William Tenn - Of Men And Monsters

“Hey, you damned daydreaming singleton!” Roy the Runner was calling from the burrow ahead. “Will you wipe that haze out of your face and pay attention to signals? This is an expedition to Monster territory, not a stroll in the women’s quarters. Stay alert, will you? The band captain’s sent down a call for you.”

Amid the chuckles ahead and behind him—damn it, even the new apprentice was laughing!—Eric took a firmer grip on his glow torch and sprinted for the head of the column. As he passed each man, he was asked the name of the girl he’d been thinking about and pressed for interesting details. Since he kept his mouth tightly shut, some of the warriors hypothesized out loud. They were painfully close to the truth.

His uncle wasn’t much gentler with him. “Eric the Eye,” the Trap-Smasher growled. “Eric the Eyebrow, Eric the Closed Eyelash, you’ll be known as, if you don’t wake up! Now stay abreast of me and try to act like Eric the Eye. These are dangerous burrows and my vision isn’t as sharp as yours. Besides, I have to fill you in on a couple of things.” He turned. “Spread out a little farther back there,” he called out to the men behind him. “Spread out! You should be a full spear-cast from the backside of the man in front of you. Let me see a real strung-out column with plenty of distance between each warrior.”

To Eric, he muttered, once the maneuver had been completed: “Good. Gives us a chance to talk without everyone in the band hearing us. You can trust my bunch, but still, why take chances?”

Eric nodded, with no idea what he was talking about. His uncle had become slightly odd recently. Well, he was still the best band captain in all Mankind.

They marched along together, the light from the strange glowing substance on Eric’s torch and his uncle’s forehead spreading a yellowish illumination some hundred feet ahead of them. On either side, underfoot, overhead, wore the curved, featureless walls of the burrow. From the center of the corridor, where they marched, the walls looked soft and spongy, but Eric knew what tremendous labor was involved in digging a niche or recess in them. It took several strong men at least two sleep periods to make a niche large enough to hold more than a handful of Mankind’s store of artifacts.

Where had the burrows come from? Some said they had been dug by the ancestors when they had first begun to hit back at the Monsters. Others claimed the burrows had always been there, waiting for Mankind to find them and be comfortable in them.

In all directions the burrows stretched. On and on they went, interminably curving and branching and forking, dark and silent, until human beings stamped into them with glow lamp and glow torch. These particular corridors, Eric knew, led to Monster territory: he had been along them many times as a humble spear-carrier when his uncle’s band had been dispatched to bring back the necessities of life for Mankind. Other corridors went off to more exotic and even more dangerous places. But were there any places which had no burrows?

What a thought! Even the Monsters lived in burrows, big as they were reputed to be. But there was a legend that Mankind had once lived outside burrows, outside the branching corridors. Then what had they lived in? Jyst trying to work it out made you dizzy.

They came to a place where the burrow became two burrows, each curving away from the other in opposite directions.

“Which one?” his uncle demanded.

Eric unhesitatingly pointed to the right.

Thomas the Trap-Smasher nodded. “You have a good memory,” he said as he bore in the direction that Eric had indicated. “That’s half of being an Eye. The other half ishaving a feeling, a knack, for the right way to go. You have that too. I’ve noticed it on every expedition where you’ve been along. That’s what T told those women—Rita, Ottilie—I told them what your name had to be. Eric the Eye, I told them. Find a vision for the kid that corresponds to it.”

He was so shocked that he almost came to a halt. “You picked my name? You told them what kind of vision? That’s—that’s—I never heard of such a thing!”

His uncle laughed. “It’s no different from Ottilie the Omen-Teller making a deal with Franklin to have a vision showing him as the new chief. He gets to be chief, she becomes the Chieftain’s First Wife and automatically takes over the Female Society. Religion and politics, they’re always mixed up together these days, Eric. We’re not living in the old times any more when Ancestor-Science was real and holy and it worked.”

“It still works, Ancestor-Science, doesn’t it?” he pleaded. “Some of the time?”

“Don’t be a fool. Of course it works. Without the correct ritual behind us, we wouldn’t dare go out on expedition. But it doesn’t work far enough, strong enough—like Alien-Science. Alien-Science is working for the Monsters. It’s got to begin working for us. That’s where you come in.”

He had to remember that his uncle was an experienced captain, a knowledgeable warrior. Thomas the Trap-Smasher’s protection and advice had brought him, a despised singleton, an orphaned child of parents that no one dared even talk about, to his present estate of almost full thieving status. It was very fortunate for him that neither of his uncle’s wives had yet produced a son who survived into the initiate years. He still had a lot to learn from this man.

“Now,” the Trap-Smasher was saying, his eyes still on the dimly illuminated corridors ahead. “When we get to the Monster burrows, you go in. You go in alone, of course.”

Well, of course, Eric thought. What other way was there to make your Theft? The first time you stole for Mankind, you did it all alone, to prove your manhood, your courage, also the amount of personal luck you enjoyed. It was not like a regular band theft—an organized stealing of a large amount of goods that would last Mankind many sleep periods, almost a tenth of an auld lang syne. In a regular band theft, assigned to each band in rotation, a warrior had to be assured of the luck and skill of the warriors at his side. He had to know that each one of them had made his Theft and proved himself when completely alone.

Stealing from the Monsters was dangerous enough under the best of conditions. You wanted only the cleverest, bravest, most fortunate warriors along with you.

“Once you’re inside, stay close to the wall. Don’t look up at first or you’re likely to freeze right where you are. Keep your eyes on the wall and move close to it. Move fast.”

Nothing new here. Every initiate learned over and over again, before he made his Theft, that it was terribly dangerous to look up when you first entered Monster territory. You had to keep your eyes on the wall and move in the protection of it, the wall touching your shoulder as you ran alongside it. Why this was so, Eric had no idea, but that it was so he had long ago learned to repeat as a fact.

“All right,” Thomas the Trap-Smasher went on. “You turn right as you go in—right, do you hear me, Eric?—you turn right, without looking up, and run along the wall, letting it brush your shoulder every couple of steps. You run forty, fifty paces, and you come to a great big thing, a structure, that’s almost touching the wall. You turn left along that, moving away from the wall, but still not.looking up, until you pass an entrance in the structure. You don’t go in that first entrance, Eric; you pass it by. About twenty, twenty-five paces further on, there’ll be a second entrance, a bigger one. You go in that one.”

“I go in that one,” Eric repeated carefully, memorizing his uncle’s words. He was receiving directions for his Theft, the most important act of his life! Every single thing his uncle told him must be listened to carefully, must not be forgotten.