The Test Colony by Winston K. Marks (best way to read ebooks txt) 📗

the fire and taking it away, turning to me to pose the question.

Sorenson, propped up on an elbow, said, "I'll be damned. He's asking you to give him some of the fire."

"No," Benson said. "He knows fire, knows you can't take the flames. He's asking for the means to build a fire."

I faced Joe, shook my head solemnly and said, "No!" To give meaning to the word I sat down and turned my head away for a moment. When I looked back Joe was looking very disappointed. It made Sue so sad that she held out a wedge of sweet melon to him. Joe accepted the gift easily, gracefully and with a small smile of "thank you". He turned back, squatted as near the blaze as comfort would permit and chewed absently at the melon.

Thereafter he ignored the animated conversation that sprang up among us. Jane wanted to know why we didn't give him one of our lighters. "He's just as intelligent as we are," she insisted. She got no argument on that score, but her husband pointed out that the golden people were unaccustomed to handling fire, and that during the present dry season even the green foliage might take off in a holocaust if ignited in this rich, oxygen air.

Even as he spoke, a long, slender pole, flaming at one end, toppled from the settling fire and rolled near Joe. With scarcely a pause to debate, he leaped to his feet, grabbed the pole by the cool end and waved it aloft like a torch.

With a triumphant yell he plunged through us and out across the field bearing his prize aloft trailing sparks.

I tried to shoot low, but my light caliber pellet caught him rather high in the thigh. He dived to the ground senseless in a shower of sparks. His fellow creatures immediately gathered around him. When we closed in to retrieve the fire-wand and stamp out the sparks, the other natives faded away, crinkling their noses. They made no effort to remove Joe, but cast many admiring glances back at the fire he had stolen.

Sue came up storming at me. "You didn't have to shoot him." She started to kneel down beside him, but Dr. Bailey restrained her.

"Easy, Susan. Remember the quarantine."

"We can't let him lie there and bleed to death," I said, feeling unaccountably ashamed for my deed, although there was scarcely an alternative.

Benson came up, "Nice shot, Sam."

I said, "Phil, I want permission to enter quarantine with Joe, here. Let me have the instruments, and I'll probe for the bullet and take care of him."

Benson shook his head. "We can't take that chance. We couldn't spare you if you caught something."

"Who could you spare better?" I demanded. "See here, we've got to find out sooner or later whether these little fellows carry anything contagious. If they do, well, then we have a decision to face, but we can't decide anything until we know."

Sue was at my side now. She said. "You have a dozen people who can punch a micro-writer. Sam and I aren't indispensable. Besides, it was he who crippled the poor little fellow."

Without waiting for an answer she called out, "Larson, where are you?" The lucky carpenter tried to draw back in the shadows, knowing full well what she had in mind.

Benson stared at me for a minute. He said gruffly, "Very well, if you can talk Larson out of his cottage, go ahead, play hero!"

I didn't feel very heroic right then. Two hours later, when we had the bullet out of Joe and had him bedded down comfortably for the night, Sue cosied up to me in our double sleeping silks and murmured, "What a guy has to go through out here to get a little privacy!"

Poor Larson!

Bailey and Sorenson set up their lab outside our cabin door. Joe's wound was seriously infected, and none of our cautiously applied remedies would control the raging fever with which he awoke the first morning. He lay, apathetic, eyes half closed, murmuring, "Tala! Tala!"

The doctors seized the opportunity to launch a study of Sirian microbes, diseases and earth molds. Sue and I took cultures from Joe's wound, and the medics experimented with the effects of local mold products similar to the penicillin series. By force-feeding we managed to keep Joe alive until Bailey, one morning, held up a hypo full of clear liquid and told us how to administer it.

Joe responded at once. The following day he began sitting up and vociferously demanding, "Tala, Tala!"

"Must be his wife or girl-friend," Sue deduced. She was wrong. Joe began making motions of a person lifting a vessel and drinking. When we offered him water he refused, repeating, "Tala!" and making more drinking motions. He tried to rise, but the pain in his swollen thigh stopped him. He sank back licking his lips like a man dying of thirst, and in spite of his general improvement, he stayed in a sullen, subdued attitude.

As his wound closed and the swelling reduced, Joe's temperature, which had reached a fabulous 142 degrees F., stabilized at 137 F., thereby confirming Benson's prediction that the natives would display a much higher metabolism. Sue, who had spent hours stroking the fevered brow, had grown used to Joe's hot-bloodedness, and she teased me about my relative "frigidity".

Until Joe got his "tala" I made disappointing progress at teaching him our language. He picked up our words for those few items that pertained to his comfort, such as food, drink, bedpan and pillow—he revelled in the luxury of our down-filled pillows. But at first he evinced little interest in communication.

Then one morning we arose to find him standing and clinging weakly to the door jamb, searching the perimeter of the clearing with frantic eyes.

We scolded him, but he ignored us. He spotted a fellow native examining one of the unfinished huts, which were going up at the rate of one a day. He called out in a loud, clear voice, and the little golden creature came running over to investigate.

It was a lovely little female, and I told Sue, "We have a reunion on our hands. Must be his mate."

But Joe was quite indifferent to her charms. She seemed tolerably happy to see him, touched his bandages with long, gentle fingers, then hurried off to the forest as if in response to his commands. Joe made no effort to follow. He seemed still to realize that he was in good hands and was profiting by the care he was receiving.

However, he chafed for the ten minutes or so before her return. We waited with high curiosity. I bet Sue that we were about to learn what "tala" was. When the female approached again we were mystified. "Why it's just a mango," Sue said. Indeed, the yellow-skinned, kidney-shaped fruit which the little native bore carefully in both hands appeared to be one of the over-sized specimens we had named after its smaller Earth counterpart.

Joe reached greedily for the fruit, poked a hole in the rind with a pointed forefinger and drank deeply. Watching from the door of our bedroom, we could smell a delightful, tangy scent that was only vaguely typical of the Sirian mangoes we had eaten.

To our surprise, as Joe drank, the skin collapsed like a plastic bag. "It must be a different species, or else it's much riper than any we've gathered," Sue said.

When Joe paused to breathe, the female took the fruit from him and sucked at it enthusiastically. They sank down on Joe's bed and took turns drinking the juice until the quart-sized skin was crumpled and empty.

I fear I interrupted an incipient romance in order to retrieve the discarded skin. The female wrinkled her nose and made for the door. I watched her roll unsteadily across the clearing with eccentric little lurches. The bland smile on Joe's handsome face deepened my suspicion. I pointed to the skin and asked, "Tala?"

He nodded, patted his stomach and repeated, "Tala!"

From that moment our relations improved immensely. Joe enlisted the help of various females to keep him supplied with skins of tala, and with the satiation of his craving he took a completely new interest in life.

We spent hours every day working out our language difficulties. He learned so rapidly that I abandoned learning his language in favor of teaching him ours. Even such abstract concepts as time and space proved no obstacles. He grasped the purpose of my wristwatch after a single day's demonstration of its relationship to the passage of Sirius across the sky.

Using a pencil I had managed to convey our symbols for large numbers. Joe could count up to any number now, and he seemed actually to understand the open-end nature of our system of enumeration.

It made possible a mutual agreement on such matters as the number of "days" in a year, which he was mildly interested to learn numbered 440 on his planet. Then a startling piece of information came from him when I asked how long his people lived.

"Two years. Maybe three," he replied. Because of the shorter days, a Sirian year about equalled an Earth year, and I found it difficult to believe that these wonderful little animals lived only two or three years. He persisted until I believed him.

He was strangely vague when I tried to determine the common manner of death. Indeed, personal death was a concept either so hazy or distasteful to him that he refused to dwell on it. The most he would convey was that there were always new faces in the tribe, and the old faces rarely remained more than three years. At this time, he described himself as being more than a year old.

This was only one of several startling items that were revealed in our conversations. The golden people matured in three months to fully grown adults. A female could bear several babies a year and usually did. Yet Joe insisted that his tribe was the only clan on the face of the planet, so far as he knew, and that it numbered fewer than a thousand individuals.

There was no such thing as monogamy or even polygamy. True, at night when the air was cooler, they paired off, male and female, and each male chose from among several favorites. But there was no formal nor permanent mating arrangement.

Benson, who had set up a sheltered desk outside Joe's window in order to listen in with an anthropologist's avid interest, posed the question which grew into quite a mystery. Under such fruitful conditions and ideal environment, why hadn't Joe's people overrun the planet? Even with the brief life-span, each female should produce many babies.

Joe had no answer. The problem didn't interest him, and he refused to ponder it. He'd squat in the corner jealously guarding his limp-skinned mango, nipping at it occasionally when our questions failed to make sense.

We were all, incidentally, quite curious to taste Joe's tala juice, but it was his sole property. His lady-friends would hand it to no one but him, and he guarded it selfishly. Bailey and Sorenson had enlisted the help of our two organic chemists to examine the moist residue of the empty skins, but with their limited lab facilities all they could do was make guesses that the coveted juice was the product of fermentation or enzymic action with which we were unfamiliar.

As a psychologist I knew that Joe responded to the tala similarly to the way a human dipsomaniac does to alcohol. When he was well-supplied he was cheerful and happy. When he ran out, he became taciturn and irritable. His frequent resort to the liquor, when we tried to force him to answer troublesome questions, confirmed my suspicion that there were certain matters his brilliant mind simply refused to embrace, and the simplest way to avoid worrying about them was to take another drink of tala.

Benson and I discussed this one afternoon while Joe was taking a nap. We sat in the shade of my hut spooning the lush pulp of a mango into our mouths. He said, "Everything points to a race of super-intelligence held down by sheer degeneracy."

"You mean the tala-drinking?" I asked.

He nodded. "For one thing. Our work parties report that they never stop drinking the stuff. The older ones get quite plastered. I've seen it myself. Disgusting. And they have no common sense of, of—well, I shouldn't say decency, because obviously morality as we know it just doesn't exist. But thank heavens they don't care for the scent of humans."

I said, "Don't depend on that too much. I asked Joe about it, and he said that we don't necessarily smell bad to them. It's just so alien to any scent they've known that they tend to shy off. Joe is quite used to it now. He lets Sue rub his back and his head. She's made quite a pet of him."

Benson didn't like this news