he saw as his chance to make his kill. I didn’t say anything about it. He wouldn’t have taken it kindly, and I really couldn’t bring myself to care much whether he got lost or not.

  It was just his luck—and ours—that while he was wandering off on one of his mini-expeditions we found the meat.

  We had come to a thicket, and were investigating its berries when we heard mewling inside. Ling parted the bushes and stepped into the thick undergrowth before I could say anything. Then he parted the foliage so that we could see. In a “nest” made from matted grasses there was a group of small mammals. They rather resembled pigs or enlarged baby rats. Their eyes were open and they were mobile, but they didn’t attempt to run. They just filled their lungs and yelled as hard as they could. That wasn’t very hard, as it happened, but it was a thin, penetrative sound.

  “Don’t!” I said, as Ling reached down to pick up one of the creatures. I was unslinging my rifle, knowing what was about to happen.

  “Back out,” I said. I didn’t have time to say any more.

  She burst from the undergrowth away to our right, already at full speed. She came thundering across the open ground. She was about the size of an Alsatian dog, with a rodent-like head and a body that put me in mind of a tapir, striped in brown and white.

  She was head on to me and I hit her between the eyes. If you’re firing bullets that’s not a bad place to hit, but anesthetic darts aren’t intended to go through skulls. She kept coming, refusing even to flinch.

  “Get out of the way!” I yelled.

  The cook was free to move, and she did—away to the left. I went right, on the principle that you should keep the adversary confused. But Ling was still in the bushes, and he couldn’t move at all.

  I fired again, getting her neatly in the flank this time. It would put her out for the count, but another unfortunate thing about darts is that they don’t work instantaneously. Ling would have been in trouble if the beast had reached him, but the woman swung at the animal with the satchel in which she’d been putting all our souvenirs. It was fairly heavy now, and it caught the pig-thing on the snout. The pig-thing promptly redirected its attack, veering off to the left. The cook was off-balance and I did the only thing I could think of—though looking back it doesn’t strike me as a particularly appropriate reaction. I dropped everything and dived forward to catch its tail in both hands.

  That really made it mad. Trumpeting its rage it doubled back on itself and came at me. Luckily, having given up all its forward momentum, it didn’t hit me very hard. It butted me on the shoulder, but didn’t use its teeth. I thumped it on the snout.

  The beast seemed to remember then what had brought her in the first place, and became once again a mother rushing to the support of her young. She let go another trumpeting sound—this time rather plaintive—and tried to get back to the nest in the thicket.

  It was too late. The drug got to her at last and she fell over, unconscious. I leaned over her prostrate form and plucked the first dart out of her head. She was lying on the other one.

  Then Roach appeared, belatedly, brandishing his phallic symbol.

  I rubbed my shoulder, which was slightly bruised, and ignored him. He didn’t stop until he was right on top of me, and when I looked up (I was still sprawled on the ground) I was surprised to see that he was angry. The fact that he’d missed out had really made the bile rise. Then, as I struggled slowly to my feet, the anger ebbed. He took out a knife from his belt and began looking round.

  “What are you looking for?” I asked.

  “A pole,” he said. “We cut a pole, tie her feet together, sling the....”

  “I know the theory,” I said. “But not this time.”

  “What?” He was holding the knife as if he couldn’t wait to stick it into someone.

  “Not this one,” I told him. “We’ll let her be. She’ll wake up.”

  “You’re crazy!” he said.

  “It’s not sporting,” I said, gently. “A mother with babies. We’re not desperate. We can shoot something else for dinner.”

  He opened his mouth to say something, then changed his mind. Instead, he said—in a tone which I presume was meant to be reasonable—“We’ll take the lot back. This lot’ll feed the whole crew. We haven’t caught a smell of anything else.”

  I didn’t want to argue. I knew full well we had no common ground on which to debate the issue.

  I just said: “No.”

  “Wait,” said Ling. “Sentiment is all very well. But a good meal for all of us...it’s the first in a long time. We’re entitled.”

  He was right, in his own way. On Attica, my scruples were meaningless. But I came from Earth, where the work of an ecologist is often one long, long fight to conserve species threatened by a sense of values that has no room for them. My prejudices had been deeply ingrained by the experiences of many individual battles.

  I hesitated, trying to weigh it all up in my mind, knowing that by all the rules of diplomacy I ought to set my prejudices aside.

  Roach didn’t give me a chance to give in gracefully. He simply let the muzzle of his gun swivel to point at the sleeping creature’s neck, and pulled the trigger.

  The shot echoed in the trees on every side.

  “It’s dead now,” he sneered.

  Temper rose in me like a flood, and I felt an uncontrollable urge to smash the butt of my own gun into his face. He watched me, and I knew that he’d have loved the excuse to hit me. We were all set for a brawl I had no chance of winning.

  I was saved by a new arrival. It wasn’t the U.S. Marines come to save us from ourselves. It was daddy, come to kill the lot of us.

  I didn’t know whether to think of him as a bull or a boar, but whatever he was he was the size of a small donkey and he was as mad as hell. Unlike his late wife he had some very useful weapons dressing his skull—six, to be precise. They were curved tusks, in two rows along the snout. They looked the sort of tool evolution might devise for the job of disemboweling.

  He came across the clearing like a tank. I saw him over Roach’s shoulder, dropped to one knee and brought up my gun. I never fired it, because Roach put a boot in my chest and shoved. I never knew whether he had seen the charging boar or not. Maybe he was starting a fight, maybe he was just getting me out of the way so that this kill could be his.

  Either way, Roach turned and raised his gun. He had one barrel left and he let fly. He was too late. The boar was traveling too fast, and that tusked head, with a vicious sideways twist, ran
straight into Roach’s groin.

  He screamed, and screamed again.

  I was flat on my back and the beast could have dealt with me with a single leap and a quick flash of the horns, but Roach’s shot had peppered its back and head, and it was in no mood for tactical planning. It cut at Roach again, ripping his belly and pulling out his guts like candy floss as he folded up, still screaming.

  Ling and the woman were running for the trees. I brought the rifle up and pumped out three darts on automatic fire. I managed to get to my feet, and at last the beast abandoned Roach and came for me. I stabbed out at its head with the butt of my gun, and caught it a solid blow. It reeled, and went to its knees—not because of the power of my blow but because the shot and the darts were taking their toll. I hit it again, the same way. It rolled over.

  I sat down, suddenly out of breath.

  Ling and the woman came back, slowly. I took Roach’s gun out of his dead hand and passed it to the woman.

  “All right,” I said, ignoring their horror-stricken expressions, “now we have the whole family. A real banquet. So much for sentiment.”

  I felt myself for injuries. There weren’t any. But I was trembling a little.

  The four babies were still mewling hopelessly. Instinct told them that it was the right thing to do. So much for instinct.

  There was blood everywhere. Animal blood, human blood.

  “Go back to the camp,” I told them. “Quickly. Get some men out here. We’re going to need three poles now.”

  The woman was crying. She knelt over Roach, and she was crying. That shocked me slightly. She was nearly fifty, with graying hair and a face that was set like granite. I couldn’t tell whether it was grief or shock that was bringing the tears. Then she looked at me, and there was hatred in her eyes. I couldn’t understand why, for a moment or two. I just couldn’t see how it added up in her mind to being all my fault. In my book, it was all down to Roach. But that wasn’t the way she saw it. It was Roach who was dead, Roach whom she was crying over. I’d picked the argument. She wasn’t concerned with all the might-have-beens and the logic of the situation. She didn’t care that Roach had paused to kick me out of the way so that I couldn’t shoot the creature. It was all my fault and that was all there was to it.

  One day ashore, and one man dead.

  I knew full well that a good meal wasn’t going to square this up. Things were bad, and getting worse.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  In the evening, we had our feast. Every mouthful reminded us of Roach. We’d done a pretty fair day’s work, but that didn’t seem to count for anything now.

  I called Nathan afterward, and told him the whole sad story. I must have told it slightly wrong, because even he somehow got the idea it was my fault.

  “You’d better pray that nothing else goes wrong,” he told me. “You’d better pray that the memory fades fast. If there was one thing you could do to fuck up this jaunt any more than it’s fucked up already getting a man killed is it. You’re a long way from any help, Alex. Remember that. It’s all down to you.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “Thanks a lot.”

  Only half the crew elected to spend the night on land. The rest returned to their bunks below decks. Ogburn posted three armed guards on four-hour shifts throughout the night. I fully expected that the natives would descend upon us at any moment, firing poison darts out of blowguns and wielding battleaxes. Somehow, though, our luck held out that far.

  Mariel told me that there was a whisper about a curse. I’d heard plenty of talk about bad luck, and it didn’t surprise me to learn that the fantasies were being steadily inflated. Nobody really believed in curses, but in a situation like that it wasn’t belief that mattered—it was the power of the fantasies to mesmerize the imagination...and the abundance of the fuel of fear. I worried a lot about the way that superstition was taking hold. Prophecies of doom have a nasty propensity for becoming self-fulfilling.

  I am not a man who habitually sleeps with his hand on his gun, but that night the rifle was very close to my sleeping bag.

  But the next day dawned without anyone trying to murder anyone else, and work began again at a steady pace that was far from frantic. It was a hot day, and the tree-fellers, in particular, built up quite a sweat. Some of the men went swimming at noon, under the watchful eye of a shotgun guard. Nothing untoward happened—the long gray shapes stayed well away.

  The stockade grew, and took on a comforting solidity. The first of the huts was marked out on the ground, and the foundations were laid. Another expedition into the forest passed off without mishap, and I made steady progress checking all the possible food sources. I passed most of them as edible, but thought it diplomatic not to call for volunteers immediately. I used only one test subject—myself. I didn’t even ask Mariel, whose stomach was of proven sensitivity.

  And then, in the afternoon, lightning struck again.

  A big, burly man felled one of the giant trees that grew in relative isolation. It was at the northern end of the area outside the stockade that had been cleared, and would have smashed the stockade if it had fallen the wrong way, but he had done his work well. It fell the right way, with no one underneath it. He walked out along its length to inspect his work with justifiable pride. A snake, upset by the upending of its resting place, struck at him from the foliage.

  I was with him inside a minute, but there was no way to identify the snake or the kind of poison it had pumped into him. There were three or four different types of poison used by Attican snakes, and this just had to be one of the fast-acting ones. By the time the symptoms were clear enough to treat, his nervous-system was paralyzed. I managed to keep his heart going for an hour or more, but I hadn’t the means to save his life. He died before sunset.

  That was two down, and I knew that the apple-barrel was really going sour.

  In the evening, another hunting-and-foraging party set out. I stayed at home. Nieland took charge. They took three guns, and they looked ready to shoot anything that moved. I hoped that the natives had the sense to stay away. They didn’t look ready to play “Take Me To Your Leader” with any seven-foot catmen.

  I dissected the snake that had killed our second casualty, and prepared a specific anti-serum for its poison. You never know when things like that will come in handy, though I was certain in my own mind that the next person to get bitten would make sure it was a different species that got him. Such is life. Mariel did some of the routine food tests for me and offered to keep the score if the test specimens I’d eaten should prove to be debilitating. That’s what’s known as undiplomatic generosity.

  But I didn’t get ill.

  It was just getting dark when a man stuck his head into the tent and said: “Come quick.”

  It was Thayer, and he had been doing a lot of running—he was panting hard. I recalled that he had gone out with the foraging party. Mariel had gone back aboard ship—as much to avoid my bitter temper as because there was anything still aboard that needed transporting up to the camp. There seemed to be no time to look for her and tell her where I was going.

  “It’s Ling,” gasped Thayer. “He’s hurt.”

  I grabbed the medical kit and pushed past him, without a word. My jaw was set tight. A chapter of accidents was one thing, but this seemed to be verging on the surreal.

  Thayer reached into the tent and fished out my dart-gun, and also the lantern I’d just switched on.

  “I’ll bring this,” he said. I didn’t bother to argue about it. I waited for him to lead the way. He did so, at a fast trot.

  We followed a blazed trail that led off at an angle of about sixty degrees from the ill-fated course I’d followed the previous day. Dusk didn’t last long, but the fuel-celled electric lamp was quite bright enough for us to find our way from one score-mark to the next. We didn’t have to go far—just half a mile or so.

  “What happened?” I asked, as we slowed down in a patch of tall grass where four or five figures waited, silent shadows in the d
im light. They were looking down at a prostrate form on the ground—Ling’s body. I recognized Malpighi standing close by, and looked for Nieland. I didn’t see him, but I couldn’t spare more than a glance as I knelt beside Ling.

  Some seconds dragged by before I realized that no one was answering my question.

  I turned Ling over because he was lying face down. He was unconscious, but there seemed to be no sign of an injury to his body. Not until I felt the skin beneath his thick black hair did I realize that he had been hit on the side of the head. Hard.

  I looked around. Malpighi had moved well away. Thayer was already raising my gun.

  Strangely, I felt neither surprise nor anger. The realization that it was a trap came to me smoothly and coherently, clicking into place in my head like a piece from a jigsaw puzzle.

  I hurled the medical bag at Thayer, but he had no trouble dodging it. The others raised their guns. There was nothing I could do—no earthly point in pretending that I could run or make a fight of it.

  I looked at Malpighi, but he was too far away from the lamp for it to illuminate his face. Obviously, though, he knew what he was doing. This had been planned. Ogburn must be in on it too.

  “Where’s Nieland?” I asked.

  “Behind a bush,” said Malpighi. “He ain’t dead. Gagged and tied. He’ll get free easy enough. We ain’t murderin’ nobody.”

  “You’ve cracked Ling’s skull,” I said, not knowing whether it was true or not.

  “He gave us a fight. Someone had to hit him. He’s not dead. Where’s the girl?”

  The last question was addressed not to me but to Thayer.

  “Wasn’t there,” said Thayer. “Maybe on the ship. We can take care of her later.”