Gordon Dickson - The Human Edge

Suddenly he landed hard on something. The impact drove all the air out of his lungs, so that he fought to breathe—and in that struggle he lost the cobwebs surrounding him for the first time that day.

He had not been aware of his fall, but now he saw that he lay half on his back, some ten feet down from the edge of one of the holes. He tried to get up, but one leg would not work. Panic cut through him like a knife.

“Help!” he shouted. His voice came out hoarse and strange-sounding. “Help!”

He called again; and after what seemed a very long time, the head of the envoy poked over the edge of the sinkhole and looked down at him.

“Get me out of here!” cried Chuck. “Help me out.”

The envoy stared at him.

“Give me a hand!” said Chuck. “I can’t climb up by myself. I’m hurt.”

“I don’t understand,” said the envoy.

“I think my leg’s broken. What’s the matter with you?” Now that he had mentioned it, as if it had been lying there waiting for its cue, the leg that would not work sent a sudden, vicious stab of pain through him. And close behind this came a swelling agony that pricked Chuck to fury. “Don’t you hear me? I said, pull me out of here! My leg’s broken. I can’t stand on it!”

“You are damaged?” said the envoy

“Of course I’m damaged!”

The envoy stared down at Chuck for a long moment. When he spoke again, his words struck an odd, formalistic note in Chuck’s fevered brain.

“It is regrettable,” said the envoy, “that you are no longer in perfect health.”

And he turned away, and disappeared. Above Chuck’s straining eyes, the edges of the hole and the little patch of sky beyond them tilted, spun about like a scene painted on a whirling disk, and shredded away into nothingness.

At some time during succeeding events he woke up again; but nothing was really clear or certain until he found himself looking up into the face of Doc Burgis, who was standing over him, with a finger on his pulse.

“How do you feel?” said Burgis.

“I don’t know,” said Chuck. “Where am I?”

“Back at Base,” said Burgis, letting go of his wrist. “Your leg is knitting nicely and we’ve knocked out your pneumonia. You’ve been under sedation. A couple more days’ rest and you’ll be ready to run again.”

“That’s nice,” said Chuck; and went back to sleep.

Three days later he was recovered enough to take a ride in his motorized go-cart over to Roy Marlie’s office. He found Roy there, and his uncle.

“Hi, Tommy,” said Chuck, wheeling through the door. “Hi, Chief.”

“How you doing, son?” asked Member Thomas Wagnall. “How’s the leg?”

“Doc says I can start getting around on surgical splints in a day or two,” Chuck looked at them both. “Well, isn’t anybody going to tell me what happened?”

“Those two natives were carrying you when we finally located the three of you,” said Tommy, “and we—”

“They were?” said Chuck.

“Why, yes.” Tommy looked closely at him. “Didn’t you know that?”

“I—I was unconscious before they started carrying me, I guess, “said Chuck.

“At any rate, we got you all back here in good shape.” Tommy went across the room to a built-in cabinet and came back carrying a bottle of scotch, capped with three glasses, and a bowl of ice. “Ready for that drink now?”

“Try me,” said Chuck, not quite licking his lips. Tommy made a second trip for charged water and brought it back. He passed the drinks around.

“How,” he said, raising his glass. They all drank in appreciative silence.

“Well,” said Tommy, setting his glass down on the top of Roy’s desk, “I suppose you heard about the conference.” Chuck glanced over at Roy, who was evincing a polite interest.

“I heard they had a brief meeting and put everything off for a while,” said Chuck.

“Until they had a chance to talk things over between themselves, yes,” said Tommy. He was watching his nephew somewhat closely. “Rather surprising development. We hardly know where we stand now, do we?”

“Oh, I guess it’ll work out all right,” said Chuck.

“You do?”

“Why, yes,” said Chuck. He slowly sipped at his glass again and held it up to the light of the window. “Good scotch.”

“ All right! ” Tommy’s thick fist came down with a sudden bang on the desk top. “I’ll quit playing around. I may be nothing but a chairside Earth-lubber, but I’ll tell you one thing. There’s one thing I’ve developed in twenty years of politics and that’s a nose for smells. And something about this situation smells! I don’t know what, but it smells. And I want to find out what it is.”

Chuck and Roy looked at each other.

“Why, Member,” said Roy. “I don’t follow you.”

“You follow me all right,” said Tommy. He took a gulp from his glass and blew out an angry breath. “All right—off the record. But tell me!”

Roy smiled.

“You tell him, Chuck,” he said.

Chuck grinned in his turn.

“Well, I’ll put it this way, Tommy,” he said. “You remember how I explained the story about Big Brother Charlie that gave us the name for this project?”

“What about it?” said the Member.

“Maybe I didn’t go into quite enough detail. You see,” said Chuck, “the two youngest brothers were twins who lived right next door to each other in one town. They used to fight regularly until their wives got fed up with it. And when that happened, their wives would invite Big Brother Charlie from the next town to come and visit them.”

Tommy was watching him with narrowed eyes.

“What happened, of course,” said Chuck, lifting his glass again, “was that after about a week, the twins weren’t fighting each other at all.” He drank.

“All right. All right,” said Tommy. “I’ll play straight man. Why weren’t they fighting with each other?”

“Because,” said Chuck, putting his glass back down again, “they were both too busy fighting with Big Brother Charlie.”

Tommy stared for a long moment. Then he grunted and sat back in his chair, as if he had just had the wind knocked out of him.

“You see,” said Roy, leaning forward over his desk, “what we were required to do here was something impossible. You just don’t change centuries-old attitudes of distrust and hatred overnight. Trying to get the Lugh and the Tomah to like each other by any pressures we could bring to bear was like trying to move mountains with toothpicks. Too much mass for too little leverage. But we could change the attitudes of both of them toward us.”

“And what’s that supposed to mean?” demanded Tommy, glaring at him.

“Why, we might—and did—arrange for them to find out that, like the twins, they had more in common with each other than either one of them had with Big Brother Charlie. Not that we wanted them, God forbid, to unite in actively fighting Big Brother: We do need this planet as a space depot. But we wanted to make them see that they two form one unit—with us on the outside. They don’t like each other any better now, but they’ve begun to discover a reason for hanging together.”

“I’m not sure I follow you,” said Tommy dryly.

“What I’m telling you,” said Roy, “is that we arranged a demonstration to bring home to them the present situation. They weren’t prepared to share this world with each other. But when it came to their both sharing it with a third life form, they began to realize that the closer relative might see more eye-to-eye with them than the distant one. Chuck was under strict orders not to intervene, but to manage things so that each of them would be forced to solve the problems of the other, with no assistance from Earth or its technology.”