West of the Sun. Edgar Pangborn

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СКАЧАТЬ Paul observed aloud. The leader was the tallest—a woman, with a long spear. All were sending anxious glances at the sky and toward the human shelter; their motions suggested a fear so deep it must be pain, yet something drew them out there in spite of it. The pygmy with the burden, a rolled-up hide, was also a woman. The leader was bald as the others, slender, muscular, her head round, with prominent forehead and thin nose, tattooed cheeks. The bowmen had only simple loincloths, and belts for their arrow quivers. The women’s knee-length grass skirts were like the Melanesian, but the leader’s was dyed a brilliant blue. Her two little pairs of breasts were youthfully firm and pointed. Dorothy murmured, “American civilization would have gone mad about those people.”

      “What a girl!” Wright sighed. “I mean Dorothy—the Dope.”

      “Even a dope can be jealous. Do you s’pose Mrs. Mijok has—Oh! Oh, poor darling! Not funny after all, gentlemen—”

      The pygmy leader had turned full face, as the nine paused at trampled grass. She wore a necklace of shell. These had no glitter, but their yellow and blue made handsome splashes against the red of her skin. Reason told Paul that she could see at most only dazzling spots where sunlight might be touching the glasses he had thrust through wilted leaves. It made no difference: she was staring directly into him, making her grief a part of his life. A still-faced grief, too profound for any tears, if she knew of tears. The green cat eyes lowered; she stabbed her spear into the ground and lifted her arms, a giving, yielding motion. Her lips moved—in prayer, surely, since all but one of the men were bowed, performing ritual gestures toward whatever lay on the ground. The one who did not bow never ceased to watch the sky. The prayer was brief. The woman’s left hand dropped meaningly, the hide was unrolled, and its bearer raised what the grass had hidden—no more than a skull and a few bones, a broken spear, a muddy scrap that might have been a grass skirt. The hide was folded gently over these; the group went on.

      “Dorothy—those things you saw running when we were circling down—I missed ’em,” Wright said. “Poor eyesight, and seems to me the air was still misty from Argo’s crash in the lake. They were going south, away from here? And they could have been—people like these?”

      “Yes. Hundreds or thousands of them. I suppose the crash of Argomust have seemed like the heavens falling. The lifeboats too.”

      “I think we interrupted a war.”

      “These would be survivors? Live in this part of the jungle maybe? Looking for what’s left after those—those flying beasts—”

      “It makes sense,” Wright said. “They’re more afraid of the sky than of our setup over here. Maybe we’re gods who came down to help them. If we did help them. Look: they’ve found another.… Yes, now the prayer.… Wish Mijok wasn’t so afraid of them. Inevitable. To them I suppose he’s an ugly wild animal. Different species, similar enough to be shocked at the similarity. ’Tain’t good.”

      “Do we try for a foot in both camps?”

      “Paul, I think I’ll take a rain check on answering that.… Ach—if I could go out there now—communicate—”

      “No!” Dorothy gasped. “Not while the others are still sick.”

      “You’re right of course.” Wright fretted at his beard stubble. “I get sillier all the time. As Ed would tell me if he were up and around. It’s the high oxygen.…”

      There were brown splashes in the sky. The pygmies saw the peril first and darted for the woods—an orderly flight however—the woman with the hide in front, the blue-skirted woman next, then the bowmen. Three of the latter turned bravely and shot arrows that glittered and whined. The brown beasts wheeled and flapped angrily upward, though the buzzing arrows dropped far short of them. The pygmies gained the trees; the omasha scouted the edge of the woods, squawking, three of them drifting toward the lifeboat, weaving heads surveying the ground. Paul gave way to unfamiliar savage enjoyment. “Do we, Doc?”

      “Yes,” said Wright, and took aim himself.

      All three were brought down, at a cost of four irreplaceable rifle bullets and two shots from Dorothy’s automatic. Mijok bellowed with satisfaction but recoiled as Wright dragged a dirty brown carcass into the clearing. “A dissection is in order.” Mijok grumbled and fidgeted. “Don’t fret, Mijok.” Wright pegged down the wings of the dead animal with sharp sticks and drew an incision on the leathery belly with his hunting knife. “Good head shot, Paul—this one’s yours. We’ll do a brain job from one of the others, but I think we’ll let that wait for Sears—oh my, yes…! Doesn’t weigh over thirty pounds. Hollow bones like a bird’s, very likely. Hope they’ll keep.”

      “You hope,” Dorothy sniffed. “What do you do when I turn housewife and instruct you to get that awful mess the hell off my nice clean floor?”

      “Dope! And you my best and only medical student.” He worked at the cutting dubiously, inexpertly. “Conventional mammalian setup, more or less. Small lungs, big stomach. Hah—two pairs of kidneys?” He spread the viscera out on the wing. “Short intestine, also like a bird. And she was preparing a blessed event multiplied by—count ’em—six.”

      “Too many,” said Paul. “Altogether too industrious.”

      “What I really want to know—Oh…?” With the lungs removed, it could be seen that the hump on the back was caused by a great enlargement of four thoracic vertebrae, which swelled into the chest cavity as well as outward. Wright cut away spinal cartilage. “Damn, I wish Sears was doing this. Well, it’s neural tissue, nothing else—a big swelling of the spinal cord.” He sliced at the ugly head, but the hermorrhage from a .30-caliber bullet confused the picture. “The brain looks too simple. Could that lump in the cord be the hind brain? I hereby leave the theories to Sears. But, son, you might slit the stomach and see what the old lady had for breakfast.”

      Paul’s clumsy cut on the slippery stomach bag made it plain what the omasha had eaten—among other things, an almost complete seven-fingered hand. Dorothy choked and walked away, saying, “I am going to be—”

      “Cheer up.” Paul held her forehead. “Never mind the clean floor—”

      “Go away. I mean stay very close. Sorry to be so physiological. Me a medic student! Even blood bothers me.”

      “Never mind, sugar—”

      “Sugar yourself, and wash your paws. We smell.”

      Mijok was muttering in alarm. Wright had abandoned the dissection and gone out in the meadow, cautious but swift, to the spot where yesterday they had found the pygmy soldiers. He took up a small skull and arm bone, pathetically clean—perhaps there were insect scavengers that followed after the omasha—and the discarded bow. But instead of bringing back these relics, Wright held them high over his head, facing westward. Tall and gray in the heavy sun, he stepped twenty paces further toward the region where the pygmies had entered the jungle; then he set the bones down in the grass and strode back to the shelter, fingers twitching, lips moving in his old habit of talking half to himself, half to the world. “The omasha,” he said, “cracked the enlarged vertebrae—favorite morsel maybe.”

      Mijok moaned, blinking and sighing. He stared long at the silent grace of the lifeboat, then at Christopher Wright. He too was talking to himself. Abruptly, something gave way in him. He was kneeling before Wright, bending forward, taking Wright’s hands and pressing them against the gray-white fur of his face and his closed eyes. “Oh, now,” Wright said, “now, friend—”

      Paul СКАЧАТЬ