Critical Threshold Read online

  “Why comb them then?”

  I allowed myself a tiny smile. “It’s because I’ve combed them so thoroughly that twenty minutes on the ground will be able to tell me so much more. The way you get to see so much is standing on the shoulders of giants, remember?”

  He was ready to smile, too.

  He stood up, but before he could reach out to open the door someone else did it for him. It was Pete Rolving, apparently in too much of a hurry to bother knocking.

  “You better come,” he said. “I got an answer to the radio signal.”

  That was good news. I shot to my feet, and I could see the relief in Nathan’s face. Obviously he’d been worried about the prospect of getting no answer at all.

  But Pete was quick to jump in on top of our elation. “They don’t make much sense,” he said. “In fact, they don’t make any sense at all.”

  He was already moving back along the corridor. We followed. Looking back over his shoulder, he said: “They’re like children. Moronic. Half the time I can’t tell what they say. They made contact in response to the alarm, but I don’t think they know what they’re doing at all. I get the impression that they think it’s God talking. They keep saying ‘Thank God’ over and over.”

  Nathan wouldn’t look at me. I don’t think he wanted to see my face.

  “Something,” said Pete Rolving, as we reached the radio, “is wrong.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  They couldn’t give us co-ordinates to tell us where to set down. In fact, they couldn’t tell us anything. They had opened a circuit, but not to communicate. As Pete had said, they had reacted to the alarm on their set. They had made the bell stop ringing. But they didn’t seem to know what was going on—like very young children...or idiots. We could hear them talking, but not to us.

  Later, in orbit, we got a fix on their signal. Pete took the ship down manually, and very carefully. We used a bit more fuel than we should have done, but it was like aiming for a postage stamp. There was a hillside, cleared of trees, where a settlement had been established. It wasn’t very big, to say the least. About two miles by one and a half, including the crest of the hill and long, shallow slopes.

  We settled like a feather, almost exactly in the center. We looked out, through the ship’s eyes: four screens gave us a complete panoramic view.

  There were houses on the slopes—a group to the south, odd ones scattered elsewhere, between fields which, once upon a time, had been marked out for grain and vegetables. The houses, so far as we could see, were in a state of some dilapidation. The nearest structure to the spot where we’d set down was a cairn of squarish stones, set right on the crown of the hill.

  We didn’t see the people, not immediately. They must have hidden from the noise of our back blast and the sight of our mass floating down out of the clouds. It’s an intimidating sight.

  While we watched, however, they began to come out.

  The first ones were children, but the initiative seized by the very young was soon pre-empted by the old. It was the adults who came right up the slope to stare at the ship from close range. There weren’t many. About ten came close; there might have been sixty or seventy more watching from a distance, including all the children.

  They just stared. And waited. They were thin, almost cadaverous, with the skin sticking close to their bones. Their cheeks were hollow, their eyes seemingly deep-set, large and shadowed. The garments they wore were unimaginably tattered, reduced to mere rags. And yet they retained the echoes of careful mass production. They were the remnants of garments brought to Dendra by the original colonists.

  Over one hundred and fifty years before.

  The original colonists had made a start. They had cleared land here—we were several thousand feet above sea level, and the trees were spaced out here, but even so a good deal of work must have gone into the preparation of the fields. They had built a village, or begun to build one. On the slope of another hill, beyond a shallow saddle, we could see where they had begun to build more houses, had begun to clear more land—a not inconsiderable tract of it. But they had failed, there. The forest had reclaimed the region, and there was a wall extending across the saddle now, cutting off the settlement from the land that had been allowed to go wild. The wall, it seemed, ran all the way round the tiny parcel of land which was all that remained of the original plan.

  In a hundred and fifty years, they could have extended over a hundred hills, mile by mile, month by month. They’d had all the time in the world.

  But they hadn’t used it.

  Instead, the forest had driven them back, enclosed them, reduced them.

  Was this really all that was left? I wondered. Less than a hundred people, in decaying houses, scraping a living of appalling poverty from a handful of fields slowly turning wild?

  I looked again at the small knot of people, patiently staring at the great metal edifice that had fallen from their sky. They were starving.

  But why? Even if the corn had failed, even if the hens had all died, the potatoes been blighted, if everything they had brought had failed, there was plenty that was edible in the forest. Meat, fruits, roots—and perennially available, for there was no winter here. They couldn’t starve.

  And the houses which were falling down, roofs caving in, pitted walls, missing doors. Why? Were they helpless?

  There was only one possible answer to that. They were helpless. Helpless, it seemed, to do anything but survive. And perhaps they were failing in that, too. Their faces seemed vacuous, hideous with the absence of any real sign of life or thought.

  Like children, Pete had said. And some of them were. Moronic, he had said, and as to that, they all were. Or so it seemed. A population robbed of intelligence, robbed of knowledge, robbed of humanity.

  “I’m going out,” said Nathan. Nobody leapt up to volunteer to go with him.

  Others were coming up the hill, now, to join the boldest. First they came in ones, and then the movement took hold of them all, and they came in a ragged crowd. A few more appeared from the houses in the huddled group.

  “Is that all of them?” whispered Linda.

  “All except the halt and the lame,” I answered.

  A couple of minutes passed while Nathan went through the safety lock. He appeared outside, glancing back apprehensively at the ship’s eye, through which we watched him.

  He walked toward the crowd. Many of them shrank back fearfully.

  We weren’t wired for sound. We couldn’t hear what he said to them, nor what they replied. But they did reply. They spoke. But whatever they said didn’t seem to make much sense to Nathan.

  He was trying to locate a leader or a spokesman, someone who could answer questions. We watched him looking round, trying to find someone. But there was no such person. They all talked. At him rather than to him.

  An absurd scenario unfolded in my mind. Once, it had been accepted as rational, almost inevitable. A colony on an alien planet forgets all the knowledge bequeathed to it by Earth. Its inhabitants became savages. When new men arrive from Earth, the savages take the newcomers for gods. Just as the South American Indians took the invading Europeans for gods.

  They thought it was God talking, I said to myself. Out of the radio. They think Nathan is God. Come to visit them. Come to rescue them. Come to destroy them. And they don’t seem to care. They haven’t fallen on their knees. They aren’t wailing and gnashing their teeth. They’re just babbling like idiots.

  Maybe, I thought, they’re waiting for a miracle. Or are we miracle enough in ourselves?

  “One thing’s certain,” said Karen. “We aren’t going to spark off a revolution here. They sure as hell aren’t going to think we’ve come to steal their promised land.”

  I turned to Mariel Valory.

  “What do you make of it?” I asked.

  If anyone could make anything of it, it had to be Mariel. She had a talent, a special understanding. Whether it was mind-reading or not no one was very sure, but she didn’t nee
d words. She could read faces.

  She was staring hard at the screen, trying to see whatever there was to be seen.

  “They don’t understand,” she said. “They just have no idea who or what we are. It’s a complete mystery to them. One or two of them—the ones who came up the hill first—seem hopeful. But they don’t know what to hope for. As an event in their lives, this is meaningless.”

  “They kept saying: ‘Thank God,’ “ said Karen. “Over the radio.”

  “Some of them seem to be saying it now,” said Mariel. “But they’re just mouthing it. As if it were a formula, something to repeat over and over in moments of stress. It doesn’t hold any meaning. Nothing seems to hold much meaning. It’s as if they aren’t really there. Not as people. Not as minds.”

  As a reading, it looked pretty good. We all got something of the same impression. These people had forgotten, all right, but they hadn’t merely gone back to being savages. They’d gone back to being ghosts, shadow-people. Savages are survivors, coping with their environment effectively, albeit in a state of ignorance. These people were not coping. They were living very close to the survival margin—to the most critical threshold of all. The decay that was in the fields and the houses was in them, too.

  Nathan signaled to the eye that he was coming back in.

  When he turned around, the crowd just stared after him. They didn’t protest. They didn’t call after him. They didn’t attempt to follow. But when he was back, they began to disperse, slowly. They thought it was over. And it hadn’t even begun.

  Nathan re-entered the room. His face was set like stone. Take it as it comes, he had said. No judgments. No condemnations.

  “How bad is it?” asked Conrad.

  “I can’t get through,” said Nathan. “They speak English, they know the words I use. But the message doesn’t get across. It’s not just that they’re stupid. They’re withdrawn. Crazy. Wrapped up in themselves. It’s going to be difficult.”

  Then his voice changed slightly, became more aggressive. “But we can do it,” he went on. “We can make contact. It’s going to take time and work, but we can rescue these people from whatever kind of dead end they’re in. We start right away. Mariel, you come with me to the village. Conrad, you look around the houses, too. A lot of these people are physically sick, find out how many and what we have to cope with. Alex, you and Linda take a walk round the whole settlement, the fields, the edge of the forest. Get a general impression of the state of affairs, and start making guesses as to what might have happened and why.”

  It was no time to object to his handing out orders. He had the right idea. Start right in, without giving ourselves a chance to recoil.

  Two by two, we went out through the safety lock. I came through last of all, the odd one out. The air outside was cool. There was a wind blowing from the south that cut a chill into me instantly. Three weeks in thermostatically controlled air leaves you vulnerable to a cold wind. But it wouldn’t take long to adjust.

  It was early morning, and the sun was just getting up to a modest height. There was some cloud about but it looked as if the weather was set fair.

  All that was left of the crowd were a handful of children. They retreated before we dispersed, but continued to watch us from a respectable distance. Nathan, Mariel and Conrad set off down the slope toward the little clot of houses. I led Linda off at right angles, along the side of the hill.

  Once we were clear of the ground that had been scorched by our back blast I knelt to inspect the grass. Tough Earth-type species brought to assist in claiming the land from the native forms grew in loose tussocks scattered here and there. There were Dendran grasses too. There were also potatoes, which had once enjoyed sole priority here but which now grew wild, vying with anything else the wind brought. There were other plants, too—Dendran plants which were already spreading clusters of spatulate leaves from tough, tall stalks to shade the ground, preparing the way for the return of the trees. For the forest to reclaim this land would take another forty or fifty years—two generations, in human terms—but it could be done, unless human intervention prevented it.

  Between the fields marked out by the original settlers were hedges of imported thorn-bushes, but the hedgerows had been invaded in no certain terms by native species. There were small birds nesting there, and a profusion of flowering plants dressing the fringes with colored blossoms. On most of the plants there were healthy blooms intermingled with new buds and dying inflorescences. On Dendra, the cycle of life was closed upon itself.

  We made our way through the gaps in the hedges over toward the eastern edge of the settlement, toward the rough wooden fence which marked the boundary of what was now the human domain. Because we were higher up the slope we could see over the fence into the youthful forest which was already well advanced in the process of regeneration over and around the wreckage of a long-abandoned attempt to extend that domain for miles and miles in every direction. The wood that had once been felled had been translated into buildings: from Dendran forest into human farmland, complete with houses, barns, silos. And then back again.

  Even in the small rectangle of land which remained, at least partly, under the domination of the extraplanetary invaders, there was no sign of domestic animals save for hens in wooden runs within the conglomerate of dwellings. Yet the forest contained creatures like pigs, flightless fowl of several native varieties, creatures like small goats, scavengers like dogs. If anything had ever been co-opted from the forest into the pattern of human life on Dendra, it had since been abandoned, sent back where it came from.

  “Perhaps,” said Linda, “this isn’t the only settlement. Perhaps they found better places, and abandoned this.” She couldn’t muster any real conviction.

  “And the people too?” I said. “Are the ones we find here just the abandoned and forsaken? The moronic and the insane? While elsewhere in the forest there’s a Utopian community where everything is beautiful?”

  I couldn’t believe it. I didn’t even want to believe it.

  We came to the barrier which sought, impotently, to keep the forest at bay. It was taller than it had seemed from the crest of the hill. It was also more solid, at least at the point where we stood. It had been built to last, its logs tightly knitted into a solid barricade seven feet high, strengthened every ten or twelve yards by stout buttresses.

  Considering its uselessness, it was surprisingly well put together.

  “I don’t really see the point of this,” I said.

  “There are predators in the forest,” Linda reminded me. “Things like leopards—and scavengers, pests of one kind and another.”

  I shook my head. “As a means of keeping things out,” I pointed out, “it’s no good at all. Things which live in forests tend to be able to climb trees, and anything that could climb a tree could climb this. It’s pretty solid, but there are gaps at ground level which would easily let something the size of a rat or a snake through. It’s not a defensive wall, it marks the boundary. The boundary they decided to settle for, when it became clear to them that all their attempts to expand were doomed to failure.”

  “But why were they doomed to failure? They obviously cleared a lot more land than this to start with. Why couldn’t they keep it clear?”

  That, of course, was the big question, and we were still a long, long way from a big answer. What was bugging me, right at that moment, was a much smaller question—maybe even a silly question. Why build a boundary so big and tough? It went all around the perimeter, maybe seven miles in all. How ridiculous to put the logs which went into it to such a futile use, instead of building houses, making something functional. It made no sense.

  “Well,” I said to Linda, “this is the first time for us. Conrad’s seen it before though not quite so bad. This is what we expected, if we expected anything.”

  Conrad had been out with the Daedalus on its first recontact mission, with Kilner. They had found five colonies engaged in a desperate struggle to survive, fighting a sl
ow losing battle. They hadn’t been so far gone as this one—and, in fact, the visit of the Daedalus might have helped them turn the corner and start winning—but this seemed to belong to the same deadly pattern. For Linda and myself, as I’d said, it was the first time we had seen it. Floria had been an exception.

  I was hoping, just then, that time wouldn’t prove Floria to be the exception.

  “It’s horrible,” she said. “Maybe I should have expected it—feared it. But there’s just no way you can be prepared.”

  I nodded my complete agreement to that.

  I gripped the top of the wooden wall and scrambled up by means of the abundant toeholds left by the curvature of the logs. I straddled the top while I helped Linda to get up beside me, then I swung round to sit on top of the structure. She did the same. Neither of us jumped down to set our feet on the soil that had been conceded to the alien world. We looked out at the sea of saplings and the clumps of bushes. Young forest, stretching away across the saddle between the hilltops, and up the distant slope. Beyond the crown of the hill we could see the real forest, in all its ancient majesty: trees a hundred feet tall even at this elevation. Down in the valleys, where the rivers ran, there would be trees like no trees which had ever grown on Earth. Vast and incredibly ancient.

  The young forest was so very young. I knew as I looked at it that this was not the true Dendra but a pale shadow.

  Forests, however, are very patient.

  The untidy stand of saplings, with their woefully inadequate crowns of thin branches and slender leaves, lacked the dignity of age, but was full of life. There was a constant flurry of movement within the bushes as crowds of small birds hopped and fluttered from branch to branch. There seemed to be a great number of butterflies and other winged insects.

  It didn’t seem strange to me, as I perched on top of the wall, that the butterflies stayed outside, in Dendran territory, as did most of the birds and many of the other flying things. I sat at the junction of two worlds—different worlds. It was natural that each should possess its own native life, and should share so very little. In my head, I knew that the two worlds were not so different. Both were in the process of returning to the original state that each had enjoyed before the human colonists ever arrived. One was moving a little faster than the other, had got a little further, but essentially the situations were the same. My eyes, however, lied just a little, and told me that there were, indeed, two worlds.