Peter Dickinson - Eva

Next morning the airboat came back and checked. By then most of the fruit had gone, because a lot of burrowing marmots lived among the tree roots and scavenged around at night. (Later Sniff taught himself a trick of lying in wait on a branch above the burrows and dropping on them as they emerged in the dusk. Eva learned to gnaw the meat raw off the thin bones and didn’t think about it with her human mind.) Several of the marmots lay around where the fruit had been, so some of the fruit must have been drugged. Eva guessed that Maria had the bit between her teeth again and wasn’t listening to Dad. Okay, he’d been wrong about leaving the chimps in the enclosure during the storm, but not for the reason anyone had thought of. He’d have known the chimps would carry the fruit away before they ate it, if Eva didn’t manage to stop them. What use would a drugged chimp be in among the trees? It would come around before anyone found it.

The fourth day, in the sticky stillness of noon when the wind was no more than a faint waft off the sea, the airboat came again. The whine of its motors stopped, and it hovered in stillness over the treetops. An enormous voice broke the silence.

“Darling, please, please, for my sake, please come home . . .”

Unfair! Unfair to both of them. Eva stuffed her fingers in her ears. Poor Mom, she’d be pretty well frantic by now. She’d know Eva was due to come into estrus in a few days’ time—that had been one of the elements they’d had to consider in timing the whole expedition. Eva had already decided that when it happened she was going to let Sniff mate with her, if he wanted, which he presumably would. Why not? You couldn’t choose some of this life and not all of it. The airboat passed on. A couple of kilometers away it stopped and hovered again. She heard the voice very faintly, not the words, only the tone of pleading. Poor Mom. There must be another patch of trees over there, out of sight. That showed they still didn’t know where the chimps were hiding.

The sixth day, people came to the wood. They were lowered from a new flivver, larger and more complicated, which seemed to have no trouble hovering close in to the slope on the far side and letting them down on to a ledge. There were three of them, with ropes, helmets, rock axes. Two of them were clearly mountaineers, moving with confidence, balancing erect on the precipitous slope and helping the third one over the trickier spots. Just before they reached the trees this third man took off his helmet to mop his brow and Eva, watching from a branch three terraces farther down, recognized him. He was Joey, the head keeper at the Reserve. He wasn’t carrying a rock ax but a stun gun. He checked the mechanism before he went in under the trees.

When they struggled in along the terrace Eva followed them while Sniff led the others down to the lower end of the wood. She didn’t dare get too close, so only caught odd glimpses of what they were up to. They didn’t seem to be doing real hunting, but spent most of their time studying the ground, presumably for chimp droppings and other traces, but they were out of luck. Because of the angle on which the trees grew, rising in tiers, somewhat more light reached the ground than it would have in a level patch of forest, and the going along the terraces was impeded by undergrowth, which also tended to hide the odd dropping that might have gotten scattered there. The hunters would have needed to chance on one of the places where the chimps nested or sheltered, and where the traces were much more obvious, but those were all farther down the mountain. After about a couple of hours they called up the flivver on a commo, made their way into the open, and were hauled back up.

That same afternoon Eva noticed two small ships moored out to sea. They carried their own flivvers, which rose and started to scurry unsystematically around the mountain. Both flivvers were caught unaware by the evening downpour and must have had a tricky time getting back down. It didn’t look as though they were part of the main expedition. There was plenty of room in the harbor, but the ships stayed out at sea, riding the slow ocean swell. A new airboat came past next day, loitering under the heavy sky, with bright green bag and letters ABS painted in vermilion along it. ABS was a shaper company, one of SMI’s main rivals. Uh-huh, thought Eva. Grog. Give us a month, he’d said, if you can manage it. The way things were going she could have stayed out for years.

“You’ll get world-wide interest,” he’d said. “Okay, you’ll have that already, but it’ll all be under SMI’s control. They can turn it off like a tap if they want to. But you make yourself news in the middle of it, and SMI can’t copyright that. The rest will be onto the island like vultures, watching every damn thing they’re doing. If they put a foot wrong, the world’s going to know. They’ll be everybody’s baddies.”

“They can sue us. They can make the Pool bankrupt.”

“They’ll never dare. I think you could bust that contract anyway—I’ve gotten advice—but it won’t get that far. You’ve got a very fair deal to offer them when they come around. Which they will. Just give me a month.”

“Uh.”

Now Eva began to wish she’d done what Grog had wanted and smuggled a receiver into the enclosure somehow and brought it with her, so that she could pick up the news, find out how things looked from out there. All she knew was what she saw between the screening leaves. But the next day a different airboat came past, small and unglamorous but making a lot of noise because it was playing Tanya Olaf’s song on its loudspeakers. On the flank of its bag was the broken butterfly and a message: THE WORLD’S ON YOUR SIDE, EVA.

There were a dozen ships moored out at sea by now and something passing overhead almost all day long. It became impossible to keep the chimps still while the watchers went by. It didn’t have to be SMI who spotted them—any of the other companies would immediately send the pictures around the world, and then the rest would know. Eva realized that it had happened when she woke one morning and heard the noise, flivver-hum on twenty different notes and the deeper buzz of airboat engines. A big voice was calling from a speaker, and the Tanya Olaf music was blasting out full volume. She couldn’t hear any words above the other noises.

Climbing cautiously up through the tree where she’d nested, keeping close to the trunk so as not to sway the leaf cover with her weight, Eva reached a point from which she could see several patches of sky. There was hardly a moment when one of them didn’t have some kind of flying machine passing through it. Something came rattling and tearing along the treetops to her left, and a moment later she saw the bulk of an airboat blocking out one whole patch. Under its cabin trailed a rope ladder. It wasn’t the SMI boat. Perhaps they were hoping Eva would grab the ladder and scramble up and give them an exclusive interview. Crazy.

Soon there were people being lowered on to the bare terraces beyond the wood. Climbers with light ladders and ropes explored up and down for the least impeded routes into the trees, and then the hunting groups made their way in, parties of three, one carrying a gadget like a camera with a giant lens as well as a stun gun slung across his back, and one with an ordinary portable shaper with the SMI logo on its side. The first man pointed his gadget up among the treetops and also at any mound of fallen branches that looked as though it might be hiding something. Eva guessed it must be some kind of sensor that would register the radiation from an animal body, hidden among leaves. They worked systematically along the terrace while the flying machines buzzed around overhead, invisible.

This was bad. She didn’t know what to do. She had come to the edge of the wood to watch the landing, and Sniff had come too (he could smell that she was coming into estrus and wouldn’t leave her side). The others were farther down. There were at least two parties of hunters between them now. The chimps’ whole instinct would be to climb for safety. They couldn’t work out they were actually better off on the ground, provided they weren’t on the same level as the hunters, because then the jut of the terraces would screen them from the sensor. Eva had trouble enough to get Sniff to stay down and wait for this group of hunters to move past, two terraces below. Then she and Sniff could move down behind them, and join up.