William Tenn - Of Men And Monsters

She nodded, placed her hands on either side of his face and kissed him slowly, softly. “Listen, darling,” she whispered, her cheek against his. “Any method of escape is bound to involve a certain amount of gymnastics. And at some time in the not too distant future, little Rachel is going to be a lot less limber than she is now. She’s going to be very clumsy about climbing from one place to another—and she’s going to be awfully slow if any running has to be done. If we make a move, it has to be well before that.”

Eric held her tight against him. “Those damned Monsters!” he swore. “Their damned laboratory! Their damned experiments! They are not going to get my child.”

“It could be children,” Rachel reminded him. “You may be a singleton, but a real litter is still a definite possibility.”

“There’d be no escape, then,” he said soberly. “You’re right: we’ve got to get out of here before you give birth. The sooner the better.”

Rachel pushed herself away from him and turned aside. “Yes,” she whispered, mostly to herself. “It was one thing to save our necks by giving the Monsters what they wanted: a breeding pair. But to give them the results of the breeding—”

“Stop it, Rachel! We’re not at that point yet.” And Eric moved off to make yet another circuit of the cage, yet another examination of Monster territory as it was visible through the transparent walls and floor. He had to be a warrior again, watching for an advantage, looking for a soft spot at which to aim an attack.

All of the plans for escape he had discussed with Jonathan Danielson and Walter the Weapon-Seeker had been inadequate; but here there was a new factor, something that had been nibbling at his mind for weeks. So far it had been only a nibble, not a bite. He concentrated on it demandingly, impatiently, both outer and inner eyes wide open.

There were no more lessons, at least none where the studies were guided wholly by the girl. Now he sat at her feet and asked her questions, pulling her back and forth in the areas of knowledge that corresponded to the places where he felt the nibbling sensation in his mind.

“Rachel, I must know about every single item in the pockets of your cloak. That small, pointed thing, for example—”

“You told me once what your people think this entire Monster dwelling looks like. Could’ you draw a picture of it for me—”

“Can you cut up a few small sections of the cloak? Can they be sewn together? You said you had some kind of adhesive, didn’t you—”

“Rachel, darling, can you tell me in simple, noncomplicated language what you know of the principles behind the various vehicles our ancestors used? Automobiles,boats, airplanes, spacecraft. Whatever you know about them, whatever you can explain—”

Sometimes he amused her. Sometimes he almost terrified her. Always he ended by exhausting her. “There is a difference between men and women,” she would mutter as she fell back finally, locking her arms behind her head and closing her eyes. “And now I know what it is. Women have to rest. Men don’t.”

Truly, Eric seemed to have no need of rest. He would prowl up and down the cage in long, springy, nervous strides, shaking a single fist over and over again, as if he were trying to hammer an idea open in mid-air. Or he would sit in a corner, staring down at a Monster going by—but while he sat and stared, his whole body would vibrate, faster, faster, faster. Or he would get involved in experiments: experiments with the properties of some piece of equipment in the cloak, experiments that could be conducted only when food was being dropped in, or only when the cage was being flooded and washed, or only when one of their immense captors had, come by to look them over.

In the beginning, Rachel worked with him and tried to help him—that is, when she could find out what it was that he was investigating: frequently he had no idea of the goal himself. But more and more she tended to leave him to his own researches. She would answer the questions he suddenly snapped at her, giving him relevant data or her carefully considered opinions. Otherwise, she was content to lie and watch him work, smiling at him fondly whenever he turned a look murky with concentration in her direction. And more and more, she spent her time stretched out at full length, dozing.

He understood, even though it was infuriating not to have the full, alert services of her well-stocked mind. First, he was her man: she had put herself and their mutual problem in his hands—and she trusted him. But more important, something was at work that he had seen many times before among the females of Mankind: pregnancy usually created a certain placid euphoria in a woman; it was as if her thoughts were pledged exclusively to the helpless thing growing slowly within her body. With Rachel it was starting early.

Eric understood, but the understanding only made him more frenzied, more restless, more probing and determined. It was up to him and him alone whether his family were ever to wander in the burrows as free creatures—-or whether they were to be forever caged and at the mercy of the Monsters’ agony-filled investigations. He would escape, he told himself, beginning yet another new line of experimentation. He would. He would.

One day there was an interruption. A Monster came by and dropped Roy the Runner into their cage.

At first, Eric had scrambled for a spear as the strange human, released from the green rope, had struggled to his feet near where Rachel sat, both hands over her mouth and her eyes wide with fear. Then he recognized Roy and called out his name. All three of them relaxed and exhaled prodigiously. They grinned weakly at each other.

The Monster, satisfied after a period of watching that no mayhem was to be committed, rumbled its tremendous bulk away on other business.

Eric had told Rachel about Roy. Now he introduced the Runner to his mate. Roy was enormously impressed. A woman of the Aaron People, willingly, without coercion … His voice, when he began telling the history of the other cage since Eric had left, was low and almost greasily respectful.

“After they took you out, we didn’t have a leader for a while—the men had lost the habit of following Arthur the Organizer. He’d lost something also: he wasn’t very eager to give orders anymore. So I tried removing my head straps and letting my hair hang free again. You know, to look like you. I figured if I looked like you, maybe the men would take orders from me as if you were giving them. Only it didn’t work. Walter the Weapon-Seeker took over for a while, until the—”

“That’s it, Eric,” Rachel broke in. “The loose hair. That’s why they brought him here.” She tumbled the hair at her neck with the back of a hand. “The loose hair. You, me, the Wild Men. The Monsters don’t know I’m pregnant. They’re still trying to get me mated.”

Eric nodded, but Roy the Runner looked very puzzled and stared first at one and then at the other of them. “Go on, Roy. I’ll explain it all later. How many of the expedition are left?”

“Practically none. About six, besides me. And not all in those Monster experiments, either. A lot of them died in the fighting.”

“Fighting? You started fighting among yourselves?”

The tall thin Runner shook his head impatiently. “No—what was there to fight over? Lots of food and no women. What happened was the Monsters put a whole flock of strange men in our cage, men like you’ve never seen or heard about. I mean not Wild Men even. Little brown men, about half our size, but strong, strong as hell. They didn’t use spears. They had clubs and something they called slingshots. It was hard to understand them. They talked—I don’t know, they talked funny, not like other human beings at all. None of the Strangers had ever seen men like them before, not Arthur the Organizer, not anybody. They had names like Nicky Five and Harry Twelve and Beelzebub Two. All of them had names like that—it was crazy.”