The Creatures of Man (63 page)

Mentally he constructed an image of the area through which the lance of energy had passed, and ran a straight line from scar to scar. The line passed through the center of the inertial control complex of the life-support packet, but touched nothing else of importance.

However, the damage done was important enough. Without inertial control, his entire transport system was of little practical use. His repulsors wouldn't raise him a millimeter off the ground against full inertia; nor, if he should manage somehow to get into space, could he go into warp.

If he hoped to get home, he would have to stun or kill a Primgranese, and take the inertial-control complex from the enemy's body.

But that could be dealt with when the opportunity arose, or when it became necessary. What he had to do now was get out of this valley and start his quest.

He walked toward the sound of water and soon came to the rushing, swollen stream, with the intention of following its course down through the southwest end of the valley. The going was difficult, at times through a solid jumble of boulders, and after a mile Morgan found his route blocked completely. The valley narrowed to a steep-walled canyon. He could neither follow the stream nor climb the wall.

For a moment he eyed the water speculatively, but it was a rolling rapid, and even with the protection of his skin-field he could be battered into a lifeless pulp if he tried swimming down it.

It was annoying indeed to be impeded this way by such petty trivialities as a minor river and a rock wall! But without inertial-control, which would let him leap over such obstacles without a thought . . . well, he would have to find another way out.

He turned back upstream, found a place where he could cross the water by leaping from boulder to boulder, and began exploring along the western slope of the valley, which was free of snow and appeared less steep than the eastern side. At several promising looking spots he tried to climb, but always he was stopped by a blank stretch of rock where he could find no further holds for hands or feet.

Finally he halted, sat down on a boulder, and tried to develop a solution to his problem. In the distant past, he knew, men had climbed mountains often—perhaps because they could not fly. Mountains far higher than the walls of this valley, and steeper too. But they had used equipment of some sort, judging by pictures he had seen: ropes, and spikes which could be driven into stone.

He glanced down at the items attached to his weapons belt, but raiders traveled light. He had nothing that could be improvised into a rope or spike. Of course, if he had kept his zerburst guns he could blast his way out—and take a chance on attracting the Primgranese to the energy release—but he had let his primary weapons go flying when he pretended to be wounded. His remaining gun was a stunner, effective enough on a human enemy at close range, but no hewer of stone.

His eyes swept the valley, in search of anything that might prove useful.

A stone clattered loudly behind him.

He refused to let himself go tense. He turned, more with the appearance of alert curiosity than startled fright.

But it wasn't an enemy, nor even a man. It was merely a mountain goat, standing high on the rim of the valley and looking down at him. Such creatures were thought to be numerous in these mountains, he recalled. In fact, the Primgranese had set aside most of the Rockies as a wildlife preserve for such animals as this one.

Morgan started to look away just as the goat moved. It began descending toward him with an ease and agility he found hard to believe, its hooves locating firm footings where he would have sworn his fingertips would have found nothing but blank stone. As the animal came closer to the floor of the valley, he ceased to marvel at its movements and began to puzzle at its purpose. He frowned. Wild animals had territorial instincts. Did this one consider him an invader to be attacked? He did not wish to inflict pain and injury on the animal, but he drew his stunner to use if he had to.

The shaggy beast stopped ten feet away and regarded the man curiously. Morgan watched and waited.

"Looks like you got in a hole, mister," said the goat in rough but perfectly understandable Universal. "What's your name?"

The man blinked. A talking goat was no great cause for surprise. Men had experimented with genetic modification of several animal species. It was puzzling, however, to find an intelligent goat living in the wild. Also, this animal's skull was no bigger than that of an unmodified goat.

"I'm Morgan," he replied.

"And I'm called Ezzy," said the goat.

"Where do you carry your brain, Ezzy?" Morgan asked.

"Under the shoulder hump," said Ezzy. "A goat's skull ain't the place for a brain. Takes too many licks. But like I was saying, Morgan, looks like you got yourself in a hole."

"You mean this valley? Yes, I'm having a little trouble getting out. Is there a path?"

"Afraid not," said Ezzy.

"Well, where can I climb out?"

"If you can't do it at them places I watched you try, you can't do it nowhere," said Ezzy. Morgan was sure the goat was grinning at him.

"I hope I'm not violating your territory," he said rather stiffly.

"Matter of fact, you are," said the goat. "but that's okay, I saw you don't want to stay. I guess this place don't look much like home to you, does it? What Lontastan planet you from, anyhow?"

Morgan's grip on the stunner tightened. "What makes you think I'm a Lontastan?" he demanded.

"Cause you landed way up here, and cause you ain't calling for help. I guess some of your stuff ain't working, or you could get out, but some of it is, or you'd be freezing. So you could get help if you wanted to call the Primgranese."

This goat had a brain all right, Morgan thought tensely. But . . . although it could
guess
he was Lontastan, it could not be certain. Maybe it was trying to verify its suspicions by tricking him into admitting his identity, after which it would curry favor with its Primgranese masters by reporting his presence.

Morgan grinned. "With all respect for your territorial preferences, what would a Lontastan be doing in such a nowhere place as this?"

The goat waggled its head. "Humans hang around a lot of nowhere places. Like where there ain't even air."

There was a long pause.

At last Morgan said, "Your reasoning about my identity could be right, Ezzy. But it's also possible that I hesitate to call for help because my predicament is a silly one to be in, and I would be embarrassed to let my friends know a mere mountainside bested me."

The goat appeared to consider this possibility before saying, "That don't tell why you lit here to start with."

"Sheer accident," said Morgan. "I misjudged the terrain."

"Well, it ain't much business of mine, nohow," said Ezzy. "I guess you want me to help you get out."

"I would appreciate it if you'll tell me the way.''

"There
ain't
no way. Like I said, where you was climbing is as good places as any, and you couldn't make it." The goat looked him over—rather belittlingly, Morgan thought. "Guess I'll have to tug you out."

"Tug me?"

"Yep. You take ahold of my hind quarters and jest hang on tight."

Morgan visualized what Ezzy was suggesting, then glanced up the steep slope. Maybe the goat could do it, but did the goat really mean to help him? Morgan realized that, once the climb was started he would be utterly dependent on Ezzy's good intentions. A sudden backlash from those sharp rear hooves and Morgan would be dislodged from goat and ground alike. He would tumble back to the valley floor. And his life-support system had not been intended to solve this kind of problem in this manner. It would afford him little protection during such a tumble.

"No, thanks, Ezzy. I don't care to risk it."

"Up to you," the goat said airily. "I don't mind having you for company, so long's you don't eat no grass." Ezzy turned away from him and began munching the spring greenery.

Morgan kept a cautious eye on the goat as it wandered slowly away, but its sole interest appeared to be in filling its belly. And his own interest should be in getting out of the valley, he reminded himself. And there was no reason to take the goat's word that he couldn't get out without help. After all, a rough, tumbled valley like this . . . 
surely
there was some way!

He resumed his search along the western slope, moving slowly up the valley floor, attempting to ascend at every promising break in the wall. It was arduous and tiring work, which left him exhausted within a few fruitless hours.

He stopped, drank from the stream, ate a ration, and sat down to rest a while.

"Hey, Morgan!"

He turned to face the approaching goat. "What is it, Ezzy?

"I been thinking, Morgan. You don't trust me, do you?"

"Not much," the man admitted.

"Can't blame you for that. This here's a Primgranese Commonality world, and you'd be foolish to trust anybody on it. Particular if they didn't level with you."

"Didn't you level with me?" asked Morgan, half amused.

"I reckon not. Thing is, Morgan, I know who you are, and what brings you to these parts. There was Primgranese all over these hills, eight years ago just about, for the same reason. I know, cause I helped 'em what I could, showing where the old diggings and things are, stuff like that, and hearing them talk about what they was after. So I got that reason I didn't tell you about to know you come from the Lontastan Federation."

Morgan had grown tense. "That search eight years ago. How did it turn out?" he demanded.

"They didn't have no luck. Guess there weren't nothing to find. Least, that's what they finally figured. Morgan, you give yourself away with that question, and the way you ask it. Why don't you quit butting the ground?"

"You assume I'm hunting for what the other search failed to find?" asked the man.

"That's all I can figure," said the goat.

"And what was that?"

"Sometimes they called it the Grail," Ezzy replied.

Morgan paused, then nodded. Why not talk about it? The goat obviously had helpful information and—if the goat became a threat in any way—it could be killed.

"The Grail is as good a name as any, I suppose," he said. "Or it can be called cornucopia, or Aladdin's Lamp—or perhaps Pandora's Box. Its precise appearance and function is uncertain. The only certain information is that it has vast power, and has been around a long time."

The goat chortled. "That's what them Primgranese was after, all right. That's just like they talked about it. They was sure it was around here in the mountains somewheres. Said it had to be. I never could tell jest how they figured that."

"Historical investigation," said Morgan. "Evidently they saw the same pattern our own historians discovered—the similarity of legendary evidence that couldn't be satisfactorily accounted for in terms of human imagination alone. The Primgranese historians seem to have been a few years ahead of ours."

"Well, it didn't do them no good," said Ezzy. "Maybe it ain't for me to say, being just a goat, but I wonder about them historians sometimes. You sure they ain't chewing on cobweb?"

Morgan shook his head. "Historical investigation is an exact science, limited only by the completeness and accuracy of available information. And information weakness can be taken into ample consideration in making a historical evaluation. In this instance, the probability that the so-called 'Grail' object is now located within fifty miles of this spot is . . ." He hesitated, reluctant to disclose the 95.3 per cent figure to a creature of the Primgranese, " . . . is very high," he finished.

"That's what the Primgranese thought," said Ezzy. "They talked about something called fortune-shifts, way I recollect, that showed how the thing was carried about in ancient times. They figured it was in a place called France for a while, but was brung over the ocean by the first Yankans."

"Between 1720 and 1750, probably," agreed Morgan.

"And they figure it's got to be right around here," the goat continued, "cause this is where the Yankans hung on in their diggings in whichever year that was."

"In 2106
,"
said Morgan. "The key fact there, of course, was that the Yankans were in an impossible position but managed to win that war just the same. Their victory is the strongest single piece of evidence in favor of the 'Grail' object's reality."

Ezzy chortled again. "It sure beats me. All the fancy molecules and things you humans got, to fly you in space, or so you can walk on places like Jupiter. Looks to me like if you wanted a Grail thing, you ought to jest figure out and build yourself one. Anything all them thousands of years old I reckon is easy for you to build, cause you learned so much."

Morgan frowned at this speech. Ezzy's vocabulary seemed limited, and his sentence structures clumsy, which left the man with occasional doubts of the goat's meaning.

"As I said before," he explained slowly, "we don't know what it does, much less how it works. Thus, we don't know how to start building one. We only know it appears to assure the survival and success of whatever society has it in possession."

"So the Lontastan Federation wants it," said the goat.

"Of course. And not just for our own benefit. You see, Ezzy, the econo-war with the Primgranese Commonality has lasted for centuries, but almost always the fighting has adhered strictly to a set of unwritten rules which keeps the damage to both sides down to an acceptable level. Some people call it a game, but it is a
serious
game. Lately, our side has developed a permanent superiority. And the Primgranese are slowly but definitely losing the war.

"At some stage, and perhaps soon," the man continued, "the Primgranese will become desperate enough to throw out the rule book. We will have total war, and that could spell the end of interstellar civilization.
Unless
the 'Grail' object, in our hands, can prevent it. In fact, it's possible that the Primgranese, knowing that we possessed the object, would be deterred from total war. So, for everybody's good, the Lontastans must have it."