4

Sally held a lamp in his eyes as she swung open the door. “Good grief!” she gasped. “Are you all right?”

“Fine,” he assured her, grinning as he swayed.

She moved closer, as if to kiss him, then sniffed suspiciously. She stepped back, and only then noticed the natives standing behind him in expressionless array. She nearly dropped the lamp.

“’S all right, Sal,” Sam said, shuffling his feet. “These boys are friends of mine.” He was aware of thickness in his speech, but couldn’t seem to control it.

The impediment served a purpose, he observed. Sally’s initial shock gave way to indignation; she was much too angry to be frightened. “Your friends can put you to bed,” she sniffed, tossing her head. “I certainly won’t.”

She stood aside. Without help, Sam managed to cross the threshold and sit on the cot. The natives stared through the doorway. Sam got up, took the hand of one, and led it within. The others followed, and he closed the door.

The natives huddled in the center of the floor, filling the room. Sally shrank into a corner by the stove.

“My own dear Trojan Horse,” she jeered. “Wooden head and all.”

“This is what we were sent here to do, Sal,” Sam said reasonably.

“It’s what you promised not to do,” she reminded him.

“I couldn’t help it,” he said. “They came to me. A good thing, too, come to think of it; I was trying to eat things in the garden, see? They wouldn’t let me, and now I’m getting the idea they’ve got nothing but poisonous plants there, probably to teach their young. Sure! That would explain why they got so excited. And see, I’ve got a little skin-allergy on my hand, like poison ivy.”

He held it up for her inspection.

A look of sympathy passed swiftly over her face, and was as swiftly repressed. “Do they have a bar up there, too?” she asked, much too sweetly.

“No. But alcohol is a poison, of sorts. So they have a fermenting pool up there. I didn’t drink very much, but I haven’t had anything to eat all day—”

“I’m not going to cook for you now,” Sally stated. “We can’t feed them all, and you can’t just eat while they watch; you’ll have to wait till they go.”

Resignedly, knowing she was right, Sam thrust his dirty hands into his jacket pockets. He felt something, fingered it, and recognized the chocolate bar. Just the thing!

Clumsily Sam took out the bar, wiped a few crumbs of dirt from it, and with his pocket-knife cut it into eight small but more or less equal parts. The natives watched fixedly.

He gave a piece to each of them, one to Sally, and kept one. The natives held theirs and watched him.

“This is to eat,” he said, and thrust his entire portion into his mouth. Sally did likewise. Hesitantly, looking from them to one another, the natives nibbled with chitinous mandibles at the small brown squares. One by one, their bits of chocolate disappeared.

“Sally, I think they like the stuff,” Sam said, pleased with himself; “I think they want some more.”

“Well, they can’t have any,” Sally said; “we can’t spare it.”

“All right.” Turning to the silent natives, Sam displayed empty hands, turned his pockets inside out, and shrugged. “No more,” he said, and shook his head. “And I’m still hungry, too.” He rubbed his belly, and pulled tight his jacket’s belt to show emptiness beneath it.

The natives looked at one another and seemed to commune. They turned to the door. Stepping carefully between them, Sam opened it. They marched out single file and disappeared into the night.

“Rude, aren’t they,” Sally said, grinning relievedly in spite of herself. “When the food runs out, they go home.”

“I don’t know,” Sam said. “All day I’ve been trying to show them we need something to eat. Maybe they have the idea, finally; maybe they’re going to get us something.”

“Yes?” Sally was staring out the shack’s rear window, her face shocked and pale. “Look! They’ve found the grave!”

They had indeed. Under the dim auroral light they’d already begun to burrow through the soft, recently spaded dirt for the body of their comrade. Sam watched with bated breath as they recovered the corpse, loaded it onto the back of one of their number, and bore it away out of sight along the dark and rolling plain.

He reached out to grip his wife’s arm. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m a fool and I know it.”

“Maybe they do, too,” Sally said thoughtfully. She was silent a moment, her forehead puckered in thought.

“You know,” she went on, “seriously, Sam, that might be the key to this whole nightmare. I mean, look—the natives know about these ant-like social life-forms that live here. Those insect-things have a complicated social life, but all on the basis of built-in drives. They just react to endocrine secretions and the like, and don’t think the way we do. Their patterns of action are complicated, but unchanging.

“Maybe the natives ignored us because they thought we were just pair of strange animals, of no interest since we’re neither enemies nor competitors—you yourself said they have none—going through our complicated, instinctive, unrationalized routine. Today, though, you proved them wrong by going out and acting foolishly, in a way that obviously was not built-in.”

“You’re sweet,” Sam said, “to try making yourself believe that everything I’ve done was for the best. But—”

“I’m not saying that! I’m only saying that rational beings are the ones with wills instead of drives; and it’s will and not instinct that gave you the capacity to go out and make a fool of yourself today. Animals never do so good a job. For instance, they usually leave alcohol alone unless first driven neurotic by artificial means—that’s been proved time and again, experimentally. Animals aren’t even likely to play around with something that’s none of their business—the way the native did last night trying to steal a piece of our fire. Maybe its mates recognize that we share its capacity for error.”

Another thing that rational beings have, Sam reflected briefly, is a conscience. He wondered if it was his feeling of guilt that kept him from accepting Sally’s theory. Still ... no use eliminating all her hopes....

He said, slowly, “I guess every animal on this planet—except a very young one—knows better than to drink from that pool. And I guess it might be called a clincher that I got drunk, slept, woke, was sick—and then went right back for another drink.”

“Oh, you did!” Sally sounded genuinely shocked. “Well, I hope you feel as bad as you look!”

“Worse,” Sam assured her. He got up, slopped water into a basin, and washed, avoiding her troubled eyes.

Wouldn’t it be nice if she’d figured everything right, he told himself. Wouldn’t it be nice if the natives came back with a large supply of tasty and nourishing food.

But what if they’d gone for their soldiers, or their weapons?

He didn’t want Sally to think of that. “You might as well turn in,” he said with elaborate casualness. “You’ve had a bad day. I’ll sit up a while, in case our guests come back. Have to be polite, you know.”

“I’ll sit up with you,” Sally said sharply. “You might need me to reload.”

Sam stared at her, wide-eyed and not wholly grateful that his mind had been so clearly read. But resentment gave way to affection. He kissed her, laid out his guns, and spent the rest of the night hauling in crated supplies and setting them around the interior walls to serve as breastworks.

It was dawn, when the natives returned. By then, Sally was dozing in a chair, and Sam, the cabin crowded to the roof, had stopped work to thoughtfully watch Altair climb the sky in a blaze of scarlet and gold, painting the granite cliff with colors more striking than any that rational beings had ever devised.

“They’re coming,” he warned softly.

Sally awoke, and rose swiftly but stiffly. “How close shall we let them come?” she asked. Sam hesitated then squeezed her hand as he gave her a gun. “When you said they might understand us, didn’t you mean it?” he asked gently.

“I meant they might—yes.”

“Well, I’m going out to meet them,” Sam said.

“But—but they might kill you!”

“Honey, a while ago you came up with a beautiful theory that rational beings can be distinguished from beasts because rational beings make such dopey mistakes. Well, while you’ve napped I thought up another couple of distinctions to take into account. One is, that only the rational can theorize in the way you did. The other is, that lacking those built-in drives, we rational ones can act in brand new ways when we want to, and actually adapt our behavior to our theories. And that’s what I’m going to do.”

“But Sam! My theory may be an awful mistake!”

“To err is human,” he said, grinning over his shoulder as he opened the door. “And human is what we’re trying to prove we are.”

But apparently Sam’s earlier blunderings had been enough to establish his rationality; for the natives brought nothing but food.