Decimated. Jack Dann
orchestration of scents that told him all he needed to know.
* * * *
With a trembling hand Rysling turned off the hound’s automatic program, He was shaking. Sweat had run down his back. He inhaled a tranquilizer. The hound would come back now but he would send it out again.
A hallucination, he thought. It was what the voice on the log tape of the other ship had been talking about. But he had felt pain, fatigue, tasted the pungent scents of the forest, known the sweat and muscles of the swift greycat as he knew his own. And he had known the fear of the cat, running before something it did not understand, could never understand because it was not part of the normal environment.
He thought he had part of the picture now. He had been hit by the animal’s defense mechanism. Did the cat have telepathic abilities? At any rate, what he had experienced had to be an illusion and he would have to ignore it next time around. Perhaps the cat’s strange power dated from some still undiscovered stage of interplanetary evolution when all life forms were still undifferentiated, all awarenesses one—the single pulse of the natural force.
The hound appeared over the edge of the plateau. It skimmed to within six feet of the control console tripod and settled to the ground. Rysling went to it and checked it carefully. Nothing was wrong. He went back to the console and sat down to face the screen. With one flick he turned the automatic track back on. Quickly the hound flew over it. When it reached the spot where it had left the cat it descended again to the jungle floor, its heat residue sensor scanning the ground for the warm trail. The greycat’s path led in a wide circle toward the northern cliff wall of the plateau. The hound followed.
Apparently the animal was following the cliff wall closely. The hound picked up speed. The greycat came into view on the sand ahead. The hound picked up still more speed. The cat ran, leaving big paw prints in the sand strip that rimmed the base of the plateau.
Rysling braced himself for the hallucination. It came like a dream he could recognize as one but he could not break the spell. The cage was open and coming directly for him. The cliff wall was at his back. He had to wait for the moment when he could rush past it into the jungle. For an instant his new body was frozen, as if all its instincts were dead or confused by the precision of an enemy which made so few mistakes, gave so little opportunity to escape. The cage came on until it was directly in front of him.
It swallowed him. The bars slid shut with a click. Then he heard the small voice whispering in his ear, You’re Rysling—this is an illusion. It will go away, change. Just wait. But the presence of the jungle was stronger, the backdrop of his new life, the vast and vivid support for his senses, the source of all blessings. He heard it, he smelled it, he saw the vivid, achingly intense colors. Only the bars kept him from it. His own voice was very faint, very far away and of no consequence. A small fly buzzing near his ear.
The greycat threw himself at the bars. Stupid, the button, the voice said. Outside the first bar. He slid his paw between the bars and pushed wildly. The side entrance of the cage opened with a half-remembered whirring sound.
The jungle beckoned. He ran into the gloom, quietly, swiftly, in one fluid motion unlike the jerky point-to-point movement of his previous life. He could smell the shades of colors—he sensed the range which before had been only green, brown, or mud-colored. The soft voice told him to go back, regain his former self, break the spell that bound him to a world that man had turned his back on a million years ago—but the voice was a poor, sterile thing compared with the rich, surrounding forest.
Still, he would have to go back, if only for a moment. The jungle called to him—it promised confidently.
But instead he ran toward the sandy plateau.
The human form that had once been Kurt Rysling stood up from its seat in front of the tripod console. Its movements were jerky. It tried to walk and fell on all fours. The smell of the jungle it had known all its life seemed distant, faded and alien. The colors were pale and the normal sounds of the forest were gone. Its strange new limbs were weak. The greycat tried to growl but only a weak sound came out of its small, human mouth. He crawled nearer the jungle, hoping that all the normal sensations would return. He reached the edge. The urge to jump came suddenly. The greycat leaped from the plateau, its human arms stretched out in front like paws.
The small voice still spoke in the greycat’s simple brain. Momentarily it became stronger when the cat came to the broken body of Kurt Rysling lying next to the sun-bleached skeletons at the bottom of the cliff. The red star had long since set, and the yellow sun was low over the jungle. The cat stood perfectly still in the cliff’s shadow, listening. Dimly, from somewhere in the depths of the greycat’s nervous system, Rysling understood what had happened to the two skeletons before him. This then was the skipper of the other ship and his companion and what was happening to him had happened to them. He looked at his own corpse with indifference. It was after all a thing and not himself. He felt comfortable and safe. From somewhere his old voice summoned up enough strength to tell him that while he could adapt easily to the cat’s nervous system, the greycat had not been able to master the complexities of a human cortex. But, then, did this not mean that the human mind was only a resident of the physio-chemical brain? That in reality it was an epiphenomenon, a matrix of energy which could detach itself from its physical form?. It must be so, the small voice said. After all, the iron of a magnet produces something beyond itself, the magnetic field; and the mass of a world produces a gravitational field; and the physio-chemical brain tissue produces a pattern of energies that is the real mind, responsible for all the higher functions. The small voice seemed desperate as it spoke. There would be a price to pay for his new existence—fading memories, the power of reason, love. But he didn’t care. The world was vast and entirely within his grasp. It was a world for him. The smells of the forest wrapped themselves around him. Did he for a moment detect—a female odor? The image was clear: a sleek female, waiting somewhere for him. The small voice was almost gone now—he could not understand its meaning or where it had come from. He glanced again at the broken body that lay face down, its neck broken. He looked up to the edge of the plateau. Had he thought of going there? There was no way up. Swiftly he turned and ran into the green shadows. His muscles were strong. In one place the yellow sun cast its light into the jungle aisle, making his fur feel warm. Soon, he knew, it would be night. The small voice was only a background sound, no stronger than an insect’s drone. He stopped and turned to look at the plateau, which from this distance was visible through a break in the trees. He could just barely see the top of one silvery ship. He looked at it, trying to remember what it was but that memory was already gone.
The greycat turned again and disappeared into the jungle.
AFTERWORD FOR “TRAPS”
George:
“Remarks want you to make them,” Raymond Chandler’s Phillip Marlowe says to his captors when they try to shut him up. This story, along with the others, is now a captive in time, captured again in this collection, provoking remarks from both of us.
I don’t know, as I write this, what Jack will say, but this is a van Vogtian pastiche, recalling his Rull stories, and maybe even “The Most Dangerous Game” by Richard Connell. It is a story written by the rules, which you can only break later; beginners don’t like to hear that. You first write what you admire, and then grow into yourself. For Jack it was this story’s greycat, and the way it walks onto the scene and into the eyes of the hunter, who learns where and to what he wants to throw in his lot. Sometimes I think the greycat’s expression is Jack Benny’s look of exasperation.
Rysling’s name is a misspelled version of the name of the blind poet in Robert Heinlein’s story “The Green Hills of Earth.” We just liked the sound of it.
* * * *
Jack:
And so our character Rysling comes alive to take a bow once again...
George was right: we were trying to write a real story, one that followed Aristotle’s rule of beginning, middle, and end. The goal of the exercise was to narrate a straightforward story in a prose style that was as simple and direct as we could make it. If memory serves, we wrote “Traps” in 1968, and it was published in Worlds