Algis Budrys - Lower than Angels

“Why did this happen, Imbry?” Iano demanded. “Why was this done to us?”

Imbry shook his head. “I don’t know. A storm… Nobody can blame anything.” Iano clenched his fists.

“I did not ask during the whole day beforehand, though I knew what would happen. I did not even ask in the beginning of the storm. But when I knew the rain must come, when the sea growled and the wind stopped, then , at last, I asked you to make the storm die. Imbry, you did nothing. You made yourself safe, and you did nothing. Why was this done ?” lano’s torso quivered with bunched muscles. His eyes blazed. “If you were who we believed you to be, if you made Tylus’s boy well, why did you do this? Why did you send the storm ?”

It was the final irony: Apparently, if Iano had accepted Imbry as a man, he would have told him in advance how bad the storm was likely to be…

Imbry shook his head. “I’m not a god, Iano,” he repeated dully. He looked at Tylus, who was standing pale and bitter eyed behind Iano.

“Are they safe, Tylus?”

Tylus looked silently over Imbry’s shoulder, and Imbry turned his head to follow his glance. He saw the paler shape crushed around the trunk of a tree, one arm still gripping the boy.

“I must make a canoe,” Tylus said in a dead voice. “I’ll go on a long journey-to-leave-the-sadness-behind . I’ll go where there aren’t any gods like you.”

“Tylus!”

But Iano clutched Imbry’s arm, and he had to turn back toward the head man.

“We’ll all have to go. We can’t ever stay here again.” The grip tightened on Imbry’s arm, and the suit automatically pressed it off. Iano jerked his arm away.

’The storm came because of you. It came to teach us something. We have learned it.” Iano stepped back. “You’re not a great god. You tricked us. You’re a bad ancestor—you’re sick—you have the touch of death in your hand.”

“I never said I was a god.” Imbry’s voice was unsteady. “I told you I was only a man.”

Tylus looked at him out of his dead eyes. “How can you possibly be a man like us? If you’re not a god, then you’re a demon.”

Imbry’s face twisted. “You wouldn’t listen to me. It’s not my fault you expected something I couldn’t deliver. Is it my fault you couldn’t let me be what I am?”

“We know what you are,” Tylus said.

There wasn’t anything Imbry could tell him. He slowly turned away from the two natives and began the long walk back to the sub-ship.

He finished checking the board and energized his starting motors. He waited for a minute and threw in his atmospheric drive.

The rumble of jet throats shook through the hull, and throbbed in the control compartment. The ship broke free, and he retracted the landing jacks.

The throttles advanced, and Imbry fled into the stars.

He sat motionless for several minutes. The memory of Tylus’s lifeless voice etched itself into the set of his jaw and the backs of his eyes. It seemed impossible that it wouldn’t be there forever.

There was another thing to do. He clicked on his communicator.

“This is Imbry. Get me Lindenhoff.”

“Check, Imbry. Stand by.”

He lay in the piloting couch, waiting, and when the image of Lindenhoff’s face built up on the screen, he couldn’t quite meet its eyes.

“Yeah, Imbry?”

He forced himself to look directly into the screen. “I’m on my way in, Lindenhoff. I ran into a problem. I’m dictating a full report for the files, but I wanted to tell you first—and I think I’ve got the answer.”

Lindenhoff grinned slowly. “Okay, Fred.”

Lindenhoff was waiting for him as he berthed the sub-ship aboard the Sainte Marie . Imbry climbed out and looked quietly at the man.

Lindenhoff chuckled. “You look exactly like one of our real veterans,” he said. “A hot bath and a good meal’ll take care of that.” He chuckled again. “It will, too—it takes more than once around the track before this business starts getting you.”

“So you figure I’ll be staying on,” Imbry said, feeling tireder and older than he ever had in his life. “How do you know I didn’t make a real mess of it, down there?”

Lindenhoff chuckled. “You made it back in one piece, didn’t you? That’s the criterion, Fred. I hate to say so, but it is. No mess can possibly be irretrievable if it doesn’t kill the man who made it. Besides—you don’t know enough to tell whether you made any mistakes or not.”

Imbry grunted, thinking Lindenhoff couldn’t possibly know how much of an idiot he felt like and how much he had on his conscience.

“Well, let’s get to this report of yours,” Lindenhoff said.

Imbry nodded slowly. They walked off the Sainte Marie’s flight deck into the labyrinth of steel decks below.

It was three seasons after the storm, and Tylus was still on his journey. One day he came to a new island and ran his canoe up on the beach. Perhaps here he wouldn’t find Pia and the nameless boy waiting for him in the palm groves.

He walked up the sand and triggered the alarm without knowing it.

Aboard the mother ship, Imbry heard it go off and switched the tight-beam scanner on. The intercom speaker over his head broke into a crackle.

“Fred? You got that one?”

“Uh-huh, Lindy. Right here.”

“Which setup is it?”

“Eighty-eight on the B grid. It’s that atoll right in the middle of the prevailing wind belt.”

“I’ve got to hand it to you, Fred. Those little traps of yours are working like a charm.”

Imbry ran his hand over his face. He knew what was going to happen to that innocent native, whoever he was. He’d come out of it a man, ready to take on the job of helping his people climb upward, with a lot of his old ideas stripped away.

Imbry’s mouth jerked sideways, in the habitual gesture that was etching a deep groove in the skin of his face.

But he wouldn’t be happy while he was learning. It was good for him—but there was no way for him to know that until he’d learned.

“How many this time?” Lindenhoff asked. “Coogan tells me they could use a lot of new recruits in a hurry, in that city they’re building up north.”

“Just one canoe,” Imbry said, looking at the image on the scanner. “Small one, at that. Afraid it’s only one man, Lindy.” He moved the picture a little. “Yeah. Just one.” He focused the controls.

“It’s him! Tylus! We’ve got Tylus!”

There was a short pause on the other end of the intercom circuit. Then Lindenhoff said: “Okay, okay. You’ve finally got your pet one. Now, don’t muff things in the rush.” He chuckled softly and switched off.

Imbry bent closer to the scanner, though there was no real necessity for it. From here on, the process was automatic and as inevitable as an avalanche.

Lindenhoff had said it, that time last year when Imbry’d come back up from the planet: “Fred, there’s a price to be paid for everything you learn about what’s in the universe. It has to hurt, or it isn’t a real price. There aren’t any easy answers.”

Certainly, for any man who had to learn this particular answer, the price could go very^ high. It was, in essence, the same answer Imbry himself had learned. When he had joined the Corporation, he had expected Lindenhoff, Coogan and the others to be gods—of a sort. And of course they weren’t, any more than Imbry was. They were human, and had to do their job in human ways.

He had confused motive and method. Actually, the Corporation’s motives were not so different from his, even though they were stated realistically instead of idealistically. To look at it another way, the Corporation simply had a clearer—more sane—knowledge of what it was doing and why.