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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 32026 ***
+
+
+                         Transcriber's Note:
+
+    This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction January 1958.
+    Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S.
+    copyright on this publication was renewed.
+
+
+                      The World That Couldn't Be
+
+
+                         By CLIFFORD D. SIMAK
+
+
+                        Illustrated by GAUGHAN
+
+
+     _Like every farmer on every planet, Duncan had to hunt down
+      anything that damaged his crops--even though he was aware
+      this was--_
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+
+The tracks went up one row and down another, and in those rows the
+_vua_ plants had been sheared off an inch or two above the ground. The
+raider had been methodical; it had not wandered about haphazardly, but
+had done an efficient job of harvesting the first ten rows on the west
+side of the field. Then, having eaten its fill, it had angled off into
+the bush--and that had not been long ago, for the soil still trickled
+down into the great pug marks, sunk deep into the finely cultivated
+loam.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+Somewhere a sawmill bird was whirring through a log, and down in one
+of the thorn-choked ravines, a choir of chatterers was clicking
+through a ghastly morning song. It was going to be a scorcher of a
+day. Already the smell of desiccated dust was rising from the ground
+and the glare of the newly risen sun was dancing off the bright leaves
+of the hula-trees, making it appear as if the bush were filled with a
+million flashing mirrors.
+
+Gavin Duncan hauled a red bandanna from his pocket and mopped his
+face.
+
+"No, mister," pleaded Zikkara, the native foreman of the farm. "You
+cannot do it, mister. You do not hunt a Cytha."
+
+"The hell I don't," said Duncan, but he spoke in English and not the
+native tongue.
+
+He stared out across the bush, a flat expanse of sun-cured grass
+interspersed with thickets of hula-scrub and thorn and occasional
+groves of trees, criss-crossed by treacherous ravines and spotted with
+infrequent waterholes.
+
+It would be murderous out there, he told himself, but it shouldn't
+take too long. The beast probably would lay up shortly after its
+pre-dawn feeding and he'd overhaul it in an hour or two. But if he
+failed to overhaul it, then he must keep on.
+
+"Dangerous," Zikkara pointed out. "No one hunts the Cytha."
+
+"I do," Duncan said, speaking now in the native language. "I hunt
+anything that damages my crop. A few nights more of this and there
+would be nothing left."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Jamming the bandanna back into his pocket, he tilted his hat lower
+across his eyes against the sun.
+
+"It might be a long chase, mister. It is the _skun_ season now. If you
+were caught out there...."
+
+"Now listen," Duncan told it sharply. "Before I came, you'd feast one
+day, then starve for days on end; but now you eat each day. And you
+like the doctoring. Before, when you got sick, you died. Now you get
+sick, I doctor you, and you live. You like staying in one place,
+instead of wandering all around."
+
+"Mister, we like all this," said Zikkara, "but we do not hunt the
+Cytha."
+
+"If we do not hunt the Cytha, we lose all this," Duncan pointed out.
+"If I don't make a crop, I'm licked. I'll have to go away. Then what
+happens to you?"
+
+"We will grow the corn ourselves."
+
+"That's a laugh," said Duncan, "and you know it is. If I didn't kick
+your backsides all day long, you wouldn't do a lick of work. If I
+leave, you go back to the bush. Now let's go and get that Cytha."
+
+"But it is such a little one, mister! It is such a young one! It is
+scarcely worth the trouble. It would be a shame to kill it."
+
+Probably just slightly smaller than a horse, thought Duncan, watching
+the native closely.
+
+It's scared, he told himself. It's scared dry and spitless.
+
+"Besides, it must have been most hungry. Surely, mister, even a Cytha
+has the right to eat."
+
+"Not from my crop," said Duncan savagely. "You know why we grow the
+_vua_, don't you? You know it is great medicine. The berries that it
+grows cures those who are sick inside their heads. My people need that
+medicine--need it very badly. And what is more, out there--" he swept
+his arm toward the sky--"out there they pay very much for it."
+
+"But, mister...."
+
+"I tell you this," said Duncan gently, "you either dig me up a
+bush-runner to do the tracking for me or you can all get out, the kit
+and caboodle of you. I can get other tribes to work the farm."
+
+"No, mister!" Zikkara screamed in desperation.
+
+"You have your choice," Duncan told it coldly.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+He plodded back across the field toward the house. Not much of a house
+as yet. Not a great deal better than a native shack. But someday it
+would be, he told himself. Let him sell a crop or two and he'd build a
+house that would really be a house. It would have a bar and swimming
+pool and a garden filled with flowers, and at last, after years of
+wandering, he'd have a home and broad acres and everyone, not just one
+lousy tribe, would call him mister.
+
+Gavin Duncan, planter, he said to himself, and liked the sound of it.
+Planter on the planet Layard. But not if the Cytha came back night
+after night and ate the _vua_ plants.
+
+He glanced over his shoulder and saw that Zikkara was racing for the
+native village.
+
+Called their bluff, Duncan informed himself with satisfaction.
+
+He came out of the field and walked across the yard, heading for the
+house. One of Shotwell's shirts was hanging on the clothes-line, limp
+in the breathless morning.
+
+Damn the man, thought Duncan. Out here mucking around with those
+stupid natives, always asking questions, always under foot. Although,
+to be fair about it, that was Shotwell's job. That was what the
+Sociology people had sent him out to do.
+
+Duncan came up to the shack, pushed the door open and entered.
+Shotwell, stripped to the waist, was at the wash bench.
+
+Breakfast was cooking on the stove, with an elderly native acting as
+cook.
+
+Duncan strode across the room and took down the heavy rifle from its
+peg. He slapped the action open, slapped it shut again.
+
+Shotwell reached for a towel.
+
+"What's going on?" he asked.
+
+"Cytha got into the field."
+
+"Cytha?"
+
+"A kind of animal," said Duncan. "It ate ten rows of _vua_."
+
+"Big? Little? What are its characteristics?"
+
+The native began putting breakfast on the table. Duncan walked to the
+table, laid the rifle across one corner of it and sat down. He poured
+a brackish liquid out of a big stew pan into their cups.
+
+God, he thought, what I would give for a cup of coffee.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Shotwell pulled up his chair. "You didn't answer me. What is a Cytha
+like?"
+
+"I wouldn't know," said Duncan.
+
+"Don't know? But you're going after it, looks like, and how can you
+hunt it if you don't know--"
+
+"Track it. The thing tied to the other end of the trail is sure to be
+the Cytha. Well find out what it's like once we catch up to it."
+
+"We?"
+
+"The natives will send up someone to do the tracking for me. Some of
+them are better than a dog."
+
+"Look, Gavin. I've put you to a lot of trouble and you've been decent
+with me. If I can be any help, I would like to go."
+
+"Two make better time than three. And we have to catch this Cytha fast
+or it might settle down to an endurance contest."
+
+"All right, then. Tell me about the Cytha."
+
+Duncan poured porridge gruel into his bowl, handed the pan to
+Shotwell. "It's a sort of special thing. The natives are scared to
+death of it. You hear a lot of stories about it. Said to be
+unkillable. It's always capitalized, always a proper noun. It has been
+reported at different times from widely scattered places."
+
+"No one's ever bagged one?"
+
+"Not that I ever heard of." Duncan patted the rifle. "Let me get a
+bead on it."
+
+He started eating, spooning the porridge into his mouth, munching on
+the stale corn bread left from the night before. He drank some of the
+brackish beverage and shuddered.
+
+"Some day," he said, "I'm going to scrape together enough money to buy
+a pound of coffee. You'd think--"
+
+"It's the freight rates," Shotwell said. "I'll send you a pound when I
+go back."
+
+"Not at the price they'd charge to ship it out," said Duncan. "I
+wouldn't hear of it."
+
+They ate in silence for a time. Finally Shotwell said: "I'm getting
+nowhere, Gavin. The natives are willing to talk, but it all adds up to
+nothing."
+
+"I tried to tell you that. You could have saved your time."
+
+Shotwell shook his head stubbornly. "There's an answer, a logical
+explanation. It's easy enough to say you cannot rule out the sexual
+factor, but that's exactly what has happened here on Layard. It's easy
+to exclaim that a sexless animal, a sexless race, a sexless planet is
+impossible, but that is what we have. Somewhere there is an answer and
+I have to find it."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Now hold up a minute," Duncan protested. "There's no use blowing a
+gasket. I haven't got the time this morning to listen to your
+lecture."
+
+"But it's not the lack of sex that worries me entirely," Shotwell
+said, "although it's the central factor. There are subsidiary
+situations deriving from that central fact which are most intriguing."
+
+"I have no doubt of it," said Duncan, "but if you please--"
+
+"Without sex, there is no basis for the family, and without the family
+there is no basis for a tribe, and yet the natives have an elaborate
+tribal setup, with taboos by way of regulation. Somewhere there must
+exist some underlying, basic unifying factor, some common loyalty,
+some strange relationship which spells out to brotherhood."
+
+"Not brotherhood," said Duncan, chuckling. "Not even sisterhood. You
+must watch your terminology. The word you want is ithood."
+
+The door pushed open and a native walked in timidly.
+
+"Zikkara said that mister want me," the native told them. "I am Sipar.
+I can track anything but screamers, stilt-birds, longhorns and
+donovans. Those are my taboos."
+
+"I am glad to hear that," Duncan replied. "You have no Cytha taboo,
+then."
+
+"Cytha!" yipped the native. "Zikkara did not tell me Cytha!"
+
+Duncan paid no attention. He got up from the table and went to the
+heavy chest that stood against one wall. He rummaged in it and came
+out with a pair of binoculars, a hunting knife and an extra drum of
+ammunition. At the kitchen cupboard, he rummaged once again, filling a
+small leather sack with a gritty powder from a can he found.
+
+"Rockahominy," he explained to Shotwell. "Emergency rations thought up
+by the primitive North American Indians. Parched corn, ground fine.
+It's no feast exactly, but it keeps a man going."
+
+"You figure you'll be gone that long?"
+
+"Maybe overnight. I don't know. Won't stop until I get it. Can't
+afford to. It could wipe me out in a few days."
+
+"Good hunting," Shotwell said. "I'll hold the fort."
+
+Duncan said to Sipar: "Quit sniveling and come on."
+
+He picked up the rifle, settled it in the crook of his arm. He kicked
+open the door and strode out.
+
+Sipar followed meekly.
+
+
+II
+
+Duncan got his first shot late in the afternoon of that first day.
+
+In the middle of the morning, two hours after they had left the farm,
+they had flushed the Cytha out of its bed in a thick ravine. But there
+had been no chance for a shot. Duncan saw no more than a huge black
+blur fade into the bush.
+
+Through the bake-oven afternoon, they had followed its trail, Sipar
+tracking and Duncan bringing up the rear, scanning every piece of
+cover, with the sun-hot rifle always held at ready.
+
+Once they had been held up for fifteen minutes while a massive donovan
+tramped back and forth, screaming, trying to work up its courage for
+attack. But after a quarter hour of showing off, it decided to behave
+itself and went off at a shuffling gallop.
+
+Duncan watched it go with a lot of thankfulness. It could soak up a
+lot of lead, and for all its awkwardness, it was handy with its feet
+once it set itself in motion. Donovans had killed a lot of men in the
+twenty years since Earthmen had come to Layard.
+
+With the beast gone, Duncan looked around for Sipar. He found it fast
+asleep beneath a hula-shrub. He kicked the native awake with something
+less than gentleness and they went on again.
+
+The bush swarmed with other animals, but they had no trouble with
+them.
+
+Sipar, despite its initial reluctance, had worked well at the
+trailing. A misplaced bunch of grass, a twig bent to one side, a
+displaced stone, the faintest pug mark were Sipar's stock in trade. It
+worked like a lithe, well-trained hound. This bush country was its
+special province; here it was at home.
+
+With the sun dropping toward the west, they had climbed a long, steep
+hill and as they neared the top of it, Duncan hissed at Sipar. The
+native looked back over its shoulder in surprise. Duncan made motions
+for it to stop tracking.
+
+The native crouched and as Duncan went past it, he saw that a look of
+agony was twisting its face. And in the look of agony he thought he
+saw as well a touch of pleading and a trace of hatred. It's scared,
+just like the rest of them, Duncan told himself. But what the native
+thought or felt had no significance; what counted was the beast ahead.
+
+Duncan went the last few yards on his belly, pushing the gun ahead of
+him, the binoculars bumping on his back. Swift, vicious insects ran
+out of the grass and swarmed across his hands and arms and one got on
+his face and bit him.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+He made it to the hilltop and lay there, looking at the sweep of land
+beyond. It was more of the same, more of the blistering, dusty
+slogging, more of thorn and tangled ravine and awful emptiness.
+
+He lay motionless, watching for a hint of motion, for the fitful
+shadow, for any wrongness in the terrain that might be the Cytha.
+
+But there was nothing. The land lay quiet under the declining sun. Far
+on the horizon, a herd of some sort of animals was grazing, but there
+was nothing else.
+
+Then he saw the motion, just a flicker, on the knoll ahead--about
+halfway up.
+
+He laid the rifle carefully on the ground and hitched the binoculars
+around. He raised them to his eyes and moved them slowly back and
+forth. The animal was there where he had seen the motion.
+
+It was resting, looking back along the way that it had come, watching
+for the first sign of its trailers. Duncan tried to make out the size
+and shape, but it blended with the grass and the dun soil and he could
+not be sure exactly what it looked like.
+
+He let the glasses down and now that he had located it, he could
+distinguish its outline with the naked eye.
+
+His hand reached out and slid the rifle to him. He fitted it to his
+shoulder and wriggled his body for closer contact with the ground. The
+cross-hairs centered on the faint outline on the knoll and then the
+beast stood up.
+
+It was not as large as he had thought it might be--perhaps a little
+larger than Earth lion-size, but it certainly was no lion. It was a
+square-set thing and black and inclined to lumpiness and it had an
+awkward look about it, but there were strength and ferociousness as
+well.
+
+Duncan tilted the muzzle of the rifle so that the cross-hairs centered
+on the massive neck. He drew in a breath and held it and began the
+trigger squeeze.
+
+The rifle bucked hard against his shoulder and the report hammered in
+his head and the beast went down. It did not lurch or fall; it simply
+melted down and disappeared, hidden in the grass.
+
+"Dead center," Duncan assured himself.
+
+He worked the mechanism and the spent cartridge case flew out. The
+feeding mechanism snicked and the fresh shell clicked as it slid into
+the breech.
+
+He lay for a moment, watching. And on the knoll where the thing had
+fallen, the grass was twitching as if the wind were blowing, only
+there was no wind. But despite the twitching of the grass, there was
+no sign of the Cytha. It did not struggle up again. It stayed where it
+had fallen.
+
+Duncan got to his feet, dug out the bandanna and mopped at his face.
+He heard the soft thud of the step behind him and turned his head. It
+was the tracker.
+
+"It's all right, Sipar," he said. "You can quit worrying. I got it. We
+can go home now."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It had been a long, hard chase, longer than he had thought it might
+be. But it had been successful and that was the thing that counted.
+For the moment, the _vua_ crop was safe.
+
+He tucked the bandanna back into his pocket, went down the slope and
+started up the knoll. He reached the place where the Cytha had fallen.
+There were three small gouts of torn, mangled fur and flesh lying on
+the ground and there was nothing else.
+
+He spun around and jerked his rifle up. Every nerve was screamingly
+alert. He swung his head, searching for the slightest movement, for
+some shape or color that was not the shape or color of the bush or
+grass or ground. But there was nothing. The heat droned in the hush of
+afternoon. There was not a breath of moving air. But there was
+danger--a saw-toothed sense of danger close behind his neck.
+
+"Sipar!" he called in a tense whisper, "Watch out!"
+
+The native stood motionless, unheeding, its eyeballs rolling up until
+there was only white, while the muscles stood out along its throat
+like straining ropes of steel.
+
+Duncan slowly swiveled, rifle held almost at arm's length, elbows
+crooked a little, ready to bring the weapon into play in a fraction of
+a second.
+
+Nothing stirred. There was no more than emptiness--the emptiness of
+sun and molten sky, of grass and scraggy bush, of a brown-and-yellow
+land stretching into foreverness.
+
+Step by step, Duncan covered the hillside and finally came back to the
+place where the native squatted on its heels and moaned, rocking back
+and forth, arms locked tightly across its chest, as if it tried to
+cradle itself in a sort of illusory comfort.
+
+The Earthman walked to the place where the Cytha had fallen and picked
+up, one by one, the bits of bleeding flesh. They had been mangled by
+his bullet. They were limp and had no shape. And it was queer, he
+thought. In all his years of hunting, over many planets, he had never
+known a bullet to rip out hunks of flesh.
+
+He dropped the bloody pieces back into the grass and wiped his hand
+upon his thighs. He got up a little stiffly.
+
+He'd found no trail of blood leading through the grass, and surely an
+animal with a hole of that size would leave a trail.
+
+And as he stood there upon the hillside, with the bloody fingerprints
+still wet and glistening upon the fabric of his trousers, he felt the
+first cold touch of fear, as if the fingertips of fear might
+momentarily, almost casually, have trailed across his heart.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+He turned around and walked back to the native, reached down and shook
+it.
+
+"Snap out of it," he ordered.
+
+He expected pleading, cowering, terror, but there was none.
+
+Sipar got swiftly to its feet and stood looking at him and there was,
+he thought, an odd glitter in its eyes.
+
+"Get going," Duncan said. "We still have a little time. Start circling
+and pick up the trail. I will cover you."
+
+He glanced at the sun. An hour and a half still left--maybe as much as
+two. There might still be time to get this buttoned up before the fall
+of night.
+
+A half mile beyond the knoll, Sipar picked up the trail again and they
+went ahead, but now they traveled more cautiously, for any bush, any
+rock, any clump of grass might conceal the wounded beast.
+
+Duncan found himself on edge and cursed himself savagely for it. He'd
+been in tight spots before. This was nothing new to him. There was no
+reason to get himself tensed up. It was a deadly business, sure, but
+he had faced others calmly and walked away from them. It was those
+frontier tales he'd heard about the Cytha--the kind of superstitious
+chatter that one always heard on the edge of unknown land.
+
+He gripped the rifle tighter and went on.
+
+No animal, he told himself, was unkillable.
+
+Half an hour before sunset, he called a halt when they reached a
+brackish waterhole. The light soon would be getting bad for shooting.
+In the morning, they'd take up the trail again, and by that time the
+Cytha would be at an even greater disadvantage. It would be stiff and
+slow and weak. It might be even dead.
+
+Duncan gathered wood and built a fire in the lee of a thorn-bush
+thicket. Sipar waded out with the canteens and thrust them at arm's
+length beneath the surface to fill them. The water still was warm and
+evil-tasting, but it was fairly free of scum and a thirsty man could
+drink it.
+
+The sun went down and darkness fell quickly. They dragged more wood
+out of the thicket and piled it carefully close at hand.
+
+Duncan reached into his pocket and brought out the little bag of
+rockahominy.
+
+"Here," he said to Sipar. "Supper."
+
+The native held one hand cupped and Duncan poured a little mound into
+its palm.
+
+"Thank you, mister," Sipar said. "Food-giver."
+
+"Huh?" asked Duncan, then caught what the native meant. "Dive into
+it," he said, almost kindly. "It isn't much, but it gives you
+strength. We'll need strength tomorrow."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Food-giver, eh? Trying to butter him up, perhaps. In a little while,
+Sipar would start whining for him to knock off the hunt and head back
+for the farm.
+
+Although, come to think of it, he really was the food-giver to this
+bunch of sexless wonders. Corn, thank God, grew well on the red and
+stubborn soil of Layard--good old corn from North America. Fed to
+hogs, made into corn-pone for breakfast back on Earth, and here, on
+Layard, the staple food crop for a gang of shiftless varmints who
+still regarded, with some good solid skepticism and round-eyed wonder,
+this unorthodox idea that one should take the trouble to grow plants
+to eat rather than go out and scrounge for them.
+
+Corn from North America, he thought, growing side by side with the
+_vua_ of Layard. And that was the way it went. Something from one
+planet and something from another and still something further from a
+third and so was built up through the wide social confederacy of space
+a truly cosmic culture which in the end, in another ten thousand years
+or so, might spell out some way of life with more sanity and
+understanding than was evident today.
+
+He poured a mound of rockahominy into his own hand and put the bag
+back into his pocket.
+
+"Sipar."
+
+"Yes, mister?"
+
+"You were not scared today when the donovan threatened to attack us."
+
+"No, mister. The donovan would not hurt me."
+
+"I see. You said the donovan was taboo to you. Could it be that you,
+likewise, are taboo to the donovan?"
+
+"Yes, mister. The donovan and I grew up together."
+
+"Oh, so that's it," said Duncan.
+
+He put a pinch of the parched and powdered corn into his mouth and
+took a sip of brackish water. He chewed reflectively on the resultant
+mash.
+
+He might go ahead, he knew, and ask why and how and where Sipar and
+the donovan had grown up together, but there was no point to it. This
+was exactly the kind of tangle that Shotwell was forever getting
+into.
+
+Half the time, he told himself, I'm convinced the little stinkers are
+doing no more than pulling our legs.
+
+What a fantastic bunch of jerks! Not men, not women, just things. And
+while there were never babies, there were children, although never
+less than eight or nine years old. And if there were no babies, where
+did the eight- and nine-year-olds come from?
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"I suppose," he said, "that these other things that are your taboos,
+the stilt-birds and the screamers and the like, also grew up with
+you."
+
+"That is right, mister."
+
+"Some playground that must have been," said Duncan.
+
+He went on chewing, staring out into the darkness beyond the ring of
+firelight.
+
+"There's something in the thorn bush, mister."
+
+"I didn't hear a thing."
+
+"Little pattering. Something is running there."
+
+Duncan listened closely. What Sipar said was true. A lot of little
+things were running in the thicket.
+
+"More than likely mice," he said.
+
+He finished his rockahominy and took an extra swig of water, gagging
+on it slightly.
+
+"Get your rest," he told Sipar. "I'll wake you later so I can catch a
+wink or two."
+
+"Mister," Sipar said, "I will stay with you to the end."
+
+"Well," said Duncan, somewhat startled, "that is decent of you."
+
+"I will stay to the death," Sipar promised earnestly.
+
+"Don't strain yourself," said Duncan.
+
+He picked up the rifle and walked down to the waterhole.
+
+The night was quiet and the land continued to have that empty feeling.
+Empty except for the fire and the waterhole and the little micelike
+animals running in the thicket.
+
+And Sipar--Sipar lying by the fire, curled up and sound asleep
+already. Naked, with not a weapon to its hand--just the naked animal,
+the basic humanoid, and yet with underlying purpose that at times was
+baffling. Scared and shivering this morning at mere mention of the
+Cytha, yet never faltering on the trail; in pure funk back there on
+the knoll where they had lost the Cytha, but now ready to go on to the
+death.
+
+Duncan went back to the fire and prodded Sipar with his toe. The
+native came straight up out of sleep.
+
+"Whose death?" asked Duncan. "Whose death were you talking of?"
+
+"Why, ours, of course," said Sipar, and went back to sleep.
+
+
+III
+
+Duncan did not see the arrow coming. He heard the swishing whistle and
+felt the wind of it on the right side of his throat and then it
+thunked into a tree behind him.
+
+He leaped aside and dived for the cover of a tumbled mound of boulders
+and almost instinctively his thumb pushed the fire control of the
+rifle up to automatic.
+
+He crouched behind the jumbled rocks and peered ahead. There was not a
+thing to see. The hula-trees shimmered in the blaze of sun and the
+thorn-bush was gray and lifeless and the only things astir were three
+stilt-birds walking gravely a quarter of a mile away.
+
+"Sipar!" he whispered.
+
+"Here, mister."
+
+"Keep low. It's still out there."
+
+Whatever it might be. Still out there and waiting for another shot.
+Duncan shivered, remembering the feel of the arrow flying past his
+throat. A hell of a way for a man to die--out at the tail-end of
+nowhere with an arrow in his throat and a scared-stiff native heading
+back for home as fast as it could go.
+
+He flicked the control on the rifle back to single fire, crawled
+around the rock pile and sprinted for a grove of trees that stood on
+higher ground. He reached them and there he flanked the spot from
+which the arrow must have come.
+
+He unlimbered the binoculars and glassed the area. He still saw no
+sign. Whatever had taken the pot shot at them had made its getaway.
+
+He walked back to the tree where the arrow still stood out, its point
+driven deep into the bark. He grasped the shaft and wrenched the arrow
+free.
+
+"You can come out now," he called to Sipar. "There's no one around."
+
+The arrow was unbelievably crude. The unfeathered shaft looked as if
+it had been battered off to the proper length with a jagged stone. The
+arrowhead was unflaked flint picked up from some outcropping or dry
+creek bed, and it was awkwardly bound to the shaft with the tough but
+pliant inner bark of the hula-tree.
+
+"You recognize this?" he asked Sipar.
+
+The native took the arrow and examined it. "Not my tribe."
+
+"Of course not your tribe. Yours wouldn't take a shot at us. Some
+other tribe, perhaps?"
+
+"Very poor arrow."
+
+"I know that. But it could kill you just as dead as if it were a good
+one. Do you recognize it?"
+
+"No tribe made this arrow," Sipar declared.
+
+"Child, maybe?"
+
+"What would child do way out here?"
+
+[Illustration]
+
+"That's what I thought, too," said Duncan.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+He took the arrow back, held it between his thumbs and forefingers and
+twirled it slowly, with a terrifying thought nibbling at his brain. It
+couldn't be. It was too fantastic. He wondered if the sun was finally
+getting him that he had thought of it at all.
+
+He squatted down and dug at the ground with the makeshift arrow point.
+"Sipar, what do you actually know about the Cytha?"
+
+"Nothing, mister. Scared of it is all."
+
+"We aren't turning back. If there's something that you know--something
+that would help us...."
+
+It was as close as he could come to begging aid. It was further than
+he had meant to go. He should not have asked at all, he thought
+angrily.
+
+"I do not know," the native said.
+
+Duncan cast the arrow to one side and rose to his feet. He cradled the
+rifle in his arm. "Let's go."
+
+He watched Sipar trot ahead. Crafty little stinker, he told himself.
+It knows more than it's telling.
+
+They toiled into the afternoon. It was, if possible, hotter and drier
+than the day before. There was a sense of tension in the air--no, that
+was rot. And even if there were, a man must act as if it were not
+there. If he let himself fall prey to every mood out in this empty
+land, he only had himself to blame for whatever happened to him.
+
+The tracking was harder now. The day before, the Cytha had only run
+away, straight-line fleeing to keep ahead of them, to stay out of
+their reach. Now it was becoming tricky. It backtracked often in an
+attempt to throw them off. Twice in the afternoon, the trail blanked
+out entirely and it was only after long searching that Sipar picked it
+up again--in one instance, a mile away from where it had vanished in
+thin air.
+
+That vanishing bothered Duncan more than he would admit. Trails do not
+disappear entirely, not when the terrain remains the same, not when
+the weather is unchanged. Something was going on, something, perhaps,
+that Sipar knew far more about than it was willing to divulge.
+
+He watched the native closely and there seemed nothing suspicious. It
+continued at its work. It was, for all to see, the good and faithful
+hound.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Late in the afternoon, the plain on which they had been traveling
+suddenly dropped away. They stood poised on the brink of a great
+escarpment and looked far out to great tangled forests and a flowing
+river.
+
+It was like suddenly coming into another and beautiful room that one
+had not expected.
+
+This was new land, never seen before by any Earthman. For no one had
+ever mentioned that somewhere to the west a forest lay beyond the
+bush. Men coming in from space had seen it, probably, but only as a
+different color-marking on the planet. To them, it made no difference.
+
+But to the men who lived on Layard, to the planter and the trader, the
+prospector and the hunter, it was important. And I, thought Duncan
+with a sense of triumph, am the man who found it.
+
+"Mister!"
+
+"Now what?"
+
+"Out there. _Skun!_"
+
+"I don't--"
+
+"Out there, mister. Across the river."
+
+Duncan saw it then--a haze in the blueness of the rift--a puff of
+copper moving very fast, and as he watched, he heard the far-off
+keening of the storm, a shiver in the air rather than a sound.
+
+He watched in fascination as it moved along the river and saw the
+boiling fury it made out of the forest. It struck and crossed the
+river, and the river for a moment seemed to stand on end, with a sheet
+of silvery water splashed toward the sky.
+
+Then it was gone as quickly as it had happened, but there was a
+tumbled slash across the forest where the churning winds had traveled.
+
+Back at the farm, Zikkara had warned him of the _skun_. This was the
+season for them, it had said, and a man caught in one wouldn't have a
+chance.
+
+Duncan let his breath out slowly.
+
+"Bad," said Sipar.
+
+"Yes, very bad."
+
+"Hit fast. No warning."
+
+"What about the trail?" asked Duncan. "Did the Cytha--"
+
+Sipar nodded downward.
+
+"Can we make it before nightfall?"
+
+"I think so," Sipar answered.
+
+It was rougher than they had thought. Twice they went down blind
+trails that pinched off, with sheer rock faces opening out into drops
+of hundreds of feet, and were forced to climb again and find another
+way.
+
+They reached the bottom of the escarpment as the brief twilight closed
+in and they hurried to gather firewood. There was no water, but a
+little was still left in their canteens and they made do with that.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+After their scant meal of rockahominy, Sipar rolled himself into a
+ball and went to sleep immediately.
+
+Duncan sat with his back against a boulder which one day, long ago,
+had fallen from the slope above them, but was now half buried in the
+soil that through the ages had kept sifting down.
+
+Two days gone, he told himself.
+
+Was there, after all, some truth in the whispered tales that made the
+rounds back at the settlements--that no one should waste his time in
+tracking down a Cytha, since a Cytha was unkillable?
+
+Nonsense, he told himself. And yet the hunt had toughened, the trail
+become more difficult, the Cytha a much more cunning and elusive
+quarry. Where it had run from them the day before, now it fought to
+shake them off. And if it did that the second day, why had it not
+tried to throw them off the first? And what about the third
+day--tomorrow?
+
+He shook his head. It seemed incredible that an animal would become
+more formidable as the hunt progressed. But that seemed to be exactly
+what had happened. More spooked, perhaps, more frightened--only the
+Cytha did not act like a frightened beast. It was acting like an
+animal that was gaining savvy and determination, and that was somehow
+frightening.
+
+From far off to the west, toward the forest and the river, came the
+laughter and the howling of a pack of screamers. Duncan leaned his
+rifle against the boulder and got up to pile more wood on the fire. He
+stared out into the western darkness, listening to the racket. He made
+a wry face and pushed a hand absent-mindedly through his hair. He put
+out a silent hope that the screamers would decide to keep their
+distance. They were something a man could do without.
+
+Behind him, a pebble came bumping down the slope. It thudded to a rest
+just short of the fire.
+
+Duncan spun around. Foolish thing to do, he thought, to camp so near
+the slope. If something big should start to move, they'd be out of
+luck.
+
+He stood and listened. The night was quiet. Even the screamers had
+shut up for the moment. Just one rolling rock and he had his hackles
+up. He'd have to get himself in hand.
+
+He went back to the boulder, and as he stooped to pick up the rifle,
+he heard the faint beginning of a rumble. He straightened swiftly to
+face the scarp that blotted out the star-strewn sky--and the rumble
+grew!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In one leap, he was at Sipar's side. He reached down and grasped the
+native by an arm, jerked it erect, held it on its feet. Sipar's eyes
+snapped open, blinking in the firelight.
+
+The rumble had grown to a roar and there were thumping noises, as of
+heavy boulders bouncing, and beneath the roar the silky, ominous
+rustle of sliding soil and rock.
+
+Sipar jerked its arm free of Duncan's grip and plunged into the
+darkness. Duncan whirled and followed.
+
+They ran, stumbling in the dark, and behind them the roar of the
+sliding, bouncing rock became a throaty roll of thunder that filled
+the night from brim to brim. As he ran, Duncan could feel, in dread
+anticipation, the gusty breath of hurtling debris blowing on his neck,
+the crushing impact of a boulder smashing into him, the engulfing
+flood of tumbling talus snatching at his legs.
+
+A puff of billowing dust came out and caught them and they ran choking
+as well as stumbling. Off to the left of them, a mighty chunk of rock
+chugged along the ground in jerky, almost reluctant fashion.
+
+Then the thunder stopped and all one could hear was the small
+slitherings of the lesser debris as it trickled down the slope.
+
+Duncan stopped running and slowly turned around. The campfire was
+gone, buried, no doubt, beneath tons of overlay, and the stars had
+paled because of the great cloud of dust which still billowed up into
+the sky.
+
+He heard Sipar moving near him and reached out a hand, searching for
+the tracker, not knowing exactly where it was. He found the native,
+grasped it by the shoulder and pulled it up beside him.
+
+Sipar was shivering.
+
+"It's all right," said Duncan.
+
+And it _was_ all right, he reassured himself. He still had the rifle.
+The extra drum of ammunition and the knife were on his belt, the bag
+of rockahominy in his pocket. The canteens were all they had lost--the
+canteens and the fire.
+
+"We'll have to hole up somewhere for the night," Duncan said. "There
+are screamers on the loose."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+He didn't like what he was thinking, nor the sharp edge of fear that
+was beginning to crowd in upon him. He tried to shrug it off, but it
+still stayed with him, just out of reach.
+
+Sipar plucked at his elbow.
+
+"Thorn thicket, mister. Over there. We could crawl inside. We would be
+safe from screamers."
+
+It was torture, but they made it.
+
+"Screamers and you are taboo," said Duncan, suddenly remembering. "How
+come you are afraid of them?"
+
+"Afraid for you, mister, mostly. Afraid for myself just a little.
+Screamers could forget. They might not recognize me until too late.
+Safer here."
+
+"I agree with you," said Duncan.
+
+The screamers came and padded all about the thicket. The beasts
+sniffed and clawed at the thorns to reach them, but finally went away.
+
+When morning came, Duncan and Sipar climbed the scarp, clambering over
+the boulders and the tons of soil and rock that covered their camping
+place. Following the gash cut by the slide, they clambered up the
+slope and finally reached the point of the slide's beginning.
+
+There they found the depression in which the poised slab of rock had
+rested and where the supporting soil had been dug away so that it
+could be started, with a push, down the slope above the campfire.
+
+And all about were the deeply sunken pug marks of the Cytha!
+
+
+IV
+
+Now it was more than just a hunt. It was knife against the throat,
+kill or be killed. Now there was no stopping, when before there might
+have been. It was no longer sport and there was no mercy.
+
+"And that's the way I like it," Duncan told himself.
+
+He rubbed his hand along the rifle barrel and saw the metallic glints
+shine in the noonday sun. One more shot, he prayed. Just give me one
+more shot at it. This time there will be no slip-up. This time there
+will be more than three sodden hunks of flesh and fur lying in the
+grass to mock me.
+
+He squinted his eyes against the heat shimmer rising from the river,
+watching Sipar hunkered beside the water's edge.
+
+The native rose to its feet and trotted back to him.
+
+"It crossed," said Sipar. "It walked out as far as it could go and it
+must have swum."
+
+"Are you sure? It might have waded out to make us think it crossed,
+then doubled back again."
+
+He stared at the purple-green of the trees across the river. Inside
+that forest, it would be hellish going.
+
+"We can look," said Sipar.
+
+"Good. You go downstream. I'll go up."
+
+An hour later, they were back. They had found no tracks. There seemed
+little doubt the Cytha had really crossed the river.
+
+They stood side by side, looking at the forest.
+
+"Mister, we have come far. You are brave to hunt the Cytha. You have
+no fear of death."
+
+"The fear of death," Duncan said, "is entirely infantile. And it's
+beside the point as well. I do not intend to die."
+
+They waded out into the stream. The bottom shelved gradually and they
+had to swim no more than a hundred yards or so.
+
+They reached the forest bank and threw themselves flat to rest.
+
+Duncan looked back the way that they had come. To the east, the
+escarpment was a dark-blue smudge against the pale-blue burnished sky.
+And two days back of that lay the farm and the _vua_ field, but they
+seemed much farther off than that. They were lost in time and
+distance; they belonged to another existence and another world.
+
+All his life, it seemed to him, had faded and become inconsequential
+and forgotten, as if this moment in his life were the only one that
+counted; as if all the minutes and the hours, all the breaths and
+heartbeats, wake and sleep, had pointed toward this certain hour upon
+this certain stream, with the rifle molded to his hand and the cool,
+calculated bloodlust of a killer riding in his brain.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Sipar finally got up and began to range along the stream. Duncan sat
+up and watched.
+
+Scared to death, he thought, and yet it stayed with me. At the
+campfire that first night, it had said it would stick to the death and
+apparently it had meant exactly what it said. It's hard, he thought,
+to figure out these jokers, hard to know what kind of mental
+operation, what seethings of emotion, what brand of ethics and what
+variety of belief and faith go to make them and their way of life.
+
+It would have been so easy for Sipar to have missed the trail and
+swear it could not find it. Even from the start, it could have refused
+to go. Yet, fearing, it had gone. Reluctant, it had trailed. Without
+any need for faithfulness and loyalty, it had been loyal and faithful.
+But loyal to what, Duncan wondered, to him, the outlander and
+intruder? Loyal to itself? Or perhaps, although that seemed
+impossible, faithful to the Cytha?
+
+What does Sipar think of me, he asked himself, and maybe more to the
+point, what do I think of Sipar? Is there a common meeting ground? Or
+are we, despite our humanoid forms, condemned forever to be alien and
+apart?
+
+He held the rifle across his knees and stroked it, polishing it,
+petting it, making it even more closely a part of him, an instrument
+of his deadliness, an expression of his determination to track and
+kill the Cytha.
+
+Just another chance, he begged. Just one second, or even less, to draw
+a steady bead. That is all I want, all I need, all I'll ask.
+
+Then he could go back across the days that he had left behind him,
+back to the farm and field, back into that misty other life from which
+he had been so mysteriously divorced, but which in time undoubtedly
+would become real and meaningful again.
+
+Sipar came back. "I found the trail."
+
+Duncan heaved himself to his feet. "Good."
+
+They left the river and plunged into the forest and there the heat
+closed in more mercilessly than ever--humid, stifling heat that felt
+like a soggy blanket wrapped tightly round the body.
+
+The trail lay plain and clear. The Cytha now, it seemed, was intent
+upon piling up a lead without recourse to evasive tactics. Perhaps it
+had reasoned that its pursuers would lose some time at the river and
+it may have been trying to stretch out that margin even further.
+Perhaps it needed that extra time, he speculated, to set up the
+necessary machinery for another dirty trick.
+
+Sipar stopped and waited for Duncan to catch up. "Your knife, mister?"
+
+Duncan hesitated. "What for?"
+
+"I have a thorn in my foot," the native said. "I have to get it out."
+
+Duncan pulled the knife from his belt and tossed it. Sipar caught it
+deftly.
+
+Looking straight at Duncan, with the flicker of a smile upon its lips,
+the native cut its throat.
+
+
+V
+
+He should go back, he knew. Without the tracker, he didn't have a
+chance. The odds were now with the Cytha--if, indeed, they had not
+been with it from the very start.
+
+Unkillable? Unkillable because it grew in intelligence to meet
+emergencies? Unkillable because, pressed, it could fashion a bow and
+arrow, however crude? Unkillable because it had a sense of tactics,
+like rolling rocks at night upon its enemy? Unkillable because a
+native tracker would cheerfully kill itself to protect the Cytha?
+
+A sort of crisis-beast, perhaps? One able to develop intelligence and
+abilities to meet each new situation and then lapsing back to the
+level of non-intelligent contentment? That, thought Duncan, would be a
+sensible way for anything to live. It would do away with the
+inconvenience and the irritability and the discontentment of
+intelligence when intelligence was unneeded. But the intelligence, and
+the abilities which went with it, would be there, safely tucked away
+where one could reach in and get them, like a necklace or a
+gun--something to be used or to be put away as the case might be.
+
+Duncan hunched forward and with a stick of wood pushed the fire
+together. The flames blazed up anew and sent sparks flying up into the
+whispering darkness of the trees. The night had cooled off a little,
+but the humidity still hung on and a man felt uncomfortable--a little
+frightened, too.
+
+Duncan lifted his head and stared up into the fire-flecked darkness.
+There were no stars because the heavy foliage shut them out. He missed
+the stars. He'd feel better if he could look up and see them.
+
+When morning came, he should go back. He should quit this hunt which
+now had become impossible and even slightly foolish.
+
+But he knew he wouldn't. Somewhere along the three-day trail, he had
+become committed to a purpose and a challenge, and he knew that when
+morning came, he would go on again. It was not hatred that drove him,
+nor vengeance, nor even the trophy-urge--the hunter-lust that prodded
+men to kill something strange or harder to kill or bigger than any man
+had ever killed before. It was something more than that, some weird
+entangling of the Cytha's meaning with his own.
+
+He reached out and picked up the rifle and laid it in his lap. Its
+barrel gleamed dully in the flickering campfire light and he rubbed
+his hand along the stock as another man might stroke a woman's throat.
+
+"Mister," said a voice.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It did not startle him, for the word was softly spoken and for a
+moment he had forgotten that Sipar was dead--dead with a half-smile
+fixed upon its face and with its throat laid wide open.
+
+"Mister?"
+
+Duncan stiffened.
+
+Sipar was dead and there was no one else--and yet someone had spoken
+to him, and there could be only one thing in all this wilderness that
+might speak to him.
+
+"Yes," he said.
+
+He did not move. He simply sat there, with the rifle in his lap.
+
+"You know who I am?"
+
+"I suppose you are the Cytha."
+
+"You have done well," the Cytha said. "You've made a splendid hunt.
+There is no dishonor if you should decide to quit. Why don't you go
+back? I promise you no harm."
+
+It was over there, somewhere in front of him, somewhere in the brush
+beyond the fire, almost straight across the fire from him, Duncan told
+himself. If he could keep it talking, perhaps even lure it out--
+
+"Why should I?" he asked. "The hunt is never done until one gets the
+thing one is after."
+
+"I can kill you," the Cytha told him. "But I do not want to kill. It
+hurts to kill."
+
+"That's right," said Duncan. "You are most perceptive."
+
+For he had it pegged now. He knew exactly where it was. He could
+afford a little mockery.
+
+His thumb slid up the metal and nudged the fire control to automatic
+and he flexed his legs beneath him so that he could rise and fire in
+one single motion.
+
+"Why did you hunt me?" the Cytha asked. "You are a stranger on my
+world and you had no right to hunt me. Not that I mind, of course. In
+fact, I found it stimulating. We must do it again. When I am ready to
+be hunted, I shall come and tell you and we can spend a day or two at
+it."
+
+"Sure we can," said Duncan, rising. And as he rose into his crouch, he
+held the trigger down and the gun danced in insane fury, the muzzle
+flare a flicking tongue of hatred and the hail of death hissing
+spitefully in the underbrush.
+
+"Anytime you want to," yelled Duncan gleefully, "I'll come and hunt
+you! You just say the word and I'll be on your tail. I might even kill
+you. How do you like it, chump!"
+
+And he held the trigger tight and kept his crouch so the slugs would
+not fly high, but would cut their swath just above the ground, and he
+moved the muzzle back and forth a lot so that he covered extra ground
+to compensate for any miscalculations he might have made.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The magazine ran out and the gun clicked empty and the vicious chatter
+stopped. Powder smoke drifted softly in the campfire light and the
+smell of it was perfume in the nostrils and in the underbrush many
+little feet were running, as if a thousand frightened mice were
+scurrying from catastrophe.
+
+Duncan unhooked the extra magazine from where it hung upon his belt
+and replaced the empty one. Then he snatched a burning length of wood
+from the fire and waved it frantically until it burst into a blaze and
+became a torch. Rifle grasped in one hand and the torch in the other,
+he plunged into the underbrush. Little chittering things fled to
+escape him.
+
+He did not find the Cytha. He found chewed-up bushes and soil churned
+by flying metal, and he found five lumps of flesh and fur, and these
+he brought back to the fire.
+
+Now the fear that had been stalking him, keeping just beyond his
+reach, walked out from the shadows and hunkered by the campfire with
+him.
+
+He placed the rifle within easy reach and arranged the five bloody
+chunks on the ground close to the fire and he tried with trembling
+fingers to restore them to the shape they'd been before the bullets
+struck them. And that was a good one, he thought with grim irony,
+because they had no shape. They had been part of the Cytha and you
+killed a Cytha inch by inch, not with a single shot. You knocked a
+pound of meat off it the first time, and the next time you shot off
+another pound or two, and if you got enough shots at it, you finally
+carved it down to size and maybe you could kill it then, although he
+wasn't sure.
+
+He was afraid. He admitted that he was and he squatted there and
+watched his fingers shake and he kept his jaws clamped tight to stop
+the chatter of his teeth.
+
+The fear had been getting closer all the time; he knew it had moved in
+by a step or two when Sipar cut its throat, and why in the name of God
+had the damn fool done it? It made no sense at all. He had wondered
+about Sipar's loyalties, and the very loyalties that he had dismissed
+as a sheer impossibility had been the answer, after all. In the end,
+for some obscure reason--obscure to humans, that is--Sipar's loyalty
+had been to the Cytha.
+
+But then what was the use of searching for any reason in it? Nothing
+that had happened made any sense. It made no sense that a beast one
+was pursuing should up and talk to one--although it did fit in with
+the theory of the crisis-beast he had fashioned in his mind.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Progressive adaptation, he told himself. Carry adaptation far enough
+and you'd reach communication. But might not the Cytha's power of
+adaptation be running down? Had the Cytha gone about as far as it
+could force itself to go? Maybe so, he thought. It might be worth a
+gamble. Sipar's suicide, for all its casualness, bore the overtones of
+last-notch desperation. And the Cytha's speaking to Duncan, its
+attempt to parley with him, contained a note of weakness.
+
+The arrow had failed and the rockslide had failed and so had Sipar's
+death. What next would the Cytha try? Had it anything to try?
+
+Tomorrow he'd find out. Tomorrow he'd go on. He couldn't turn back
+now.
+
+He was too deeply involved. He'd always wonder, if he turned back now,
+whether another hour or two might not have seen the end of it. There
+were too many questions, too much mystery--there was now far more at
+stake than ten rows of _vua_.
+
+Another day might make some sense of it, might banish the dread walker
+that trod upon his heels, might bring some peace of mind.
+
+As it stood right at the moment, none of it made sense.
+
+But even as he thought it, suddenly one of the bits of bloody flesh
+and mangled fur made sense.
+
+Beneath the punching and prodding of his fingers, it had assumed a
+shape.
+
+Breathlessly, Duncan bent above it, not believing, not even wanting to
+believe, hoping frantically that it should prove completely wrong.
+
+But there was nothing wrong with it. The shape was there and could not
+be denied. It had somehow fitted back into its natural shape and it
+was a baby screamer--well, maybe not a baby, but at least a tiny
+screamer.
+
+Duncan sat back on his heels and sweated. He wiped his bloody hands
+upon the ground. He wondered what other shapes he'd find if he put
+back into proper place the other hunks of limpness that lay beside the
+fire.
+
+He tried and failed. They were too smashed and torn.
+
+He picked them up and tossed them in the fire. He took up his rifle
+and walked around the fire, sat down with his back against a tree,
+cradling the gun across his knees.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Those little scurrying feet, he wondered--like the scampering of a
+thousand busy mice. He had heard them twice, that first night in the
+thicket by the waterhole and again tonight.
+
+And what could the Cytha be? Certainly not the simple, uncomplicated,
+marauding animal he had thought to start with.
+
+A hive-beast? A host animal? A thing masquerading in many different
+forms?
+
+Shotwell, trained in such deductions, might make a fairly accurate
+guess, but Shotwell was not here. He was at the farm, fretting, more
+than likely, over Duncan's failure to return.
+
+Finally the first light of morning began to filter through the forest
+and it was not the glaring, clean white light of the open plain and
+bush, but a softened, diluted, fuzzy green light to match the
+smothering vegetation.
+
+The night noises died away and the noises of the day took up--the
+sawings of unseen insects, the screechings of hidden birds and
+something far away began to make a noise that sounded like an empty
+barrel falling slowly down a stairway.
+
+What little coolness the night had brought dissipated swiftly and the
+heat clamped down, a breathless, relentless heat that quivered in the
+air.
+
+Circling, Duncan picked up the Cytha trail not more than a hundred
+yards from camp.
+
+The beast had been traveling fast. The pug marks were deeply sunk and
+widely spaced. Duncan followed as rapidly as he dared. It was a
+temptation to follow at a run, to match the Cytha's speed, for the
+trail was plain and fresh and it fairly beckoned.
+
+And that was wrong, Duncan told himself. It was too fresh, too
+plain--almost as if the animal had gone to endless trouble so that the
+human could not miss the trail.
+
+He stopped his trailing and crouched beside a tree and studied the
+tracks ahead. His hands were too tense upon the gun, his body keyed
+too high and fine. He forced himself to take slow, deep breaths. He
+had to calm himself. He had to loosen up.
+
+He studied the tracks ahead--four bunched pug marks, then a long leap
+interval, then four more bunched tracks, and between the sets of marks
+the forest floor was innocent and smooth.
+
+Too smooth, perhaps. Especially the third one from him. Too smooth and
+somehow artificial, as if someone had patted it with gentle hands to
+make it unsuspicious.
+
+Duncan sucked his breath in slowly.
+
+Trap?
+
+Or was his imagination playing tricks on him?
+
+And if it were a trap, he would have fallen into it if he had kept on
+following as he had started out.
+
+Now there was something else, a strange uneasiness, and he stirred
+uncomfortably, casting frantically for some clue to what it was.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+He rose and stepped out from the tree, with the gun at ready. What a
+perfect place to set a trap, he thought. One would be looking at the
+pug marks, never at the space between them, for the space between
+would be neutral ground, safe to stride out upon.
+
+Oh, clever Cytha, he said to himself. Oh, clever, clever Cytha!
+
+And now he knew what the other trouble was--the great uneasiness. It
+was the sense of being watched.
+
+Somewhere up ahead, the Cytha was crouched, watching and
+waiting--anxious or exultant, maybe even with laughter rumbling in its
+throat.
+
+He walked slowly forward until he reached the third set of tracks and
+he saw that he had been right. The little area ahead was smoother than
+it should be.
+
+"Cytha!" he called.
+
+His voice was far louder than he had meant it to be and he stood
+astonished and a bit abashed.
+
+Then he realized why it was so loud.
+
+It was the only sound there was!
+
+The forest suddenly had fallen silent. The insects and birds were
+quiet and the thing in the distance had quit falling down the stairs.
+Even the leaves were silent. There was no rustle in them and they hung
+limp upon their stems.
+
+There was a feeling of doom and the green light had changed to a
+copper light and everything was still.
+
+And the light was _copper_!
+
+Duncan spun around in panic. There was no place for him to hide.
+
+Before he could take another step, the _skun_ came and the winds
+rushed out of nowhere. The air was clogged with flying leaves and
+debris. Trees snapped and popped and tumbled in the air.
+
+The wind hurled Duncan to his knees, and as he fought to regain his
+feet, he remembered, in a blinding flash of total recall, how it had
+looked from atop the escarpment--the boiling fury of the winds and the
+mad swirling of the coppery mist and how the trees had whipped in
+whirlpool fashion.
+
+He came half erect and stumbled, clawing at the ground in an attempt
+to get up again, while inside his brain an insistent, clicking voice
+cried out for him to run, and somewhere another voice said to lie flat
+upon the ground, to dig in as best he could.
+
+Something struck him from behind and he went down, pinned flat, with
+his rifle wedged beneath him. He cracked his head upon the ground and
+the world whirled sickeningly and plastered his face with a handful of
+mud and tattered leaves.
+
+He tried to crawl and couldn't, for something had grabbed him by the
+ankle and was hanging on.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+With a frantic hand, he clawed the mess out of his eyes, spat it from
+his mouth.
+
+Across the spinning ground, something black and angular tumbled
+rapidly. It was coming straight toward him and he saw it was the Cytha
+and that in another second it would be on top of him.
+
+He threw up an arm across his face, with the elbow crooked, to take
+the impact of the wind-blown Cytha and to ward it off.
+
+But it never reached him. Less than a yard away, the ground opened up
+to take the Cytha and it was no longer there.
+
+Suddenly the wind cut off and the leaves once more hung motionless and
+the heat clamped down again and that was the end of it. The _skun_ had
+come and struck and gone.
+
+Minutes, Duncan wondered, or perhaps no more than seconds. But in
+those seconds, the forest had been flattened and the trees lay in
+shattered heaps.
+
+He raised himself on an elbow and looked to see what was the matter
+with his foot and he saw that a fallen tree had trapped his foot
+beneath it.
+
+He tugged a few times experimentally. It was no use. Two close-set
+limbs, branching almost at right angles from the hole, had been driven
+deep into the ground and his foot, he saw, had been caught at the
+ankle in the fork of the buried branches.
+
+The foot didn't hurt--not yet. It didn't seem to be there at all. He
+tried wiggling his toes and felt none.
+
+He wiped the sweat off his face with a shirt sleeve and fought to
+force down the panic that was rising in him. Getting panicky was the
+worst thing a man could do in a spot like this. The thing to do was to
+take stock of the situation, figure out the best approach, then go
+ahead and try it.
+
+The tree looked heavy, but perhaps he could handle it if he had to,
+although there was the danger that if he shifted it, the bole might
+settle more solidly and crush his foot beneath it. At the moment, the
+two heavy branches, thrust into the ground on either side of his
+ankle, were holding most of the tree's weight off his foot.
+
+The best thing to do, he decided, was to dig the ground away beneath
+his foot until he could pull it out.
+
+He twisted around and started digging with the fingers of one hand.
+Beneath the thin covering of humus, he struck a solid surface and his
+fingers slid along it.
+
+With mounting alarm, he explored the ground, scratching at the humus.
+There was nothing but rock--some long-buried boulder, the top of which
+lay just beneath the ground.
+
+His foot was trapped beneath a heavy tree and a massive boulder, held
+securely in place by forked branches that had forced their splintering
+way down along the boulder's sides.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+He lay back, propped on an elbow. It was evident that he could do
+nothing about the buried boulder. If he was going to do anything, his
+problem was the tree.
+
+To move the tree, he would need a lever and he had a good, stout lever
+in his rifle. It would be a shame, he thought a little wryly, to use a
+gun for such a purpose, but he had no choice.
+
+He worked for an hour and it was no good. Even with the rifle as a
+pry, he could not budge the tree.
+
+He lay back, defeated, breathing hard, wringing wet with perspiration.
+
+He grimaced at the sky.
+
+All right, Cytha, he thought, you won out in the end. But it took a
+_skun_ to do it. With all your tricks, you couldn't do the job
+until....
+
+Then he remembered.
+
+He sat up hurriedly.
+
+"Cytha!" he called.
+
+The Cytha had fallen into a hole that had opened in the ground. The
+hole was less than an arm's length away from him, with a little debris
+around its edges still trickling into it.
+
+Duncan stretched out his body, lying flat upon the ground, and looked
+into the hole. There, at the bottom of it, was the Cytha.
+
+It was the first time he'd gotten a good look at the Cytha and it was
+a crazily put-together thing. It seemed to have nothing functional
+about it and it looked more like a heap of something, just thrown on
+the ground, than it did an animal.
+
+The hole, he saw, was more than an ordinary hole. It was a pit and
+very cleverly constructed. The mouth was about four feet in diameter
+and it widened to roughly twice that at the bottom. It was, in
+general, bottle-shaped, with an incurving shoulder at the top so that
+anything that fell in could not climb out. Anything falling into that
+pit was in to stay.
+
+This, Duncan knew, was what had lain beneath that too-smooth interval
+between the two sets of Cytha tracks. The Cytha had worked all night
+to dig it, then had carried away the dirt dug out of the pit and had
+built a flimsy camouflage cover over it. Then it had gone back and
+made the trail that was so loud and clear, so easy to make out and
+follow. And having done all that, having labored hard and stealthily,
+the Cytha had settled down to watch, to make sure the following human
+had fallen in the pit.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Hi, pal," said Duncan. "How are you making out?"
+
+The Cytha did not answer.
+
+"Classy pit," said Duncan. "Do you always den up in luxury like this?"
+
+[Illustration]
+
+But the Cytha didn't answer.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+Something queer was happening to the Cytha. It was coming all apart.
+
+Duncan watched with fascinated horror as the Cytha broke down into a
+thousand lumps of motion that scurried in the pit and tried to
+scramble up its sides, only to fall back in tiny showers of sand.
+
+Amid the scurrying lumps, one thing remained intact, a fragile object
+that resembled nothing quite so much as the stripped skeleton of a
+Thanksgiving turkey. But it was a most extraordinary Thanksgiving
+skeleton, for it throbbed with pulsing life and glowed with a steady
+violet light.
+
+Chitterings and squeakings came out of the pit and the soft patter of
+tiny running feet, and as Duncan's eyes became accustomed to the
+darkness of the pit, he began to make out the forms of some of the
+scurrying shapes. There were tiny screamers and some donovans and
+sawmill birds and a bevy of kill-devils and something else as well.
+
+Duncan raised a hand and pressed it against his eyes, then took it
+quickly away. The little faces still were there, looking up as if
+beseeching him, with the white shine of their teeth and the white
+rolling of their eyes.
+
+He felt horror wrenching at his stomach and the sour, bitter taste of
+revulsion welled into his throat, but he fought it down, harking back
+to that day at the farm before they had started on the hunt.
+
+"I can track down anything but screamers, stilt-birds, longhorns and
+donovans," Sipar had told him solemnly. "These are my taboos."
+
+And Sipar was also their taboo, for he had not feared the donovan.
+Sipar had been, however, somewhat fearful of the screamers in the dead
+of night because, the native had told him reasonably, screamers were
+forgetful.
+
+Forgetful of what!
+
+Forgetful of the Cytha-mother? Forgetful of the motley brood in which
+they had spent their childhood?
+
+For that was the only answer to what was running in the pit and the
+whole, unsuspected answer to the enigma against which men like
+Shotwell had frustratedly banged their heads for years.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Strange, he told himself. All right, it might be strange, but if it
+worked, what difference did it make? So the planet's denizens were
+sexless because there was no need of sex--what was wrong with that? It
+might, in fact, Duncan admitted to himself, head off a lot of trouble.
+No family spats, no triangle trouble, no fighting over mates. While it
+might be unexciting, it did seem downright peaceful.
+
+And since there was no sex, the Cytha species was the planetary
+mother--but more than just a mother. The Cytha, more than likely, was
+mother-father, incubator, nursery, teacher and perhaps many other
+things besides, all rolled into one.
+
+In many ways, he thought, it might make a lot of sense. Here natural
+selection would be ruled out and ecology could be controlled in
+considerable degree and mutation might even be a matter of deliberate
+choice rather than random happenstance.
+
+And it would make for a potential planetary unity such as no other
+world had ever known. Everything here was kin to everything else. Here
+was a planet where Man, or any other alien, must learn to tread most
+softly. For it was not inconceivable that, in a crisis or a clash of
+interests, one might find himself faced suddenly with a unified and
+cooperating planet, with every form of life making common cause
+against the interloper.
+
+The little scurrying things had given up; they'd gone back to their
+places, clustered around the pulsing violet of the Thanksgiving
+skeleton, each one fitting into place until the Cytha had taken shape
+again. As if, Duncan told himself, blood and nerve and muscle had come
+back from a brief vacation to form the beast anew.
+
+"Mister," asked the Cytha, "what do we do now?"
+
+"You should know," Duncan told it. "You were the one who dug the pit."
+
+"I split myself," the Cytha said. "A part of me dug the pit and the
+other part that stayed on the surface got me out when the job was
+done."
+
+"Convenient," grunted Duncan.
+
+And it _was_ convenient. That was what had happened to the Cytha when
+he had shot at it--it had split into all its component parts and had
+got away. And that night beside the waterhole, it had spied on him,
+again in the form of all its separate parts, from the safety of the
+thicket.
+
+"You are caught and so am I," the Cytha said. "Both of us will die
+here. It seems a fitting end to our association. Do you not agree with
+me?"
+
+"I'll get you out," said Duncan wearily. "I have no quarrel with
+children."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+He dragged the rifle toward him and unhooked the sling from the stock.
+Carefully he lowered the gun by the sling, still attached to the
+barrel, down into the pit.
+
+The Cytha reared up and grasped it with its forepaws.
+
+"Easy now," Duncan cautioned. "You're heavy. I don't know if I can
+hold you."
+
+But he needn't have worried. The little ones were detaching themselves
+and scrambling up the rifle and the sling. They reached his extended
+arms and ran up them with scrabbling claws. Little sneering screamers
+and the comic stilt-birds and the mouse-size kill-devils that snarled
+at him as they climbed. And the little grinning natives--not babies,
+scarcely children, but small editions of full-grown humanoids. And the
+weird donovans scampering happily.
+
+They came climbing up his arms and across his shoulders and milled
+about on the ground beside him, waiting for the others.
+
+And finally the Cytha, not skinned down to the bare bones of its
+Thanksgiving-turkey-size, but far smaller than it had been, climbed
+awkwardly up the rifle and the sling to safety.
+
+Duncan hauled the rifle up and twisted himself into a sitting
+position.
+
+The Cytha, he saw, was reassembling.
+
+He watched in fascination as the restless miniatures of the planet's
+life swarmed and seethed like a hive of bees, each one clicking into
+place to form the entire beast.
+
+And now the Cytha was complete. Yet small--still small--no more than
+lion-size.
+
+"But it is such a little one," Zikkara had argued with him that
+morning at the farm. "It is such a young one."
+
+Just a young brood, no more than suckling infants--if suckling was the
+word, or even some kind of wild approximation. And through the months
+and years, the Cytha would grow, with the growing of its diverse
+children, until it became a monstrous thing.
+
+It stood there looking at Duncan and the tree.
+
+"Now," said Duncan, "if you'll push on the tree, I think that between
+the two of us--"
+
+"It is too bad," the Cytha said, and wheeled itself about.
+
+He watched it go loping off.
+
+"Hey!" he yelled.
+
+But it didn't stop.
+
+He grabbed up the rifle and had it halfway to his shoulder before he
+remembered how absolutely futile it was to shoot at the Cytha.
+
+He let the rifle down.
+
+"The dirty, ungrateful, double-crossing--"
+
+He stopped himself. There was no profit in rage. When you were in a
+jam, you did the best you could. You figured out the problem and you
+picked the course that seemed best and you didn't panic at the odds.
+
+He laid the rifle in his lap and started to hook up the sling and it
+was not till then that he saw the barrel was packed with sand and
+dirt.
+
+He sat numbly for a moment, thinking back to how close he had been to
+firing at the Cytha, and if that barrel was packed hard enough or deep
+enough, he might have had an exploding weapon in his hands.
+
+He had used the rifle as a crowbar, which was no way to use a gun.
+That was one way, he told himself, that was guaranteed to ruin it.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Duncan hunted around and found a twig and dug at the clogged muzzle,
+but the dirt was jammed too firmly in it and he made little progress.
+
+He dropped the twig and was hunting for another stronger one when he
+caught the motion in a nearby clump of brush.
+
+He watched closely for a moment and there was nothing, so he resumed
+the hunt for a stronger twig. He found one and started poking at the
+muzzle and there was another flash of motion.
+
+He twisted around. Not more than twenty feet away, a screamer sat
+easily on its haunches. Its tongue was lolling out and it had what
+looked like a grin upon its face.
+
+And there was another, just at the edge of the clump of brush where he
+had caught the motion first.
+
+There were others as well, he knew. He could hear them sliding through
+the tangle of fallen trees, could sense the soft padding of their
+feet.
+
+The executioners, he thought.
+
+The Cytha certainly had not wasted any time.
+
+He raised the rifle and rapped the barrel smartly on the fallen tree,
+trying to dislodge the obstruction in the bore. But it didn't budge;
+the barrel still was packed with sand.
+
+But no matter--he'd have to fire anyhow and take whatever chance there
+was.
+
+He shoved the control to automatic, and tilted up the muzzle.
+
+There were six of them now, sitting in a ragged row, grinning at him,
+not in any hurry. They were sure of him and there was no hurry. He'd
+still be there when they decided to move in.
+
+And there were others--on all sides of him.
+
+Once it started, he wouldn't have a chance.
+
+"It'll be expensive, gents," he told them.
+
+And he was astonished at how calm, how coldly objective he could be,
+now that the chips were down. But that was the way it was, he
+realized.
+
+He'd thought, a while ago, how a man might suddenly find himself face
+to face with an aroused and cooperating planet. Maybe this was it in
+miniature.
+
+The Cytha had obviously passed the word along: _Man back there needs
+killing. Go and get him._
+
+Just like that, for a Cytha would be the power here. A life force, the
+giver of life, the decider of life, the repository of all animal life
+on the entire planet.
+
+There was more than one of them, of course. Probably they had home
+districts, spheres of influence and responsibility mapped out. And
+each one would be a power supreme in its own district.
+
+Momism, he thought with a sour grin. Momism at its absolute peak.
+
+Nevertheless, he told himself, it wasn't too bad a system if you
+wanted to consider it objectively.
+
+But he was in a poor position to be objective about that or anything
+else.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The screamers were inching closer, hitching themselves forward slowly
+on their bottoms.
+
+"I'm going to set up a deadline for you critters," Duncan called out.
+"Just two feet farther, up to that rock, and I let you have it."
+
+He'd get all six of them, of course, but the shots would be the signal
+for the general rush by all those other animals slinking in the brush.
+
+If he were free, if he were on his feet, possibly he could beat them
+off. But pinned as he was, he didn't have a chance. It would be all
+over less than a minute after he opened fire. He might, he figured,
+last as long as that.
+
+The six inched closer and he raised the rifle.
+
+But they stopped and moved no farther. Their ears lifted just a
+little, as if they might be listening, and the grins dropped from
+their faces. They squirmed uneasily and assumed a look of guilt and,
+like shadows, they were gone, melting away so swiftly that he scarcely
+saw them go.
+
+Duncan sat quietly, listening, but he could hear no sound.
+
+Reprieve, he thought. But for how long? Something had scared them off,
+but in a while they might be back. He had to get out of here and he
+had to make it fast.
+
+If he could find a longer lever, he could move the tree. There was a
+branch slanting up from the topside of the fallen tree. It was almost
+four inches at the butt and it carried its diameter well.
+
+He slid the knife from his belt and looked at it. Too small, too thin,
+he thought, to chisel through a four-inch branch, but it was all he
+had. When a man was desperate enough, though, when his very life
+depended on it, he would do anything.
+
+He hitched himself along, sliding toward the point where the branch
+protruded from the tree. His pinned leg protested with stabs of pain
+as his body wrenched it around. He gritted his teeth and pushed
+himself closer. Pain slashed through his leg again and he was still
+long inches from the branch.
+
+He tried once more, then gave up. He lay panting on the ground.
+
+There was just one thing left.
+
+He'd have to try to hack out a notch in the trunk just above his leg.
+No, that would be next to impossible, for he'd be cutting into the
+whorled and twisted grain at the base of the supporting fork.
+
+Either that or cut off his foot, and that was even more impossible. A
+man would faint before he got the job done.
+
+It was useless, he knew. He could do neither one. There was nothing he
+could do.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+For the first time, he admitted to himself: He would stay here and
+die. Shotwell, back at the farm, in a day or two might set out hunting
+for him. But Shotwell would never find him. And anyhow, by nightfall,
+if not sooner, the screamers would be back.
+
+He laughed gruffly in his throat--laughing at himself.
+
+The Cytha had won the hunt hands down. It had used a human weakness to
+win and then had used that same human weakness to achieve a viciously
+poetic vengeance.
+
+After all, what could one expect? One could not equate human ethics
+with the ethics of the Cytha. Might not human ethics, in certain
+cases, seem as weird and illogical, as infamous and ungrateful, to an
+alien?
+
+He hunted for a twig and began working again to clean the rifle bore.
+
+A crashing behind him twisted him around and he saw the Cytha. Behind
+the Cytha stalked a donovan.
+
+He tossed away the twig and raised the gun.
+
+"No," said the Cytha sharply.
+
+The donovan tramped purposefully forward and Duncan felt the prickling
+of the skin along his back. It was a frightful thing. Nothing could
+stand before a donovan. The screamers had turned tail and run when
+they had heard it a couple of miles or more away.
+
+The donovan was named for the first known human to be killed by one.
+That first was only one of many. The roll of donovan-victims ran long,
+and no wonder, Duncan thought. It was the closest he had ever been to
+one of the beasts and he felt a coldness creeping over him. It was
+like an elephant and a tiger and a grizzly bear wrapped in the
+selfsame hide. It was the most vicious fighting machine that ever had
+been spawned.
+
+He lowered the rifle. There would be no point in shooting. In two
+quick strides, the beast could be upon him.
+
+The donovan almost stepped on him and he flinched away. Then the great
+head lowered and gave the fallen tree a butt and the tree bounced for
+a yard or two. The donovan kept on walking. Its powerfully muscled
+stern moved into the brush and out of sight.
+
+"Now we are even," said the Cytha. "I had to get some help."
+
+Duncan grunted. He flexed the leg that had been trapped and he could
+not feel the foot. Using his rifle as a cane, he pulled himself erect.
+He tried putting weight on the injured foot and it screamed with pain.
+
+He braced himself with the rifle and rotated so that he faced the
+Cytha.
+
+"Thanks, pal," he said. "I didn't think you'd do it."
+
+"You will not hunt me now?"
+
+Duncan shook his head. "I'm in no shape for hunting. I am heading
+home."
+
+"It was the _vua_, wasn't it? That was why you hunted me?"
+
+"The _vua_ is my livelihood," said Duncan. "I cannot let you eat it."
+
+The Cytha stood silently and Duncan watched it for a moment. Then he
+wheeled. Using the rifle for a crutch, he started hobbling away.
+
+The Cytha hurried to catch up with him.
+
+"Let us make a bargain, mister. I will not eat the _vua_ and you will
+not hunt me. Is that fair enough?"
+
+"That is fine with me," said Duncan. "Let us shake on it."
+
+He put down a hand and the Cytha lifted up a paw. They shook,
+somewhat awkwardly, but very solemnly.
+
+"Now," the Cytha said, "I will see you home. The screamers would have
+you before you got out of the woods."
+
+
+VI
+
+They halted on a knoll. Below them lay the farm, with the _vua_ rows
+straight and green in the red soil of the fields.
+
+"You can make it from here," the Cytha said. "I am wearing thin. It is
+an awful effort to keep on being smart. I want to go back to ignorance
+and comfort."
+
+"It was nice knowing you," Duncan told it politely. "And thanks for
+sticking with me."
+
+He started down the hill, leaning heavily on the rifle-crutch. Then he
+frowned troubledly and turned back.
+
+"Look," he said, "you'll go back to animal again. Then you will
+forget. One of these days, you'll see all that nice, tender _vua_
+and--"
+
+"Very simple," said the Cytha. "If you find me in the _vua_, just
+begin hunting me. With you after me, I will quickly get smart and
+remember once again and it will be all right."
+
+"Sure," agreed Duncan. "I guess that will work."
+
+The Cytha watched him go stumping down the hill.
+
+Admirable, it thought. Next time I have a brood, I think I'll raise a
+dozen like him.
+
+It turned around and headed for the deeper brush.
+
+It felt intelligence slipping from it, felt the old, uncaring comfort
+coming back again. But it glowed with anticipation, seethed with
+happiness at the big surprise it had in store for its new-found
+friend.
+
+Won't he be happy and surprised when I drop them at his door, it
+thought.
+
+Will he be ever pleased!
+
+                                                    --CLIFFORD D. SIMAK
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 32026 ***