The flood was treacherous, the ark was insubstantial. But something permanent came of them. A new author presents us with a new Noah...
by Cherry Wilder
On the ninety-first day of his Met. duty Carlyle stepped out of the hut and gazed desperately at the cloudless sky. There were no quogs to meet him on the platform; the oily purple sea sucked gently at the wooden piles; his instruments had assured him there was a light westerly breeze. His delusion persisted and he had nothing to support it . . . not even the tangible evidence of an aching bunion. He did not dare call the station. How would he begin?
‘Something tells me ...’
He decided to walk round the island but he found an ancient quog, the one he called the Chief, squatting at the foot of the ladder. He beckoned him on to the platform. The quogs were cryptorchids so for all he knew perhaps this was a Chieftainess: it was difficult to tell.
When he had first taken up his duty, before the boat brought him to the island, he had seen Mary Long, a young anthropologist who had tagged along with the landing party to the plateau, sexing a herd of quogs. She walked among them, picking the creatures up and solemnly examining their genital pouches. She was engrossed in her work: twenty or thirty quogs surrounded her and gently stripped off every stitch of her clothing before Carlyle or the other men could intervene. They sat round her and stared, their luminous eyes full of innocent curiosity.
Not a great deal of work had been done on quogs; they had been described as small land mammals, semi-erect bipeds, modified baboons. They were docile, certainly, and capable of performing many tasks; but they were also ugly, elusive and rank-smelling. Their odour had already ceased to bother Carlyle but he noticed that the quogs still kept upwind of him. He found himself describing them differently: they were like trolls, like squatting goblins, like little old men. At night he listened for one of their rare sounds, the qwok-qwok-qwok, hardly vocalized, that had given them their name.
The Chief, who was a big fellow, fully three feet tall, scrambled nimbly on to the platform.
‘Where are the others?’ asked Carlyle.
Every other day the platform had been lined with quogs who gave him berries, limpets, burrowing shrimps, in exchange for bacon cubes. He had tried them with everything he had: orange juice, vegetables, vitamins, but they liked the bacon best. Now the Chief tried to explain their absence. He could be heard only by cupping his long bluish hands before his tiny slit of a mouth to amplify the sound, the way Carlyle made owl-hoots as a boy.
‘Mee-haw,’ boomed the Chief faintly.
At first Carlyle did not understand. The mee-haw was a tree; in fact it was the only tree. The vegetation on AC14 was low, luxuriant and undistinguished except for the mee-haw trees, which reared up, with straight trunk and spreading crown of leafy branches, one hundred metres and more above the bushy islands in the still, purple sea. The timber resembling balsa, was particularly easy to work. The platform on which Carlyle had his Met. hut was made entirely of the single mee-haw tree that had grown on the tiny island. The quogs had wept to see it fall down. Carlyle had had the uneasy notion that the mee-haw tree might be sacred to them.
Now the Chief pointed to the island; Carlyle was shaken again by his crazy premonition.
‘Come on,’ he said.
He climbed down from the platform and followed the Chief up the brush-covered slope. All the quogs on the island, about thirty of them forming one family group, were huddled together on the broad stump of the mee-haw tree.
‘Why?’ asked Carlyle. ‘Why?’
The Chief cupped his hands and answered with a third quog word.
Carlyle strained to catch it.
‘Aw-kee?’
The quogs on the stump waved their fingers; this was a way of laughing. To Carlyle’s surprise they all began to vocalize, even the babies, pale blue and completely hairless, cupping their tiny hands. ‘Aw-kee’ was the nearest he could get to it.
‘What’s that?’ asked Carlyle.
He already knew. He went into a mad pantomime, begging the quogs for confirmation, then he ran back to the Met. hut. He called the satellite without a glance at his instruments. He announced firmly:
‘There’s going to be a flood.’
The receiver crackled. What were his readings?
‘The quogs told me,’ said Carlyle.
The crackle became indignant. Readings please. Carlyle turned hopelessly towards his instrument panel and his heart pounded. The barometer had dropped thirty degrees and was still falling. The wind had swung round to the south. The room became dark as he completed his report and huge drops of rain began a tattoo on the roof of the Met. hut.
He ran out on to the platform. The sky was a dome of blue-black cloud above a darkening sea; the waves flashed emerald and purple-black and broke in iridescent foam upon the shore. The word for it, Carlyle decided, was unearthly. Already drenched to the skin he cowered in the doorway of the hut. He was worried about the quogs; he guessed that their instinct to seek higher ground would keep them huddled on the mee-haw stump. The fragile shelters where they slept and did their weaving would be no protection against this rain. The picture of the quogs twisting their endless ropes from native flax lingered in his mind. He wished, idly, that the mee-haw tree had not been cut down.
Carlyle gave a cry: ‘The tree!’
He peered out into the downpour, staring up at the dark centre of the island where the mighty mee-haw tree had stood, ready to shelter the quogs in its dense foliage. They made ropes . . . probably sent up a young male to loop slings over the branches, then the whole tribe went up.
There was a splashing and scrambling at the foot of the platform. Carlyle knelt down and saw the Chief, already swimming awkwardly; the water had risen three feet in twenty minutes. The rain was a blinding cataract; a man who lay on his back would drown, thought Carlyle. He dragged the old quog aboard and bundled him into the hut. They sat gasping, the water pouring from the quag’s grizzled hide, from Carlyle’s coveralls.
‘How far?’ gasped Carlyle. ‘How high does the water ... ?’ He gestured with a horizontal hand, staring into the Chief’s bulging dark eyes.
Carlyle was suddenly aware of an earlier moment. When the mee-haw tree came down ... the day the quogs wept... he and Ensign Weiss noticed marks on its great trunk. A series of wavy bands, between three and four metres from the lowest branches . . . more than eighty metres from the ground. Carlyle understood, with another thump of fear . . . water marks. The water would rise until only the mee-haw tops rose like islands out of the purple sea. The only high ground on the entire planetoid was the plateau where his expedition had touched down briefly, far to the north. It had a large quog population... and no mee-haw trees.
The Chief touched Carlyle’s knee gently with the tip of his prehensile tail.
‘Sure,’ said Carlyle. ‘Sure. We have a real problem here, old buddy.’
He was calculating . . . One life-raft, inflatable, fully provisioned and powered, capacity six humans. All he had to do was launch the thing. And figure out some way of transporting thirty quogs to the plateau. The receiver gave his call signal but Carlyle paid no attention. He rushed out on to the platform again, into the deluge, and saw with alarm that the water was up to the cross supports; The scrap of beach and the lowest rank of undergrowth were already submerged. Sea and sky were joined in a blue-black curtain of moisture. Suddenly Carlyle gave a triumphant cry that brought the old quog scuttling to his side; he had realized that they were standing upon a raft.
He explained it to the Chief as he dug out the axe. The tribe must come aboard now, pronto, when the water rose he would knock out the supports of the platform and they would be launched. The wind and the current were driving towards the plateau... Maybe they could use the power pack of his own inflatable boat...
‘Come on!’ he shouted. ‘We have to get them aboard!’
The Chief had been dancing and shivering at Carlyle’s side, stretching out his arms to the island. He pointed through the rain and Carlyle saw that the quogs were coming.
It made sense of course; the platform was a little higher than the top of the island. They came swarming through the bushes and flung themselves gamely into the water. Their awkward quog-paddle was very efficient; the first wave - pregnant females and mothers with babies on their backs - was already nosing towards the supports. The turbid water was alight with their bulbous eyes. Carlyle knelt down beside the Chief and began to heave the dripping creatures aboard. More than once Carlyle saw a big quog dive and drag up a half-drowned cub. The oldest animals took it pretty hard, they fought to stay on land; but the younger ones thrust them brutally into the water. All along the platform in the plunging rain the rest of the tribe were gently dancing and stamping, reaching out their arms in encouragement to those still in the water.
As the last of them were dragged aboard Carlyle herded them into the Met. hut and went over the side with the axe. The Chief and four husky offsiders watched him wallowing in the water up to his neck and hammering with the back of the axe-head at one of the supports. The mee-haw piles had been embedded in heavy silt to a depth of two metres. Carlyle reckoned he could slide the tops of the piles out of the groove cut for them in the platform. But the first pile moved inward with a lurch the moment he hit it; he saw that the silt was swirling away in clouds as the water rose. He was treading water now, catching an occasional foothold on a rock. He moved under the platform, beat at the pile with the axehead, then heaved it outward with all his strength.
As the silt let go its hold the pile swung upwards in the water and the platform sagged down at one corner. Instantly two quogs were in the water grasping the mee-haw pile and using it to restore balance. Carlyle swam to the diagonal under the far corner of the hut and knocked it out like a loose tooth; two more quogs hove up out of the rain and balanced the platform. Carlyle knocked out the remaining leeward pile and felt the whole structure buckle and shift. He yelled to the quogs and scrambled back on to the platform. The decking heaved about crazily. The last pile on the seaward side gave way. Carlyle watched his two pairs of assistants climb expertly inboard and tapped the loose piles free of their grooves as they rode up on the surface of the flood. Leaning down he caught hold of one long pile as it clung to the side of the platform and shoved off from the island. The quogs on deck gathered to help him, bracing their leathery underbodies against the pole; the platform shuddered, then settled gently. The wind was rising and a strong current ran to the north. The mee-haw raft floated free upon the waste of waters.
* * * *
Carlyle and his deck-hands carefully drew in their oar; he felt an extraordinary sense of well-being as they clustered around his knees. The rain had slackened but they still pressed forward into a wall of water. A gleam of violet penetrating the low ceiling of black cloud showed that the Star was shining. Carlyle glanced down at the Chief, who blinked solemnly through the rain. He remembered that he must answer the call signal and led the way into the Met. hut.
The quogs had packed themselves in snugly under the big plastic dome. Carlyle couldn’t think of any species who could carry off the situation better. Humans? Monkeys? Bedlam and filth. Okay, the quogs were a spooky lot, and the smell, en masse, was like camphorated garlic, but there were times when he appreciated their stillness, the way they organized themselves. He lifted aside a tiny blue paw, resting on the communicator, and called the satellite.
The signal was faint.
‘Readings...’
He gave the readings.
‘We observe dense cloud,’ pipped the signal. ‘Evaluate.’
Carlyle switched over to voice, although he didn’t like talking to the computer. He made a report. The androgynous voice snapped. ‘Evacuate. Use liferaft.’
Carlyle said: ‘The emergency is way past that point. I have evacuated the native population.’
The quogs were vocalizing gently in the background . . . qwok-qwok-qwok . . . There was static, the voice signal was faint.
‘Follow emergency procedures. No record . . . population. Save…self…data.’
Carlyle repeated stolidly: ‘Evacuating with quogs.’
‘Follow... procedures. No deviation... losing contact.’
Carlyle said coarsely: ‘Screw yourself tin-brain. Give me emergency voice contact.’ He slammed the red button and Garrett answered.
‘Jim... Jim? What the hell is going on down there?’
Carlyle gave his report all over again; the reply was broken and distant.
‘We’re losing signal.’ Garrett was worried. ‘What in blazes are you doing with those quogs?’
‘Evacuating them. The island is submerged by now I guess.’
‘But why? This is not time . . . Tough luck . . . the quogs. No ethnological value ... plenty more ...’
‘Hell!’ said Carlyle. ‘We cut down their tree!’
‘Jim!’ cried Garrett, with the static closing in. ‘Take care . . . crazy raft. . . Can’t allow . . . deviation emergency procedures.’ The receiver went dead.
Carlyle felt a surge of panic as if his lifeline had snapped. His morale sagged at the thought of the satellite . . . warmth, filtered air, human company ... He felt his conditioning slipping away. He was on the verge of apophobia, Weltraumangst, the fear that grew in interstellar space from contemplating vast distances. He remembered poor Ed Kravetts, a cadet in his year who tried to cover up a bad case of ‘Yonders’. He staggered through his classes on the station red-eyed and queasy; a glance at one of the monitors made him sweat; the checking of an air-lock or a simple space walk left him shocked and pale. To see Kravetts struggling with a quantum equation was to apprehend the void: all the black miles that separated them from the tiny spinning globe of earth, a pin-point of light seen through the wrong end of a telescope.
Carlyle dragged himself back to his own world. ‘Identify with the place you’re in,’ wasn’t that Eva’s way of saying it Eva, E. M., Earth Mother, Commander Magnussen, come beautiful Eva, aid me now. He sent his prayer off into deep space and doled out bacon cubes to all hands before striding out on deck. The rain had really eased off and the cloud was lifting. The mee-haw raft rushed on faster than before. With the current and a rising wind they were making maybe five knots. The Star was down; the brief blue night had settled on AC14.
The Chief leaned on his knuckle-pads beside Carlyle; they stared together over the wine-dark sea. Low waves came at the raft from the south-west, as the wind swung round. They were long, uncrested hillocks of water, that surged under the mee-haw logs and disappeared into the dusk, rolling in line across the surface of the endless sea.
‘Those waves better keep low,’ said Carlyle. ‘Does the sea get rough?’
In his ninety-one days of Met. duty he had never seen a choppy sea, never felt a drop of rain, never observed a significant drop in barometric pressure. He made wave-motions with his hands and the Chief replied with ‘Aw-kee’ and some new words. He thought of the sea rising up into roaring crests, high over the raft, huge rollers, hills and valleys where the pink foam boiled. He had to shut his eyes to shake off the nightmare picture of those waves, superimposed upon the harmless scene he was watching.
‘I better get some sleep,’ Carlyle muttered. He was wet and shaky, his morale still down. The whole project, the solitary Met. duty, was a test of his survival qualities and his potential as a colonist. Perhaps he had blown it with Garrett by evacuating the quogs ... He stumbled back into the hut, found a way to his bunk, put on a fresh warm coverall from the thermo-pack. He didn’t dare take any medication in case there was a sudden alert. Most of the quogs were sleeping; he caught the gleam of an eye here and there, the flicker of a blue hand. The Chief materialized at the foot of his bunk with two even more ancient creatures, so old that their skin was grey. They stared at Carlyle and clapped their long hands soundlessly. He felt an instant of revulsion . . . sleeping in a hut crammed with animals, for crissake. Then with a surge of weariness and a sense of strange well-being he fell asleep.
. . . He was wide awake in a dark room with a low ceiling. A range of scents and sounds assailed him; fresh air, wood-smoke, perfume, the waffling roar of a jet refuelling, insects, someone strumming idly on a moog. Earth. He was on Earth. Carlyle knew that he must be dreaming; he savoured his dream, taking in the outlines of the room. It was night; he was standing beside a window that opened on to a balcony. He glanced down at the thick, unpatterned carpet. A memory stirred. Had he been in this room before? Or was it simply the colour, a rippling mist-green, an earth colour. There was someone at the desk; Carlyle felt himself drift closer.
He peered at the dark figure ... A caftan, a long fall of dark hair, he couldn’t tell if it was a man or a woman. Yet something in the attitude of the head made him tremble, in his dream. Slowly Eva Magnussen turned until she saw him. She blinked into the darkness of the room, switched off her cassette and removed the earpiece as he had seen her do a thousand times.
‘Jim?’ her voice was husky, hesitant. ‘Jim Carlyle?’
‘Eva?’ In the dream his own voice was muffled.
‘Where are you?’ she asked. ‘Is this some kind of experiment?’
‘It’s my dream,’ he said. ‘You know where I am.’
‘Jim... I can see you.’
‘I thought of you,’ he said. ‘I have a situation going here. My communications are gone. No word from upstairs. Seeing you helps a lot.’
‘You’re not alone,’ she said. ‘Who are they?’
‘Quogs,’ he said. ‘They are great little guys. You might find-a short report on them in the file on AC14. Not enough work done on quogs.’
‘You say you are sleeping?’
‘Sure. Eva the sea is purple. Wine-dark sea...’
‘Oh, Jim...’
‘Don’t!’ he said. ‘Eva . . . Don’t cry. Think about what I said. I’m not one of your cadets any more. We could take a colonial posting.’
Then as she rose in her chair the dream tilted; he was looking down on the room. He saw the figure of Eva Magnussen, his instructress, Commander Magnussen M.D., specialist in space psychology, rise up from her chair and run forward on the green carpet. He felt an instant of amazement and fear…it was like watching something else... real life... not a dream. He heard Eva cry out across the abyss of space and time:
‘Jim... Jim Carlyle... I love you...’
Then the dream vanished in a swirl of colour and scent; he was back in the dark, in the flood, in the crowded Met. hut, with the quogs whistling in anxiety and the Chief tugging his arm.
‘Okay!’ said Carlyle. ‘I see what’s wrong.’
Rain was falling heavily again; the wind had become violent and ripped one of the panels out of the hut. The raft was bumping about in the water as the wind tore inside under the dome.
‘I’ll relax the panels,’ said Carlyle to the Chief. ‘I may need your team.’
The Chief summoned them up in the eerie violet light of dawn, while the rest of the passengers cowered away from the driving rain.
Carlyle went to work on the expanding ribs holding the panels. The hut began to fold down and the raft settled. Finally he grappled with the damaged panel, but he had the order wrong. He had been too busy providing shelter for the quogs - the torn panel should have been folded down first. He felt a thrill of warning, the eyes of the quogs glowed around him, he shot up a hand and turned sideways. The heavy strut holding one side of the panel broke with a rending crack and came down on his head. Carlyle’s last conscious thought was: ‘I am seeing stars...’
He was out, but not out cold for very long. He groped upwards towards consciousness through a fog of nausea and pain. Words whirled through the aching sunburst of his brain; he strove to move his legs, his hands, his fingers, to wrest open his leaded eyelids. He saw pictures ... ragged scraps of film…the island, the satellite, a house in a green field ... where? He felt himself, flying, moving, uplifted . . . lifted by a hundred strong, blue hands. He could see them so clearly through his closed eyelids. Whoever had blue hands ... ? He remembered and laughed in his pain-fringed dream. ‘Their hands were blue... and they went to sea... they went to sea in a sieve.’
Carlyle opened his eyes. He was on his bunk, the quogs all around him, their saucer eyes alight with concern.
‘Concussion,’ mumbled Carlyle. ‘Got to take - medication.’ He could not reach his head but the Chief guided his hand. There was a shallow two-inch cut on his scalp above the left ear and blood had soaked and matted his shaggy crop of hair, known in the service as the colonist’s cut or the Buffalo Bill.
‘Must take - antibiotic’
Carlyle was heavily conditioned to protect himself against alien bacteria. He fought to stay conscious.
‘Hogan . . .’ he whispered to the Chief. ‘Hogan the Medic. Up there. He can tell me what to take...’
He sank into a confused nightmare of purple microbes and the capsules in his medical pack.
Carlyle’s head ached still and he began this comical dream. He was in a cabin on the satellite, lying just above the floor, floating. It was some guy’s bedroom, with his locker, pinups, a green video cassette. He heard startled voices and saw two people sitting up in the bunk, clutching the sheet around them.
‘Hi Mary!’ said Carlyle in his muffled dream voice. ‘No clothes again!’
‘Carlyle... what the hell!’
It was Dick Hogan the Medic, naked too and for some reason frightened.
‘Hogan!’ cried Carlyle. ‘You’re just the guy I wanted to see.’
‘Carlyle?’ whispered Mary Long, the blonde anthropologist, ‘Is it you, Jim?’
‘Sure,’ said Carlyle. ‘I’m dreaming. I do a lot of dreaming down here. I have a concussion, Dick. Little cut on my scalp...’
The two lovers sat there petrified, unable to move. Carlyle laughed and could not make it out. He wasn’t about to report them for fraternizing.
‘Come on now!’ He laughed, weakly. ‘What do I take, Dick? Not functioning too well... what antibiotic... the label... ?’
‘UCF,’ said Hogan automatically. ‘You know that. Orange capsules.’
‘Thanks...’
Then Mary Long pointed and began to scream.
‘Quogs! I can see quogs!’
And the dream swirled away taking Carlyle with it.
* * * *
After he got the Chief to feed him the orange capsules he slept long and heavily while his head mended. He woke at night, out on deck, with the raft still moving steadily in the grip of the current. They passed islands - no, not islands, but the tops of mee-haw trees, and on the raft the quogs danced, holding out their hands to the distance, to their brothers in the dripping branches. He woke in the hut and saw a patch of indigo sky with the Star shining down. Carlyle turned to the Chief; he was still lightheaded.
‘Far and Few ...’ said Carlyle. ‘How does it go?’ He struggled drowsily on to one elbow.
Few and far, Far and few,
Are the lands where the Jumblies live,
Their heads were green, and their hands were blue,
And they went to sea in a sieve.
Carlyle was laughing and the quogs waved their fingers.
In his sleep he heard someone calling his name; he woke up and found the Chief, vocalizing through his hands.
‘Cah-lah-ee!’
‘Good try,’ said Carlyle, flexing his limbs and feeling stronger.
He pointed to the Chief, who slid across his nictitating eyelids in a show of quog bashfulness.
‘Tell me your name,’ urged Carlyle.
The old quog boomed shyly: ‘Sheef.’
Chief. The name Carlyle had given him, though he didn’t recall ever calling him that, unless in his delirium. He let it go, puzzled. Either the quogs had no names or they were like cats, who had special sounds they used to communicate with humans.
Carlyle checked his instruments; the stormy conditions were abating. A mee-haw off to port showed a fraction of trunk. The flood waters were beginning to recede. His chronometer told him he had been out of action for three days. The Star hung low in a sky of aquamarine; he saw the plateau dead ahead with the black cliffs rising up sheer. The current was no more than a ripple and the mee-haw raft moved sluggishly through the purple water.
He checked the plateau through his glasses, trying to make out a possible landing-place that he remembered where broken columns of black basalt had made an alien giant’s causeway. He saw a disturbance in the water, a line of foam. Before he could register it properly he sensed the anxiety of the quogs, growing into fear. Behind him they huddled and whistled, crowding into the ragged heap of the Met. hut. He stood on the raft, sandwiched between two shock waves . . . the low wedge of foam moving towards them and the almost palpable fear given off by the quogs.
‘What is it?’ cried Carlyle.
The Chief, all of them, could give no answer, only this immense welling up of terror. Carlyle gazed at them blankly. A whale? A giant ray? The Great Horned Toad? He pushed through the crowd and took down a regulation magnum; then as an after-thought he reached down the new Fernlich, the automatic missile carbine. As he feathered its vents he heard the sound, a high vibrant scale of notes, swinging up and down on impossible frequencies. He might have heard it before, far out on the sea at night, so sweet and distant that it could be something he imagined. The quogs writhed in fear and pain, clasping their hands over their round ears, burrowing under the paraphernalia in the hut.
Carlyle rushed out into the waves of strange music. The ripple had divided into ten, a dozen pink clumps of foam, approaching swiftly on all sides. He could almost see them now . . . not too large, dark shapes swimming easily . . . like seals, maybe, or dolphins…slipping, weaving, gliding, just below the surface of the water. Carlyle squatted on the deck, fascinated. The music thrilled around him, his head sang, he felt dizzy. A young quog, crouched at the doorway of the hut, rolled over and died.
Carlyle sprang up, gasping. With an audible pop something reared up out of a patch of foam. A smooth pink bubble ... At first he thought incredulously of a child’s toy space helmet, then he saw that it was a bubble of foam. The bubble burst and a sleek black head appeared. It did look like a seal but the coat was scaly, black crystalline scales, dark mother-of-pearl, breaking the bluish light into an alien spectrum. The creature was dancing on its tail, waving sleek webs like forepaws, only a few metres from the raft. Then, with a glissando of sound, infinitely sweet, like a peal of electronic bells, a single scale tentacle whipped out from a curled position below the head and seized the body of the dead quog. The seal-lizard flipped its catch into the air and caught it playfully. There was a flash of teeth, a minor chord, the quog’s head was bitten off. A whistle of anguish rose from the burrowing terrified quogs crammed inside the hut. Carlyle shouted at the top of his voice.
The creatures has never heard a human voice. There was an excited humming, a swish of dark bodies passing around and under the raft. A colony of pink bubbles grew to starboard, at a safe distance. The seal-lizards repeated what he recognized vaguely as the tone and pitch of his own voice. They bloomed and cawed, bouncing about in the water. Carlyle accepted the invitation; he called again, telling them to clear off. The formation of bubbles began to move closer, tinkling, humming ... testing... testing...
With a ringing head Carlyle realized what they were trying to find. The raft was drifting closer to the plateau; he grasped the oar, still lying on deck, and began to drive the clumsy craft along. He would never escape this way before the seal-lizard found his death frequency - the sound which would make this new creature with the harsh, loud voice fall down to be eaten. The seal-lizards moved alongside in formation. The noise was unbearable; Carlyle sang, groaned, shouted aloud. A tentacle, then another, flicked over the timbers of the raft, plucked at his boots, probed towards the quogs in the hut.
Carlyle dropped his oar and fired the magnum in the air. The seal-lizards hesitated, then pressed forward. A new wave of sound broke over the raft; he screamed and rolled upon the deck, pressing his hands over his ears. Through the mists of agonizing sound he saw the seal-lizards at the very edge of the boat. A row of neat, scaly black heads; narrow oval eyes, a structure of nasal beak and leathery appendages like whiskers . . . even so close they looked amazingly like seals. He could not see how they made their music. Their comical mouths opened upon murderous fangs. A tentacle gripped his wrist and pulled gently.
Roaring aloud to counteract their killing whine Carlyle put one hand to the missile carbine and fired point-blank along the deck. A seal-lizard was blasted into mush. The missile that destroyed it passed on across the sea, then struck and exploded, sending up a column of water, fifty metres away.
There was a moment of utter silence, then the whole band of seal-lizards dived like one creature. It could have been the shock-wave that did it, or the sound of the carbine, or simply the death of one of their number. Rising to his knees Carlyle saw them emerge far beyond the raft swimming in formation, fast and low ... a ripple bearing away to the south-west. He caught only a few notes of their music across the dark waters.
The quogs crept out and surrounded him, helping him to stand. Everyone, Carlyle included, was partially deaf from the encounter. The quogs held their heads sideways and bounced on one leg, like a human bather with water in his ear. Carlyle shook hands with the Chief; it caught on. The whole party, dizzy with relief, shook hands promiscuously.
They were already within the shadow of the plateau: Carlyle and his crew, working the oar, struck a rock or a shoal, then another. They were over the flooded causeway where he had embarked for the island three months ago. He levered the raft in towards a rock platform. The quogs had begun to stamp gently and hold out their hands to the plateau.
One moment there was no sign of life, only the glittering planes of the great stone mesa; the next, every plane and slope was alive with quogs. They spilled over the edge of the plateau in waves, until the black rock was blanketed with brown and grey and tawny fur. A strange noise, stranger even than the music of the seal-lizards, began to rise up from the multitude. They vocalized all together, by tens and hundreds, their weak voices blending into a vast muffled shout, that echoed out over the purple flood tide and reverberated from the chasms of the plateau.
‘CAH-LAH-EE.’
As his own quogs pressed round him proudly, in silence, Carlyle recognized his own name. Then as the shout re-doubled: ‘CAH-LAH-EE,’ he saw himself as a new creature, as the quogs perceived him: the clumsy, loud-voiced, white-handed giant of a new species. The dogged Cah-lah-ee, who made a marvellous craft from the looted remains of a mee-haw tree, who overcame the flood, did battle with seal-lizards and brought a whole tribe to safety.
The raft sidled into the platform and a nylon rope fell on the deck. The quogs were so thick that Carlyle had not seen the landing party, Garrett, Hogan and Weiss. The sight of these men, his own kind, affected him powerfully. His sense of proportion was restored; he smiled and choked up, just as they all did. He felt as if he had returned from some other dimension, not a routine stint on AC14.
‘Hey there!’ cried Garrett. ‘Some welcome you got here, Lieutenant.’
‘Am I glad to see you!’ said Carlyle.
They heaved him ashore; the quogs were whisked off the raft by hundreds of willing hands.
Carlyle turned back to the Chief.
‘See the raft is made fast,’ he said.
The men of the landing party turned back and watched as the Chief and his offsiders tied up to a pillar of rock.
‘Everything ship-shape!’ said Dick Hogan.
‘They know the ropes,’ said Carlyle.
The party ascended through an aisle of quogs, still hooting his name; Carlyle acknowledged the applause as modestly as he could. He was looking ahead eagerly ... Yes, there was the landing module on the plateau, among the bushes and the stony burrows of the upland quogs. He was going upstairs, back to the station. His limbs began to ache in anticipation of a steam bath and a bunk.
‘How’s the head?’ asked Hogan.
‘Oh fine,’ said Carlyle. ‘It was just a simple concussion.’
Garrett turned to him.
‘You get it, don’t you, Jim? You understand what you’ve discovered.’
‘I think so,’ said Carlyle. ‘I guess I knew all along. Or when they called out my name... Did you know it was my name?’
‘We worked it out.’ They laughed and looked at Carlyle expectantly, waiting for him to bell the cat.
‘The quogs are able to transmit pictures,’ said Carlyle. ‘They are natural telesends.’
‘The first in the Universe,’ said Garrett.
‘There’s more to it than that, Max,’ said Carlyle. ‘Some kind of group intelligence...’
‘They had us on the hop upstairs!’ put in Weiss.
‘What way?’ asked Carlyle.
‘Reports of hallucinations,’ said Garrett. ‘Weiss here saw you on the raft. Hogan...’
‘I saw Hogan,’ said Carlyle. ‘Spoke to him. I thought it was a dream.’
He and Hogan exchanged glances, straight-faced; no one said a word about Mary Long. The quogs certainly had a trick of embarrassing that girl.
‘Communication can extend over vast distances,’ said Max Garrett.
He was smiling in an odd way; the men were still watching Carlyle closely. He couldn’t read much in their faces, no pictures came to him; for a moment he wished they were quogs. Hogan dug him in the ribs.
‘You got the prize, boy,’ he said.
Garrett cleared his throat.
‘We had word. Commander Eva Magnussen put in a report. She has also requested a P.I.C. with Lieutenant Carlyle.’ A Personal Interplanetary Communication: something flashed from Earth to Armstrong Base to a chain of a hundred satellites. It was the spaceman’s version of compassionate leave; marriages were contracted, births and deaths announced in this way. ‘She has requested a colonial posting.’
Carlyle smiled foolishly and the men all shook him by the hand.
They were anxious to get him upstairs to sick bay; but Carlyle excused himself and turned aside. He bent down to the nearest quog.
‘Where is my friend the Chief?’
There was an immediate response in the scattered groups of quogs returning up the sides of the plateau. A strong impulse, stronger perhaps because of the numbers involved, directed him to a low cave some distance away. He strode over and found the Chief, with his wives and children, being regaled with berries and limpets and sweet-bark. He realized that he had been aware for some time that the Chief was in fact a male; he found no difficulty in sexing quogs at a glance. The Chief knew that he was leaving.
‘I’ll come back after a few days,’ said Carlyle.
The pair of them stood in a clear space, looking out from the height of the plateau. The three giant causeways in the rock were explained, three great chutes that drained off the deluge of rain from the high ground. The purple sea spread out beneath them; the mee-haw trees marked the submerged islands. In a series of quick superimpositions Carlyle saw the great day when the flood receded altogether; when the star approached its apogee and the islands became dry land again.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I’ll be back to see that.’
As he turned to rejoin the landing party Carlyle took in the scene. The three men beside their vehicle, tall visitors in regulation silversuits, and a fourth man, unkempt and hairy, in ragged coveralls, communing at a distance with the members of a new species. The men looked curiously towards Carlyle; their anxiety did not quite diminish as he came closer. The distance between Carlyle and the landing party could not be taken up in a few small steps. They saw tomorrow’s man, who by some chance operation of goodwill, some accident of understanding, reached forward into new modes of being.