Hal Clement - Close to Critical

“Nick! Is that really you? Where have you been? We thought you’d slept out once too often!”

At the first sound, Nick had reached for his knives; but he checked the movement as he recognized the voice.

“Johnny! It’s good to hear proper talk again. What are you doing this far out? Have the sheep eaten everything closer to home?”

“No, I’m hunting, not herding.” John Doolittle pushed through the undergrowth into clear view. “But where have you been? It’s been weeks since you went out, and since we stopped looking for you.”

“You looked for me? That’s bad. Still, I guess it didn’t make any difference, or I’d have known it sooner.”

“What do you mean? I don’t understand what you’re talking about. And what did you mean about it’s being good to hear ‘proper talk’? What other kind of talk is there? Let’s hear the story.”

“It’s a long one, and I’ll have to tell everyone as quickly as possible anyway. Come along home; there’s no point telling it twice.” He headed toward the valley they both called “home” without waiting to hear any answer. John “trailed” his spears and followed. Even without Nick’s implication of trouble ahead, he would not willingly have missed the report. Fresh as he was, thpugh, he had difficulty keeping up with the returned explorer; Nick seemed to be in a hurry.

They met two more of the group on the way, Alice and Tom, who were herding. At Nick’s urgent but hasty words they followed toward the village as fast as their charge would permit.

Five more of the group were actually in the village, and Fagin was at his usual station in the center of the ring of houses. Nick called the teacher by name as he came hi sight.

“Fagin! We’re in trouble! What do we have for weapons that you haven’t shown us yet?”

As usual, there was a pause of a couple of seconds before an answer came back.

“Why, it’s Nick. We had about given you up. What’s all of this about weapons? Do you expect to have to fight someone?”

“I’m afraid so.”

“Who?”

“Well, they seem to be people just like us; but they don’t keep animals, and they don’t use fire, and they use different words for things than we do.”

“Where did you run into these people, and why should we have to fight them?”

“It’s a long story, I’m afraid. It will be better if I start at the beginning, I suppose; but we shouldn’t waste any more time than we can help.”

“I agree; a complete report will make the most sense to all of us. Go ahead.” Nick settled his weight back on his standing legs and obeyed.

“I started south as we decided and went slowly, mapping as I went. Nothing much had changed seriously out to the edge of the region we usually cover in farming and grazing; after that, of course, it was hard to tell whether anything had changed at all recently, or in what way.

“The best landmark I saw by the end of the first day was a mountain, of quite regular conical shape and much higher than any I had ever seen before. I was tempted to climb it, but decided that detail mapping could be accomplished better later on; after all, my trip was to find new areas, not evaluate them.

“I passed to the east of the mountain shortly after sunrise the second day. The wind was remarkably strong in that region and seemed always to blow toward the mountain; I called it Storm Hill on the map. Judging by tile wind, there ought to be a lot of night-growing plants there; any exploration should be planned to get off the hill before dark.

“As far as travel goes, everything was about as usual. I killed enough in self-defense to keep me in food, but none of the animals were at all unusual that day.

“The third morning, though, with the mountain out of sight, I got involved with something that lived in a hole in the ground and reached out an arm to catch things going by. It caught me around the legs, and it didn’t seem to mind my spears very much. I don’t think I’d have gotten away if I hadn’t had help.”

“Help?” The startled question came without the pause characteristic of the teacher’s remarks; it was Jim who asked it. “How could you have gotten help? None of us was down that way.”

“So it wasn’t one of us—at least, not exactly. He looked just like us, and used spears like ours; but when we finally managed to kill the thing in the hole and tried to talk to each other, his words were all different; in fact, it was quite a while before I realized that he was talking. He used the same sort of noises we do for words, but mixed them with a lot of others that we never learned from you.

“After a while I realized that the noises must be talk, and then I wondered why I hadn’t thought of such a thing before—after all, if this person wasn’t brought up by you, he’d have had to think up his own words for things, and it would be silly to expect them to be the same as ours. I decided to go with him and learn more; after all, this seemed a lot more important than just mapping. If I could learn his talk, he might know a lot more than we could find in months of exploring.

“He didn’t seem to mind my trailing along, and as we went I began to catch on to some of his words. It wasn’t easy, because he put them together in very strange ways; it wasn’t just a matter of learning the noise he used for each object. We hunted together, though, and all the time we were learning to talk together. We didn’t travel in a straight line, but I kept pretty good track of our path and can put his village on the map when I get the chance.”

“Village?” It was Jim once more who interrupted; Fagin had said nothing.

“That’s the only word I know for it. It wasn’t at all like ours; it was a place at the foot of a steep cliff, and there were holes all over the face of the stone. Some of them were very small, like the solution holes you can see in any rock; others were very much larger, and there were people living in them. The one I was with was one of them.

“They were very surprised to see me, and tried to ask me a lot of questions; but I couldn’t understand them well enough to give any answers. The one I had traveled with talked to them, and I suppose told how he had met me; but they stayed interested, and a lot of them were always watching me, whatever I did.

“It was getting fairly late in the afternoon when we got to the cliff, and I was starting to wonder about camping for the night. I didn’t realize just at first that these people lived in the holes in the rock, and when I finally caught on I wasn’t very happy about it. There are even more quakes down that way than around here, I noticed, and that cliff seemed an awfully unhealthy neighborhood. When the sun was almost down, I decided to leave them and camp a little way out on a hilltop I’d found, and then I discovered that they didn’t want me to go. They were actually prepared to get rough in order to keep me around. I had learned a few more of their words by that time, though, and I finally convinced them that I wasn’t trying to get away completely, and just wanted to spend the night by myself. There was a surprising amount of firewood around, and I was able to collect enough for the night without much trouble—in fact, some of the little ones helped me, when they saw what I wanted.”

“Little ones? Weren’t they all the same size?” Dorothy asked.

“No. That was one of the funny things I haven’t had time to mention. Some of them weren’t more than a foot and a half high, and some of them were nearly twice as tall as we are—nine feet or more. They ah” had the same shape as ours, though. I never found out the reason for that. One of the biggest ones seemed to be telling the others what to do most of the tune, and I found that the little ones were usually the easiest to get along with.