Frank Belknap Long

“ I stood with Kallatah on a cloud-wreathed peak staring down.
"When man is free to shape his own destiny," I said, "civilization does not beat its shining wings in vain. They will go forward boldly now, with the yoke of superstition forever removed from their necks."
"Thanks to you," Kallatah said.
"It was not too difficult to predict the exact moment of the volcano's eruption," I said. ”

“ Into thirty huts I crept and roused the sleeping warriors with the same hypnotic dazzlement. And to each I whispered the same words, and imposed upon them the same urgent post-hypnotic command.
It is always unwise to take pride in a difficult task accomplished with ease until the last obstacle has been overcome, the last hurdle surmounted.
I almost did—until I walked through the high-arching entrance of the thirty-first hut, and found myself confronting a warrior wide awake and on his feet.
"I have been awaiting your coming," Geipgos' son said.
Our Earth heritage is rich in legends. ”

“ You cannot hypnotize a man against his will. You can not force him to do something that will outrage his moral sense. But what I wanted Geipgos to do had the sanction of nature and common sense, and the sanction as well of the wild, unruly part of himself that has shaped his destiny from childhood. I was playing both ends off against the middle—against a ridiculous straw man of a hated taboo.
"When you have done what you must do the mountain will cease to be angry," I told him. ”

“ With a sudden, roaring sound a tree collapsed, dislodging a screaming shrewlike beast that scampered into the clearing with its tail between its legs. There was a moment of awful silence while the jungle built up tensions past all sanity. The clearing became a trap brimming with a malevolence as unnerving as the ticking of some hidden detonating device.
A black blur of panic rose to encompass me as a concentration of hatred almost palpable plucked agonizingly at my mind. ”

“ Four tall warriors grouped themselves with prideful eagerness about the conveyance, and lifted it to their shoulders, Geipgos and his son fell back with gestures of deep respect, and a procession formed behind us, and we were borne forward across the clearing like the idols of some primitive fertility cult whose wrath could shrivel crops and cause a blight to descend upon the land. ”

“ Kallatah turned and looked at me, her eyes strangely luminous. "Taro Hargon," she said. "I am going to tell you something. From the first moment I saw you I knew that you were a man."
I stared at her, wondering.
"It takes the courage and daring and resourcefulness of the Earthborn to do what you did. The Guiding Council realized that we on Tragor had need of the Earthborn too. Our heritage had worn too thin. So they selected a man of Terra with truly great gifts of body and mind to guide us all—"
I grew alarmed, still wondering how insecure my secret had become. ”

“ Soon the wrath of the mountain will be terrible against its false servants."
Geipgos tried to rise, but I gripped his arm and compelled him to keep his eyes riveted on the reflector. "They are not true servants, for they anger the mountain. The mountain would drive them forth, but without your help how can the mountain free itself? The mountain has no legs. It cannot walk about and seek out its false servants when they descend on the village." ”

“ Old and young, tall and short, comely and ugly.
The warriors carried us to the central hut and set the litter down with prideful flourishes of their long arms and broad, straight shoulders. Instantly shouts of jubilation echoed through the village. There were no brass bands, but the brass band spirit was tremendously in evidence.
A child of ten came up, bearing garlands, and a girl with skeleton ribs, and vermilion-painted cheekbones presented Kallatah with a beautiful shell bracelet mottled yellow and black, slipping it on her wrist before she could recoil in protest. ”

“ Freeze that memory chain, shatter the brittle links, and the human mind has no refuge left anywhere in time or space. I had only to substitute Tragor for Earth to know how Kallatah must have felt. But before I could move to her side all of the links snapped, and we were caught up in a jungle new and terrible and strange, with all points of reference stripped away. ”

“ Maddened with terror they darted to and fro between the cowering, screaming women and children, their distended eyes and metallic body sheen mirroring the fiery sky glow.
They lunged and parried, striking out with their claws as they circled about as any savage animal will when it feels itself to be hopelessly trapped. There was a blind purposelessness in their movements, a frantic swaying and thumping that churned up the ground beneath them and sent clumps of uprooted vegetation spinning in all directions. ”

“ The lizards are so sacred they can't be killed off without angering the mountain."
It was then that Kallatah surprised me. She gave a low whistle.
"You mean that tribal law has decreed that?"
"Precisely. They breed fast and eat voraciously. You can't have agriculture and the storage of fruits and grains—any kind of stable handicraft culture even—with vicious tyrants like that on every patch of cultivated land. By rough estimate those beasts consume millions of tons of food a year. Even the small animal life is vanishing."
"And they don't dare kill one," Kallatah said. ”

“ You can accept almost any reality when it's thrust upon you, even the wonder of a woman of Tragor facing you in a wilderness Eden with a warmth so unmistakable it makes your senses reel.
Her name was Kallatah, and she had come to Dracona alone in a faster-than-light cruiser to collect zoological specimens for the natural history museum at Tagga. Just for the record, Dracona's the fourth planet of a second-magnitude sun in the Constellation Cygnus, and it's as far from Tragor City as it is from Earth. Tagga is a suburb of Tragor City—a white and beautiful metropolis in its own right. ”

“ But a man is safe if he keeps his distance, for they are lazy by nature and don't attack without provocation.
"They're taboo animals," I told her. "The natives call them 'Servants of the Mountain.' If your purpose was to infuriate the natives you couldn't have made a better start."
She returned my stare with a strange mixture of alarm and defiance. "I had no way of knowing that!" she protested. "This planet is down on the charts as uninhabited. A virgin wilderness. If there are intelligent primitives here—"
Her face grew suddenly strained. ”

“ I told her. "They're symptoms of the stark lunacy which possesses the human mind before it gets hold of the tools it needs to grasp the real nature of the physical world. Even when it gets such tools," I qualified, "a society can be psychotic in a more complex way. All societies are probably psychotic in one way or the other, but that's another story entirely."
"But the adult males seem well fed," Kallatah said, her eyes on the trail ahead. "How could starved children grow up into such robust-looking adults?" ”

“ One of the warriors thrust his face close to us to ask if we were all right. I nodded, and he fell back with a gratified grin to resume his position in the procession.
"It's tragic how one little taboo can hold a race back," I went on. "You've seen how keenly intelligent they are. If that taboo hadn't plagued them for hundreds of years they'd be truly civilized by now."
"I'm afraid I don't understand," Kallatah said. "What do you mean by a pattern of starvation."
"Those lizards eat the natives out of house and home," I told her. "Literally—and it's horrible. ”

“ I thought of the thousand square miles of research laboratories, the museums and the libraries, the sports arenas swimming in a golden radiance and the sky-mirroring splendors of the biogenetic fulfillment centers. I thought of the schools where teaching had become an exact science completely integrated with human needs. ”

“ The natives of Dracona are physically comely and well-proportioned, and they carry themselves with such an air of easy grace that you have to look twice to realize that they are not entirely like ourselves. ”

“ The trail descended the mountain in a corkscrew curve, with many evil-looking twists and turns. To be carried on a litter down a steep trail is always hazardous and I would have preferred to remain silent. But when I saw how alarmed Kallatah looked I thought it best to keep right on talking.
Across the valley loomed the largest volcano on Dracona and as I gestured toward it I did my best to sound cheerful. ”

“ Why with such a charming companion available should he not relax as I am doing—be completely natural and human and at his ease? Why should he not sit down and discuss art and philosophy, music and the dance the whole night through? ”

“ They get to our minds first—in a horrible, primitive sort of way. They strip our minds bare so that we'll feel isolated—lost. Primitive man could kill off his enemies in the same way—by paralyzing them with a mental projection of the jungle as a kind of trap. ”

“ You see, there's a new director of biological research on the Guiding Council, and from all reports he's the kind of man who is only impressed by results. When I have my first interview with him he'll forget I'm a woman. I'll have to shine as a scientist who doesn't make mistakes. ”

“ Visualize a Tyrant King dinosaur with ribbed, skeletal wings, reduced to the dimensions of a kangaroo, and you'll have a fairly accurate mental picture of one.
All they do is eat. Birds and small mammals, fruits, berries and nuts. In twenty-four hours a Draconian flying lizard can eat three times its weight in food. ”

“ Draconian flying lizards are monstrous brutes. They're four feet in length and have a metallic green sheen to them, and when they have reason to hate their jaws can close with a ferocity unparalleled in nature. ”

“ There is only one sleeping compartment available and what do you suppose the man does? The sane scientific approach would be to behave like an intelligent human being. When a man and a woman are alone together excessive prudishness is ridiculous. ”

“ You've got to remember that only the strongest survive where the infant mortality skyrockets the way it does here. And those that do reach manhood have bad teeth, poor digestion—all kinds of psychosomatic ills. ”

“ Why do some primitive human societies glorify hate, fear, cruelty, war, and others live at peace with their neighbors? In this unusual novelette the gifted and versatile Frank Belknap Long has penetrated to the very core of the mystery with dramatically compelling logic. ”

“ They can set fires and move objects from a distance. The power resides in an area of the brain which civilization seems to blunt. It's an ESP faculty which was part of man's original survival equipment. ”