Donald A. Wollheim (ed) (20 page)

And there was another way in which the mighty
presence of the Mountains of Eternity affected them. The region was warm—not
warm by the standards of the twilight zone, but much warmer than the plain
below. Their thermometers showed zero on one side of the rocket, five above on
the other. The vast peaks, ascending into the level of the Upper Winds, set up
eddies and stray currents that brought warm air down to temper the cold breath
of the
Underwind
.

Ham stared gloomily over the plateau visible in the fights. "I
don't like it," he grunted. "I never did like these mountains, not
since you made a fool of yourself by trying to cross '
em
back in the Cool Country."

"A fool!" echoed Pat. "Who
named these mountains? Who crossed them? Who discovered them? My father, that's
who
!"

"And so you thought you inherited '
em
," he
retorted, "and
that all you had to do was to
whisde
and they'd lie down and play dead, and Madman's Pass would turn into a park
walk.
With the result that you'd now be a heap of
clean-picked bones in a canyon if I hadn't been around to carry you out of
it."

"Oh, you're just a timid Yankee!"
she snapped. "I'm going outside to have a look." She pulled on her
parka and stepped to the door, and there paused. "Aren't you—aren't you
coming, too?" she asked hesitantly.

He grinned. "Sure! I just wanted to hear
you ask." He slipped into his own outdoor garb and followed.

There was a difference here. Outwardly the
plateau presented the same bleak wilderness of ice and stone that they had
found on the plain below. There were wind-eroded pinnacles of the utmost
fantasy of form, and the wild landscape that glittered in the beams from their
helmet lamps was the same bizarre terrain that they had first encountered.

But the cold was less bitter here; strangely, increasing altitude on
this curious planet brought warmth instead of cold, as on the Earth, because it
raised one closer to the region of the Upper Winds, and here in the Mountains
of Eternity the
Underwind
howled less persistently,
broken into gusts by the mighty peaks.

And the vegetation was less sparse.
Everywhere were the veined and bulbous
masses,
and Ham
had to tread carefully lest he repeat the unpleasant experience of stepping on
one and hearing its moaning whimper of pain. Pat had no such scruples,
insisting that the whimper was but a tropism; that the specimens she pulled up
and dissected felt no more pain than an apple that was eaten; and that, anyway,
it was a biologist's business to be a biologist.

Somewhere off among the peaks shrilled the
mocking laughter of a
triops
, and in the shifting
shadows at the extremities of their beams, Ham imagined more than once that he
saw the forms of these demons of the dark. If there they were, however, the
light kept them at a safe distance, for no stones hummed past.

Yet it was a queer sensation to walk thus in the center of a moving
circle of light; he felt continually as if just beyond the boundary of
visibility lurked Heaven only knew what weird and incredible creatures, though
reason argued that such monsters couldn't have remained undetected.

Ahead of them their beams glistened on an icy
rampart, a bank or cliff that stretched right and left across their course.

Pat gestured suddenly toward it. "Look
there!" she exclaimed, holding her light steady. "Caves in the
ice—burrows, rather. See?"

He saw—little black openings as large,
perhaps, as a manhole cover, a whole row of them at the base of the ice rampart.
Something black skittered laughing up the glassy slope and away—a
triops
. Were these the dens of the beasts? He squinted
sharply.

"Something's there!" he muttered to
Pat. "Look! Half the openings have something in front of them—or are those
just rocks to block the entrance?"

Cautiously, revolvers in hand, they advanced.
There was no more motion, but in the growing intensity of the beams, the
objects were less and less rocklike, and at last they could make out the
veinings
and fleshy
bulbousness
of life.

At least the creatures were a new variety.
Now Ham could distinguish a row of eyelike spots, and now a multiplicity of
legs beneath them. The things were like inverted bushel baskets, about the size
and contour, veined, flabby, and featureless save for a complete circle of eye
spots. And now he could even see the semitransparent lids that closed, apparently,
to shield the eyes from the pain of their lights.

They were barely a dozen feet from one of the
creatures. Pat, after a moment of hesitation, moved directly before the
motionless mystery.

"Well!" she said. "Here's a
new one, Ham. Hello, old
fella
!"

An instant later both of them were frozen in
utter consternation, completely overwhelmed by bewilderment, amazement, and
confusion. Issuing, it seemed, from a membrane at the top of the
creaure
, came a clicking, high-pitched voice.

"Hello,
fella
!" it said.

There was an appalled silence. Ham held his
revolver, but had there been need, he couldn't have used it, nor even
remembered it. He was paralyzed; stricken dumb.

But Pat found her voice. "It—isn't
real," she said faintly. "It's a tropism. The thing just echoes
whatever sounds strike it. Doesn't it, Ham? Doesn't it?"

"I—I—of
coursel
"
He was staring at the lidded eyes. "It must be. Listen!" He leaned
forward and yelled, "Hello!" directly at the creature. "It'll
answer."

It did. "It isn't a tropism," it
clicked in shrill but perfect English.

"That's
no echo!" gasped Pat. She backed away.
"I'm scared," she whimpered, pulling at Ham's arm. "Come away
—quick!"

He thrust her behind him. "I'm just a
timid Yankee," he grunted, "but I'm going to cross-question this
living phonograph until I find out what—or who—makes it tick."

"No!
No, Ham! I'm scared!"

"It doesn't look dangerous," he observed.

"It
isn't dangerous," remarked the thing on the ice.

Ham gulped, and Pat gave a horrified little moan.

"Who—who
are you?" he faltered.

There was no answer. The lidded eyes stared steadily at him.

"What
are you?" he tried again.
Again no reply.

"How
do you know English?" he ventured. The clicking voice sounded: "I
isn't
know English." "Then—uh—then why do you
speak English?" "You speak English," explained the mystery,
logically enough.

"I
don't mean why. I mean
how!"

But Pat had overcome a part of her terrified
astonishment, and her quick mind perceived a clue. "Ham," she
whispered tensely, "it uses the words we use. It gets the meaning from
us!"

"I
gets
the meaning from you,"
confirmed the thing ungrammatically.

Light dawned on Ham. "Lord!" he gasped. "Then it's up to us
to give it a vocabulary."

"You speak, I speak," suggested the creature.

"Sure! See, Pat? We can say just
anything." He paused. "Let's see— 'When in the course of human events
it—'"

"Shut up!" snapped Pat. "
Yankeel
Remember you're on English territory now
. '
To be or not to be; that is the question just—'"

Ham grinned and was silent. When she had
exhausted her memory, he took up the task: "Once upon a time there were
three bears—"

And so it went. Suddenly the situation struck
him as fantastically ridiculous—there was Pat carefully relating the story of
Little Red Riding Hood to a humorless monstrosity of the night-side of Venus!
The girl cast him a perplexed glance as he roared into a gale of laughter.

"Tell him the one about the traveling
salesman and the farmer's daughter!" he said, choking. "See if you
can get
a
smile from him!"

She joined his laughter. "But it's
really a serious matter," she concluded. "Imagine it, Ham!
Intelligent life on the dark side! Or
are you
intelligent?"
she asked suddenly of the thing on the ice.

"I am
intelligent," it assured her. "I am intelligently intelligent."

"At least you're a marvelous
linguist," said the girl. "Did you ever hear of learning English in
half an hour, Ham? Think of that!" Apparently her fear of the creature had
vanished.

"Well, let's make use of it,"
suggested Ham. "What's your name, friend?"

There was no reply.

"Of course," put in Pat. "He
can't tell us his name until we give it to him in English, and we can't do that
because—oh, well, let's call him Oscar, then. That'll serve."

"Good
enough. Oscar, what are you, anyway?"

"Human, I'm a man."

"Eh?
I'll be damned if you are!"

"Those are the words you've given me. To
me I am a man to you."

"Wait a moment
. '
To
me I am—' I see, Pat. He means that the only words we have for what he
considers himself are words like man and human. Well, what are your people,
then?"

"People."

"I
mean your race. What race do you belong to?" "Human."

"Owl"
groaned Ham. "You try, Pat." "Oscar," said the girl, "you
say you're human. Are you
a
mammal?"

"To me man is
a
mammal
to you."

"Oh, good heavens!"
She tried again. "Oscar, how does your
race reproduce?" "I have not the words." "Are you
born?"

The queer face, or faceless body, of the
creature changed slightly. Heavier lids dropped over the semitransparent ones
that shielded its many eyes; it was almost as if the thing frowned in
concentration.

"We are not born," he clicked.

'Then—seeds,
spores, parthenogenesis? Or fissure?" "Spores," shrilled the
mystery, "and fissure." "But-"

She paused, nonplussed. In the momentary
silence came the mocking hoot of a
triops
far to
their left, and both turned involuntarily, stared, and recoiled aghast. At the
very extremity of their beam one of the laughing demons had seized and was
bearing away what was beyond doubt one of the creatures of the caves. And to
add to the horror, all the rest squatted in utter indifference before their
burrows.

"Oscar!" Pat screamed. "They got one of you!"

She broke off suddenly at the crack of Ham's revolver, but it was a
futile shot.

"O-oh!" she gasped. "The
devilsl
They
got one!" There
was no comment at all from the creature before them. "Oscar," she
cried, "don't you care? They murdered one of you! Don't you
understand?"

"Yes."

"But—doesn't it affect you at all?"
The creatures had come, somehow, to hold a sort of human sympathy in Pat's
mind. They could talk; they were more than beasts. "Don't you care at
all?"

"No."

"But what are those devils to you? What
do they do that you let them murder you?"

"They eat us," said Oscar placidly.

"Oh!" gasped Pat in horror. "But—but why don't—"

She broke off; the creature
was backing slowly and methodically into its burrow.

"
Waitl
" she cried. "They can't
come here! Our lights—"

The
clieking
voice drifted out: "It is
cold. I go because of the cold."

There was silence.

It was colder. The gusty
Underwind
moaned more
steadily now, and, glancing along the ridge, Pat saw that every one of the
cave creatures was slipping like Oscar into his burrow. She turned a helpless
gaze on Ham.