William Tenn - Of Men And Monsters

A small noise from Rachel. Eric looked at her. “I know about them,” she said. “They’re not from this house at all. They’re from another house, the one next to ours. Naturally, another house—they’re almost a totally different breed of humanity. Men from my people have visited them and brought back some strange, strange tales.”

“What does she mean ‘another house’?”

“A Monster house,” Eric told Roy. “All of us Mankind, the Strangers, the Aaron People—we all live in the walls of one particular Monster house. Actually, we all live in just one wing of that one house. In the other wings, there are lots of other peoples, some like us, some different. But people who live in another house entirely have to be very different from us. They’ve been breeding away from us for centuries, and their language and culture have been changing.” At the Runner’s bewildered expression, he said: “All right, Roy, I’ll explain that later, too. Don’t worry about it now. These men came into the cage and started fighting?”

“They did, from the moment they arrived,” Roy answered, relieved to get back to a matter that was familiar and somewhat understandable. “They were screaming, just as we were, when the Monsters dropped them into the cage. Then they calmed down: they stopped screaming and they started fighting with us. They didn’t like anything we did. They said we didn’t even know how to eat: the only right way to eat, according to them, was stretched out at full length on the floor of the cage, face down. And you weren’t supposed to touch the food with your hands—you had to eat it off the floor. There were lots of other things: the way we slept, the way we talked, the way we moved our bowels. Everything had to be done their way—they were like lunatics! Day after day we lived in opposite corners of the cage with sentries posted while we slept, and every time we were fed—or watered—or anything—there’d be a full-scale battle in the middle, spears against clubs and slingshots, and three, four corpses for the Monsters to dispose of.”

“Finally, though, you beat them?”

“Nobody beat anybody. What happened was the Monsters brought up a big sort of buzzing machine and put it over the cage. From that time on, whenever you felt mad enough to kill someone, you got a terrible pain in the head, and it got worse and worse until you thought you’d go clear out of your mind. The moment you stopped thinking about killing, the pain disappeared. Let me tell you, Eric, we got to be friends, us and those strange little brown men! We got to be friends, no more arguments, no more battles, no more killing—just the Monsters taking a man out every once in a while and tearing him to pieces. You know, good times again?”

Eric and Rachel smiled grimly.

“That’s what I expected was going to happen to me when they pulled me out today. Eric, was I glad to see you! I thought you’d been sewered a long, long time ago. They took Arthur the Organizer out only two days ago. He was lucky: they dropped some black powder on him and he was dead fast just like that. But Manny the Manufacturer—”

Eric held up a hand to stop him. ” Pm not interested in that,” he said. “Tell me: you said that sometimes there were three or four corpses to dispose of while the fighting was going on. Were they all taken out of the cage together?”

The Runner screwed up his eyes and thought back. “I think so. Yes. Yes, they were all taken out of the cage at the same time. Once a day, whoever was dead, down would come the green ropes and out they’d all go together.”

“And whatever they were wearing, whatever spears or clubs might be lying across their bodies—that would go out too?”

“Sure. You saw it. Remember the guy that Walter said was from the Aaron People, the one who died the day after we arrived? They took him out with his skirt wrapped around his face just the way we had placed it. That’s the way they dumped him into the black hole—that’s the way they do it with everyone who dies in the cage.”

“The Monsters do seem to have a thing about death,” Rachel mused aloud. “Or at least death as it has to do with human bergs. Their interest in us is strictly in viva, as the ancestors would say. But what difference does that make to you, Eric? Once we’re dead—”

“Once we’re dead, we have a good chance to stay alive,” he told her. “And I’m not being funny. Roy, do you want to escape with us?”

After one startled stare, the Runner bobbed his head emphatically. “Do I! Any plan you have, no matter how dangerous it is, count me in. The way I see it, there’s no real future here for an ambitious young man.”

“The plan I have is very dangerous. An awful lot of things can go wrong, but it’s absolutely the only way out of the cage that I can see. All right, let’s get started.”

Under his instructions, they went into action. He drove them both the way he’d been driving himself, doggedly, unremittingly. And the work went fast.

But once Rachel looked up and asked anxiously: “Aren’t you taking a lot for granted, Eric? You have inference piled on inference. We don’t know that much for certain about the construction of Monster houses.”

“If I’m wrong, we’ll be killed. And if we stay here?”

Rachel put her head down, sighed, and went back to her task.

Another time, it was Roy who exploded. He was learning and growing, too—and becoming less deferent. “Look, Erik, you have no reason to believe these things work. Even Rachel—who’s from the Aaron People—even she says she’s never heard of these things before.”

“Yes, she has. She knows them under another name= the Archimedes principle. And I told you, I’ve experimented with them. I’ve experimented with them over and over again. They’ll work.”

When they were almost finished with the construction, they began timing the approach of the Monster who fed them every day. Eric’s plan was complicated enough: if the strains upon them were not to be too great, they had to initiate their operation shortly before a feeding time. And it was necessary for them to store food and drinking water. Who knew when they would come close to these essentials again?

Rachel looked at her torn and shredded cloak, the equipment from its pockets scattered about the floor of the cage like so much litter. “The only thing,” she said in a low, miserable voice, “that I find really painful, darling, is your destroying my protoplasm neutralizer. The work, the research, that went into that gadget! And it was the whole point of my being sent into Monster territory. To go back to my people without it, after all this—”

“If we get back to your people,” Eric told her calmly, working away at a folded section of the rod-like device, “the most important thing you can tell them is that the neutralizer works. Once they know that, they can build others like it. Meanwhile, we have nothing else we can turn into a really strong hook. And without a strong hook—even if everything else works right we don’t have a chance.”

The Runner came across the cage and stood beside him. “I’ve been thinking, Eric. You’d better tie the hook to my hands. I’m at least as strong as you. But you’re smarter: I think you’ll do better with the opening. I promise to hang on with all my might.”

Eric finished twisting the rod of the protoplasm neutralizer into a serviceable hook. Then he sat back and thought. He nodded. “All right, Roy,” he said. “That’s the way we’ll do it. But don’t let go!” He put the uncurved end of the hook into Roy’s hands: the Runner gripped it firmly. Then Eric tied the device to Roy’s hands, running more straps from it around his arms, back across his shoulders. The hook had become almost a part of Roy’s body.