THE WATER OF
  THOUGHT
        By
  Fred Saberhagen
 The Water of
   Thought
FRED SABERHAGEN


A TOM DOHERTY
ASSOCIATES BOOK
      TOR
     science
     fiction
 PINNACLE BOOKS
   NEW YORK
This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this
book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is
purely coincidental.

WATER OF THOUGHT

Copyright © 1981 by Fred Saberhagen

A Tor Book

A shorter version of this work was published © 1965.

First printing: May 1981
Second printing: July 1981

ISBN: 0-523-41482-X

Printed in the United States of America
Distributed by Pinnacle Books, Inc., New York.
Cover and interior illustrations by Janet Aulisio
                                   I.
   In the dream a faceless figure came pacing after Boris. Clad in a
groundsuit, it groped toward him with hands whose fingers writhed like
snakes, menacing and venomous.
   No, Boris told the figure, it's not me you want. Those are your hands,
not mine. And then he realized that he was waking up.
   He lay in the bottom of a little two-passenger sportboat with a float-
cushion tucked under his head. The boat was pulled into the shore of a
tiny river island, and the light of an alien though very Sol-like sun came
dappling down on him through alien trees, making leaf-shadows of shapes
that to Earth-descended eyes were subtly wrong. The sun reflected from
the quiet water to shimmer upward on Brenda's laughing face and her
dark brown hair as she bent over him.
   Boris was blond and bony and tall, with innocent blue eyes in a rough
face; it crossed his mind now that Brenda was his opposite in just about
every physical detail. He had met her ten days ago, when he had arrived
on the planet, and though he hadn't been alone with her for any length of
time until today, he had been looking forward to the chance.
    Her manner now was one of playful reproach and overlain with just a
little concern. "I don't mind your dozing off," she told him. "But must you
have nightmares?"
    "I guess I must. Was I making noises?" He stretched luxuriously, trying
to remember the dream. But already the burden of it was slipping away.
    "What were you dreaming about?"
   He sighed. The sound was part contentment with this, his waking
world, part something else. "I think it probably had something to do with
my last job."
   Brenda became more sympathetic. His work impressed her. "Where
was that?"
   "Oh. Parsecs away from here."
   "Well, of course. But what happened? If you don't mind my asking."
   "I don't mind. What happened was a man on my crew opened his
helmet when he shouldn't have. As simple as that. Something got in and
began eating at him."
   "Oh, horrible. Now I wish I hadn't asked. Was he…"
   She had never heard of the man before, and still it hurt her personally
to hear about it. "The medics saved him. He's getting a new face built."
   Brenda looked at Boris silently for a long moment. Then with some
hesitation she asked: "Did they blame you for it?"
   "No." Boris sat up, making the boat rock soft ripples into the gentle
river. He looked round at the peaceful green wilderness that filled island
and shores alike. Hayashi was, or had been, a planeteer, not an infant. He
shouldn't have needed extra warnings, and leading by the hand.
   Once, more years and planets ago than he cared right now to think
about, Boris had been young and green. Then a planeteering scheme of
his had led to the drowning of a number of men. But why should he recall
that old disaster now, on this pleasant afternoon? He didn't know. And
why should Brenda immediately ask him if he had been blamed for what
happened to Hayashi? Did he look guilty? By any professional standard
he was far from being a failure.
   He needed this leave; and an idyllic layover on the way home to Sol
was a special bonus. Lately, even before the Hayashi incident, he had
been feeling tired and stale.
   He grinned abruptly at Brenda. "Enough about nightmares!" And he
caught her by the arm and gently pulled.
   "Oh, oh," said Brenda, gently chiding, and gently resisting. But her
opposition was not very intense, and perhaps would not be too
prolonged—
   The communicator was chiming at them from under the dashboard of
the little sportboat.
    With a quick little gasp that sounded more like vexation than relief,
Brenda suddenly exerted strength impressive for a young woman of her
size and pulled away from him. "It must be important, or they wouldn't
call."
    She twisted around to touch a switch. "Brenda here. And Colonel
Brazil. What's up?"
    A male voice from the instrument at once began shouting at them,
telling a confused story about a killing. Boris let the babble go on while
he disengaged himself fully from Brenda and got the boat moving, away
from the island and into open water. He steered carefully around a bend in
the river, then accelerated downstream at the top thrust of the sporter's
waterjets. A few kilometers ahead, he could see above the treetops the
insubstantial-looking forcefield screens that were activated on occasion to
shield the tiny colony of Earth-descended people.
    Brenda, in shock over what the communicator was telling her, was
silent. Boris put practiced calm into his voice as he answered it. "Is that
you, Morton?" If Boris remembered correctly, Don Morton was the name
of the colonist who happened to be presently standing the routine
defensive watch. If any serious trouble had arisen, Morton might be
forgiven a tendency to over-excitement. For ten years now there had been
a colony of Earth-descended humans on this lonely, lovely planet called
Kappa. Ten quite peaceful years, according to what Boris had heard about
it, and no doubt by now the colonists were beginning to imagine that they
understood the place.
    "Yes, it's me. This is Don Morton. The defense tower."
    "All right, fine. Now what's happened? This is Colonel Brazil. Start
again, will you?"
    "It's Jones." Morton's voice had regained some self-control. "He's gone
crazy and killed a native. And now he's run away."
    "Hang on. I'll be there in about two minutes."
    Almost all that Boris knew about Edmund Jones was that like himself
the man was a planeteer, and that he was spending a lengthy leave here on
Kappa pursuing an interest in anthropology that he said was both
professional and personal. Boris too was on leave, but only stopping over,
waiting for a ship that would carry him home to Sol System.
    Boris Brazil and Edmund Jones had started out a few hours ago on a
picnic with Brenda and Jane, another currently unattached young woman
of the colony. But Jones had a standing request that he be notified at once
whenever a native medicine man visited the colony, and so Morton had
called Jones on his boat radio about noon to tell him that a shaman had
arrived and was setting up camp near the colony's main gate.
   Certainly Jones had not been drunk or otherwise deranged when,
accompanied by a disappointed Jane, he deserted the picnic and hurried
back to see the witch doctor. That gave him less than a standard hour to
somehow get in shape for craziness, killing, and running away.
   The sportboat skimmed the placid stream, between shores covered with
growth just a bit too open and pleasant to be called jungle. Something in
the air and sun of Kappa gave to chlorophyll in leaves a greener-than-
reality travel advertisement look. Had it been easier of access, the planet
might have more tourists and make an excellent site for a big colony,
thought Boris. As things were, dust clouds and more or less permanent
atomic storms peppered the whole section of Galactic arm around Kappa,
making c-plus travel permanently uncertain.
   Boris slowed the boat as it passed the riverside landing field where
shuttles came down from visiting starships. The landing field was empty
now. Just ahead, the colony's defensive forcefield opened a gate in itself
at the place where it bulged out over and into the river. Driving in through
the gate, he docked beside a rank of miscellaneous water craft. Brenda
stepped up to the dock beside him, and together they strode toward the
defense tower. This was a neglected-looking building four or five stories
high near the center of the small residential compound. The compound
contained only a couple of dozen structures altogether, built mostly of
glass and native wood and stone, and inhabited by fewer than three
hundred Earth-descended people. The colonists lived here, while
automated machinery did the routine work of running mines and farms
and ranches out in the zones of Kappa's grimmer climates, where
intelligent natives were few or none.
   The Space Force, with its planeteers and research teams, was gone
from Kappa, moved on to worlds yet unexplored. The colonists were
people who liked the life of an isolated small town, or they would not
have remained on Kappa long, maintaining a foothold for Earth, and
making themselves comfortably prosperous. Kappa had never offered
them worse than incidental and occasional danger.
   But now Boris found half a dozen anxious people, including Brenda's
friend Jane, gathered in the room that occupied the whole top level of the
defense tower. All were crowded around Morton's sentry chair, watching
his viewscreens.
   Pete Kaleta, the colony's pudgy mayor, was speaking. "It all looks
normal at the silver mine; he went in the other direction anyway. Oh,
Brazil, very glad you're here."
   "What's it all about?"
   The colonists looked uncertainly at each other. When no one else
seemed eager to speak, Jane began. "Jones—Eddie—hardly said a word
all the way back here in the boat. But he didn't seem wild or anything.
Just thoughtful."
   Boris asked: "So what happened when he got here?"
   Kaleta took a deep breath, and spoke. "A pair of men from a tribe just
west of here arrived shortly after you four had left on your picnic. They
started to set up camp just outside our main gate. One of them, a witch
doctor by his face painty said he wanted to see Jones—Jones has been
talking to all the local witchmen. So Morton got Jones on the radio and
Jones came back, put on a groundsuit, and walked out through the main
gate."
    "Put on a groundsuit?" asked Boris. "Why?"
    Kaleta gestured nervously. "He didn't say. I suppose he wanted to
impress the natives. Or maybe he just wanted to have the radio handy."
    There were handier ways than putting on a suit, thought Boris, to carry
a radio around.
    The big viewscreen in front of the sentry chair now showed the area
just outside the main gate. The grass there was littered with bright bits of
fabric, scattered wooden boxes, and primitive utensils. In the foreground
stood a native pack animal, grazing placidly. Heavy leather straps hung
broken from, its back; someone or something had torn the panniers from
its sides and scattered the contents.
    Don Morton, a powerfully-built young man, swung round in his sentry
chair, and took up the story. "Jones went out there in the groundsuit and
talked to the natives. I wasn't paying any particular attention to just what
he said—I'm not even sure he had his suit radio on then." Morton looked
at Boris belligerently, as if expecting to be accused of something.
    "All right, go on."
    When Morton hesitated, Jane said: "I came up here to watch, after
Eddie told me he'd rather go out and talk to them alone. The first thing I
saw was one of the Kappans outside offering Eddie a drink. He poured it
from a funny kind of bottle—I've never seen one just like it before. And
then Eddie did radio in. He said something like, 'Hey, better have a
stomach pump ready, just in case.' He didn't drink whatever it was right
away. He still had his helmet on, and was standing there talking to the
witch doctor."
    "Morton, I wish you'd called me," said Mayor Kaleta, staring into the
viewscreen.
    Morton shifted nervously in his chair. "Well, anyway, Jones sounded
like he was serious about the stomach pump. So I called up the infirmary,
and talked to Doc, here."
    Doc pulled thoughtfully at a heavy mustache. "What that stuff was, I
can't imagine. I wouldn't expect a small amount of any Kappan drink to
have much effect on an Earthman—unless it was meant to be a poison.
You know, Kappans and Earth-descended are remarkably similar in their
biology, even for two prime-theme human races; I've seen experimental
skin grafts made to take from one to the other. Anyway, as Morton says, I
did get a stomach cleaner ready."
   Morton took up the story again. "By the time I finished talking to Doc,
Jones had his helmet off, and was starting to drink, from a little cup. He
took a sip, and then he stood there talking for another minute; I don't
know what about. Then he gulped the rest of the stuff down. Then, first
thing I knew, he and the Kappans were arguing. I was just starting to pay
closer attention when I guess he must have shut off his radio. I have no
idea what the fight was about." Morton looked at Jane.
   She said: "Well, I saw Eddie step forward, shouting at the Kappans. I
guess he was threatening them. They backed away; they looked
frightened and surprised."
   "Jones grabbed at them," said Morton. "He knocked them down behind
those bushes there. I think he must have killed them; you know the power
in those suits. Then he tore the baskets off the pack animal and scattered
all the stuff inside, as if he were looking for something. By that time I was
already calling you and the mayor."
   Mayor Kaleta seemed much worried. But he had nothing to say, for the
moment.
   "What kind of suit did Jones put on?" Boris asked.
   "Heavy ground armor," Morton answered. "We keep two suits of it
ready, just in case. We've never needed it."
   "Ugh." It seemed to Boris that things just might get much worse before
they started getting better. He decided that he had better put on the other
armored suit himself before going out to investigate.
   Jane said: "And then Eddie found the bottle, where the Kappans had
put it away, all wrapped up. He took another little drink, in a hurry, and
then he set the bottle down in the grass as if it were something precious.
Then he came back in through the gate."
   "What?"
   "Oh, yes." Morton had an angry look. "He radioed: 'Open up the outer
gate, you fool, I need a rifle.' Well, I didn't know what the hell was going
on. When he came back like that, I thought he must have some good
reason. I mean, he's a planeteer, isn't he? He's supposed to know what he's
doing in… in strange situations. Right?"
   Boris said: "Well, let's find out how strange the situation is. So you
opened the outer gate, and he came in again?"
   "Right. And I opened the little door to the arms room, and he went in
and got an energy rifle. We keep a couple of them handy, like the suits.
And then he trotted off without another word, heading west."
   Jane added: "And he picked up the odd little bottle and took it along
with him."
   The silent mayor had one hand over his eyes.
   "I'd better get out there," said Boris. He adjourned the meeting to the
arms room at the main gate, where he could get himself fitted into the
remaining suit of heavy ground armor while the talk went on.
   So, it seemed that Jones was running amok, with equipment that would
make the average man as dangerous as a troop of saber-wielding cavalry.
And Jones was not an average man, but a planeteer, with all the skills,
including combat skills, of the professional interstellar explorer. Boris
was a chief planeteer himself, when not on leave enjoying rest and
recreation as he was now. So, it was quite logical for the colonists to call
on him in an emergency like this one, and let him take over. Set one to
catch one.
   Possibly, he thought as he began cladding himself in armor, Jones is
still rational. It's just that he's discovered something that makes it right for
him to manhandle a couple of natives, arm himself even further, and then
run off without a word of explanation. Boris couldn't imagine what such a
discovery might be.
   "Anything else peculiar around here? Unexplained?" he asked, while a
couple of the colonists helped him with the fittings and fastenings of the
armored suit.
   "Things have been pretty dull," Kaleta said.
   "Since Magnuson disappeared," said Doc. When Boris looked at him,
he amplified: "An anthropologist, named Emanuel Magnuson. Used to
work for the Space Force, spent most of his time out in the hills near
Great Lake. He was supposed to leave when the last of the Space Force
people pulled out, but instead he vanished. Looked like some carnivore
probably got him."
   "But you weren't sure?" Boris probed. "Could the Kappans have done
him in?"
   "We've always kept on good terms with them," said Mayor Kaleta,
looking at Doc. "The Space Force seemed to be satisfied that Magnuson
was killed by animals."
   Doc, squatting to work on one of Boris's boots, contrived to shrug.
"Maybe they were. He was a strange one. He'd argue his theories… there,
how's that feel?"
   "Okay." Boris brought an arm in from one suit sleeve and fastened his
helmet from the inside. Then, checking his breathing apparatus as he
went, he headed for the outer gate. For all the suit's weight and bulk,
walking in it was easier than without it. Its limbs, powered by a tiny
hydrogen fusion power lamp, were driven by servomechanisms that
followed the movements of the wearer.
   As he passed the door to the arms room Boris stepped in, took down
the remaining energy rifle, and checked the charge. Such a weapon was
effective at close range even against heavy ground-suit armor. If it should
ever come to that.
   When the main gate shimmered open for him, Boris went out and saw
the scattered Kappan goods, and the grazing, phlegmatic animal. It would
be nice, he thought, to find tracks indicating that the two Kappans had
departed the area at a speed impossible for seriously injured men, and to
find Jones sleeping off his strange intoxication behind a bush. Sometimes,
Boris had noticed, the world was not nice.
   Kappans were a leathery-skinned people, with very wide-set eyes and
bulging foreheads, grotesque by Earthly standards of appearance. The
first man Boris found in the bushes was quite dead, with the insects at him
already. The appearance of his head suggested that he might well have
died of a blow from the power-driven arm of a groundsuit.
   Boris's helmet radio brought him the collective gasp of the people in
the defense tower; they were watching now through the television eye that
rode on his shoulder.
   "That's not the witch doctor," someone commented.
   Boris turned up the sensitivity of his suit's air mikes and kept on
searching, now holding the rifle ready with the safety off. When he had
moved on a few more meters he caught the sound of ragged breathing.
The second Kappan had crawled under a bush to hide. The wide-set eyes
were open, and from behind oozing blood and witchman's paint they
followed Boris.
   "Send out a couple of stretcher bearers," he radioed. "And someone tell
me a few soothing words to use."
   Boris, helmet under one arm but still wearing the rest of the groundsuit,
stood beside the hospital bed in which the injured Kappan lay. While Doc
worked on the man, Brenda acted as translator.
   "He says, just as soon as Jones had smacked his lips over the drink, he
demanded to know where it came from. Jones was being initiated into
the—well, the Kappan witch doctors' union, I guess you'd call it—so they
told him the truth. It comes in trade from the western hill people, near the
Great Lake. Then Jones demanded that they give him more of the drink,
and when they wouldn't do that he went after it. They tried to stop him
from tearing up their goods, but he just knocked them aside."
   "What was in the drink?"
   The Kappan hesitated for some time before giving his short answer.
Brenda glanced around at the blank faces of the other colonists present,
frowned, and translated for Boris. "He says, 'The Water of Thought.' "
   "What's that mean?"
   Everyone still looked blank. "I've never heard of it," said Kaleta, who
had just come into the infirmary. "And I've been here eight years, always
in contact with the natives."
   "Maybe this guy's making it up," said Morton, shaking his head.
   Boris said: "Well, an Earth-sized planet can hold a lot of secrets. I'd be
out of a job if it couldn't." He drummed metal fingers on the helmet under
his arm. "You're all sure that there was nothing in the Space Force reports
about such a drink, or poison, or whatever?"
   Everyone nodded or murmured assent. "I can check the memory
banks," the mayor said. "But I'm sure already. We practically memorized
all those reports."
   "Then maybe this man is lying about it. Or it's something new."
   Brenda again questioned the Kappan, then passed along his reply,
which was fairly lengthy. "He says it's old, very old. The Water of
Thought lets a man communicate with his animal ancestors; very
powerful medicine. He can tell us about it now, because we've saved his
life. No one else has ever reached to it the way Jones did, he says; he says
he guesses Earth-descended men are just different."
   "If only Jones had remembered that simple fact," said Doc morosely.
"Well, you people had better all clear out of here for a while. My patient
needs some rest."
   "Two anthropologists," said Boris, thinking aloud as he walked to the
door of the infirmary. "One vanishes somewhere near this Great Lake,
and the other is last seen running toward it. It is west of here, isn't it? Or is
there more than one Great Lake?"
   The colonists, most of them coming along with Boris, probed one
another with the quick searching looks of people who have known one
another for a long time.
   "There's just one that I know about," said the mayor finally. "I don't see
any connection, though, between what happened to Magnuson and what
Jones is doing."
   Brenda was keeping thoughtfully silent.
   "Excellent man in his field, he was," said Morton, leading the way out
into the sunlight. "Magnuson, I mean."
   Time was passing, and Boris was in a hurry to get moving. But he had
the feeling there was something relevant that he was not being told. "I've
got to go after Jones. If any of you know anything that might help me, I'd
better hear it."
   Mayor Kaleta shrugged irritably. "We're telling you all we know,
Brazil. No doubt you're right; someone must stop Jones, or there's no
telling what he'll do, what problems he'll involve us in with the natives.
Frankly I'm glad you're willing to take the risk of going after him. I don't
want to send out a lot of untrained people, not knowing what he's up to
with that suit and rifle, or what the natives might…" He looked back
uncertainly toward the infirmary.
   "You're right," Boris said. "Better keep your people here, inside the
defenses, as much as possible. I'll need a copter and a pilot, though."
   "Right. I'll see that a machine's ready." Kaleta hurried off.
   "I'm as good a pilot as there is around," said Brenda.
                                    II.
   At an altitude of seven or eight hundred meters they had no trouble in
following the trail that Jones had left. It ran as straight as some fanatical
assassin's lunge, through bush and swamp and an occasional cultivated
field, toward the western hills that were still eighty kilometers and more
away.
   Jones might be napping as he traveled, or unconscious, or even dead.
The semi-robotic suit could be set to balance itself and walk, or even run
at thirty kilometers an hour, holding to a course and steering itself around
major obstacles. With its self-contained recycling systems and stock of
emergency rations, it could keep a continuously sealed in wearer almost
comfortable for a week, and functioning for a standard month.
   Boris to his relief could see no signs along the trail that Jones had had
any more trouble with the natives. Any Kappan who saw the suited figure
pass would be likely to stay clear; Jones had knocked down rows of small
trees that stood in his path.
   "What do we do when we catch up with him?" Brenda asked cooly.
   Boris reflected that he seemed to have made a good choice for pilot.
"You set me down on his trail before then," he answered. "This copter
makes too good a target for that rifle of his."
   "You think he'd shoot us down?"
   "We'd better think so." Boris watched Brenda's profile, which remained
calm. Something about the behavior of the other colonists still bothered
him, and he shot a sudden question: "What was this Emanuel Magnuson
like?"
   Brenda's eyes, watching the terrain and air ahead, were briefly clouded.
"I think he was a fine man. He was good to Jane and me—in a fatherly
sort of way. He was nice. But still there's something so—intense—about
him."
   "You speak as if you think he might be still alive."
   "Do I? I guess I do. I get the impression sometimes—oh, I don't know."
   "Tell me."
   "It's like a feeling in the air, around the colony, that Dr. Magnuson
didn't just die in a simple accident. Though I don't recall anything definite
ever being said. Do you know what life in a small town's like? Or maybe
our small town's unique."
   "I was born in a small town. Under a dome on Mars. It's starting to
puzzle me a little why you stay here, Brenda."
   "Oh. When my parents died, I just stayed on. All the people are my
family and friends. Jane and I are like the two orphans; maybe we're
spoiled." She glanced over at Boris. "Sometimes I—we—get restless. We
took a trip out once—"
   Boris interrupted: "Better start down now. I don't think he can be more
than six or eight klicks ahead of us. See that second meadow up there?
Aim for it, but when you get about halfway there peel off sharply to the
right. We'll take a little evasive action, just to be on the safe—"
   The accustomed drone of the copter's engine had suddenly disappeared;
in the heavy silence Boris looked overhead to see the jet-spun rotor idling
toward a halt. In his stomach he felt the familiar start of free fall. His
hands moved instinctively to the copter's controls, but Brenda's fingers
were already there, doing the proper things.
   But to no avail. The engine remained dead; Jones must have hit it
squarely with a jolt from his energy rifle. The copter tilted forward, and
forest replaced sky in front of Boris, ranks of trees coming closer in a
long hard rush. The machine was not dropping quite like a rock, but
neither could you describe what it was doing as a satisfactory glide.
   "Bail out!" Boris yelled at Brenda. He reached to take what control was
left out of her hands. "I've got the suit!"
   Her fingers were already tightening the parachute straps over her
coverall, but she hesitated momentarily, her wide brown eyes looking into
his, checking in her own mind to make sure that what he said made sense.
Then, just as Boris was about to shove her clear, she popped open the
cabin door on her side and leaped out.
   With metal arms he fought the controls until the steering column bent.
And then the trees were upon him.
   Bounce and bang. Bounce again, and smash. He held his arms before
his faceplate, until he had shocked and jolted to a halt. Blessed be heavy
ground armor.
   Boris's seat belt was holding him, upside down, among splintered
branches. The copter was a mass of torn metal around him; no way that it
was ever going to fly again. The afternoon sun beamed through a fine
haze of leaves and sawdust, still drifting and settling.
   Taking inventory of his sensations, Boris could find nothing worse than
a couple of probable bruises. He began to break his way out of the
wreckage. It had been a frustrating day, up to now, and there was a certain
satisfaction in bashing aside obstructions. As soon as the way was clear,
he undid his belt, hung for a moment by one arm, then dropped with a
clanging thud to the ground. He retrieved his rifle, which had landed
nearby, and saw with relief that it was undamaged—for all he knew,
Jones might be coming round for another shot.
   Now for Brenda. After getting his directions from the sun, Boris moved
off through the forest at a fast lope, toward the area where he judged her
parachute ought to have come down. After a few minutes of coursing
back and forth he spotted the bright cloth spread on the ground.
   "Boris!" Her voice came from above. She sat four meters high in a tree,
clasping the shag-barked trunk. Her face was pale, but her voice was
pretty good, all things considered. "My ankle's hurt. No, I'm all right,
really; I climbed up here. I thought I might be able to see where you had
come down."
   "Well." Boris allowed himself a grin. "You can relax now, your knight
in shining alloy's here. If you're not injured it looks like we're in pretty
good shape. Even if your ankle's hurting I can carry you back to the
colony in five or six hours with this suit. Of course wearing the suit I
won't enjoy the task nearly so much."
   "What about Jones?" Brenda asked. "Are we just going to give up on
finding him?"
   "I was hoping you'd take that attitude. Just let me go check his trail, at
least. He might be still nearby somewhere. Tell you what, suppose you
come down from that tree and hide in a bush, and I'll call your name when
I get back. My suit is number Two—see? I suppose that Jones must have
on number One."
   "Okay, go ahead. I'll be all right." Brenda started to get herself down
from the tree. Boris observed that she was definitely favoring one leg.
   There seemed little point in trying to tell her what to do if he didn't
come back. So without further delay he moved out into the woods,
slipping his bulk of metal along as quietly as possible. When he was out
of Brenda's view he halted, waiting for a minute, watching to see if Jones
would appear near her. Jones might have seen the chute come down, and
he determined, for some mad reason, on more murder.
   Jones did not materialize, and Boris soon moved on. Just about where
he expected to find Jones's trail, he came upon it—a line of brush and
saplings trampled down and bent toward the west. Evidently Jones still
did now care a damn whether anyone was following him or not. Boris
stayed with the trail for* another hundred meters, and then noted
hopefully that it had begun to waver. Soon it looped around as if the man
making it were no longer sure of his directions.
   And then Boris saw a silvery gleam ahead—Jones's suit, fallen on its
faceplate in low grass. Boris let out a little sigh of relief, and moved
forward, watching alertly—
   "Freeze in your tracks, Brazil," said a voice not far behind him. "I've
got a rifle on you."
   There seemed to be little future in any other course.
   "Now drop the rifle, and take off your helmet."
   He did.
   After a moment Jones came walking around to face him, well out of
reach but easily close enough for the energy rifle he held to puncture
Boris's armor. And the weapon stayed center-aimed at Boris.
   Jones was almost as tall as Boris, and built more heavily. He sported a
short black beard. More dark hair grew thickly on his bare massive
forearms, and from the throat of his coverall. He looked happy.
   "Well, what's the matter, Jones?" Boris asked. "I'd like to hear your
side of this." He made his voice a trifle loud; it was conceivable that
Brenda had now worked a cramp out of her leg and had decided to follow
him.
   Jones showed white teeth, and looked Boris's suit up and down with an
expert eye. "No sidearms, eh? That's fine. Sit down against that tree over
there, and I'll tell you my side, as you put it. Understand that I'll kill you,
if need be, but I don't want to kill you. I've thought of a much better way."
   "That's good to hear," said Boris, sitting down as directed. Then he
nodded toward Jones's fallen armor. "Neat ambush."
    Jones ignored the compliment. "Brazil, I've tasted the Water of
Thought—that's what the witchman said they call it. And I've come to
know—" Jones paused, giving his head a little shake. "There's no use my
trying to explain. I wouldn't have believed anyone who tried to tell me.
You'll have to taste it yourself before you'll understand." Keeping an eye
on Boris, he walked to the fallen groundsuit, and from somewhere inside
it brought out what could only be the medicine man's bottle.
    "No, now, wait, maybe I can understand," said Boris smoothly. "I'd
like to try. You tore up those people's property back there and ran off, just
to find more of this Water of Thought?"
    "Tore up their property. I did more than that. I killed someone. Oh, I
know that at least one of them is dead. But I had to do it, they were
keeping me from the Water. You'll see when you taste it. Nothing could
mean more to me now than it does; not food, or relief from pain, or
women, or anything else. I sound like a madman, don't I? But you'll see
how it is." Jones put a hand to his forehead. His face and eyes looked as if
he might be developing a fever.
    Boris thought rapidly. "Jones, do you have a family?"
    "Never mind my family!" For the first time, though, Jones showed a
hint of inner conflict. "I know I won't see them now for a long time.
Maybe never. How can I, when the Water of Thought is here on Kappa?"
    "All right, so it's necessary to get more of this Water of Thought. Most
likely it'll take a large expedition just to find out where the stuff comes
from."
    "Oh, no, Brazil." Jones chuckled. "No, you're not sweet-talking me
back to the colony. They'd just stick me in the infirmary, and they
wouldn't give me any more Thought-Water if they had any, which they
don't. Right now, the only way I can get along with another Earthman is
to convert him to my way of thinking." So saying, Jones held up his stone
bottle. "You will be my first disciple."
    Keep him talking, thought Boris. Maybe the stuff will wear off, or he'll
pass out. "Jones, are you religious?"
    Jones accepted the question as relevant. "You know, I wasn't."
    "And now you are? I don't understand."
    "Of course you don't. But you will. You will." Still keeping the rifle
steady, Jones used his teeth to loosen the carved top of the bottle.
Removed, it made a little drinking cup. He set the cup down on a level
spot of ground and very carefully poured it half full of clear liquid from
the bottle.
   "This is God, Brazil. That's what I mean. God's in my little bottle here."
It was only with great evident effort that Jones was able to keep from
drinking the contents of the cup himself. But he backed away from it, still
holding the bottle and the rifle. "Now drink that!" he ordered. "Move
forward slowly and drink it."
   "If I take any, there'll be less for you."
   Jones bit his lip. "It's an investment, to get more. That's the only reason
I can stand to give it away. One man alone can always be tricked or
trapped somehow, but with two of us, in ground armor, working together,
the Kappans will never be able to keep us from getting at the source of the
Water. Now drink! I'm in a hurry. If I must, I'll kill you and go on alone."
   Boris stood up slowly, and walked slowly forward; he had heard the
sincere intent of murder before, and recognized it now. But experience
gave no protection against the cutting edge of fear.
   "Just let me walk away, Jones," he said loudly. "Even without my
groundsuit. I could just walk back to the colony." Possibly Brenda was
listening, wondering what to do, and would accept the hint. "It would take
me a couple of days, and you'd get away."
   Jones only moved the rifle muzzle slightly, motioning toward the cup.
It would be plain suicide to try to rush Jones. Swallowing the Water of
Thought might be suicide of a different kind, but it seemed to Boris that if
he drank he would at least keep on breathing. And while breath lasted,
there was always hope. Three or four days should see the arrival in
Kappan orbit of the cruiser that Boris had been expecting to ride home to
Sol; the cruiser would have the people and the equipment to mount a
massive search.
   Boris decided to try one last argument. "Jones, I—"
   "One more stalling word and you're dead."
   Boris bent down, reaching for the cup. He noticed that his fingers were
still steady. As if that meant anything.
   "Brazil, if you spill even one drop, I'll take the time to kill you slowly,
before I go on."
   Carefully, Boris picked up the cup. The liquid in it was as clear and
thin as spring water, or raw corn whisky. A subtle, slightly fishy odor rose
from it.
   "Drink!"
   As a man threatened with drowning would clutch for physical support,
so Boris tried to clamp a mental hold on sanity. He hoped that Brenda
would somehow know enough to run from him if he went mad. The fluid
in the cup rose before his face, a tidal wave to sweep his mind away. I am
the master of my fate—
   "Drink!"
   Boris sipped. The stuff had an alien tang, not unpleasant, but with a
ghost of fishiness. He swallowed the half-cupful of the Water of Thought,
and found it pleasantly cooling to his throat.
   Boris brought his hand down with the empty cup in it, being careful not
to spill a single drop. He tried to brace his mind against the overwhelming
lust for another drink, that any second now must strike.
   Jones relaxed, sure of himself now, slinging the rifle over his shoulder.
"Brazil, I'll pour you another little shot, if you like. Share and share alike
with this bottle. You don't have to rush me for it. It might spill, and we
wouldn't want that, would we?" His chuckle had an obscene sound.
   Boris felt a moment of mental confusion; but it seemed to pass. He still
had no craving for the Water of Thought. Could he hope to be immune?
He would play along with Jones, hold out the cup as if demanding another
drink, and as soon as Jones had poured it Boris would throw down the cup
and grab—
   And then Boris discovered that he was unable to move a muscle.
   He still breathed, and obviously his heart was still beating. He didn't
feel numb. But he couldn't move. He felt sweat break out on his forehead.
   Jones stepped closer to him. "What's the matter with you? Brazil. Look
at me. Answer me!"
   As if with a life of their own, Boris's eyes swiveled obediently to look
at Jones. Boris's voice, speaking without his volition, said: "The matter
with me is I can't move."
   "Hah!" said Jones, an incredulous snort.
   "So, you can't move without being ordered," said Jones, three minutes
later, pacing back and forth. "You can't be faking. If you were faking,
you'd pretend to feel the way I do. I'd have fallen for that. Then you'd take
me by surprise, and drag me back to the colony." Jones shuddered.
"They'd keep me there, alive, but without the Water. They'd try to cure
me."
   With a quick move Jones grabbed the empty cup from Boris's statue-
hand, tilted the bottle again, and rationed himself a tiny drink. He
swallowed it, gasped, and stood for a moment with his eyes closed. Then
he carefully capped up the bottle again. "Oh, put your arm down," he said
in preoccupied annoyance.
   Boris's arm relaxed. But the rest of his body remained frozen, save for
his eyes. They still helplessly followed Jones, who had begun to pace
again.
   "You don't have to watch me all the time!" Jones barked. Then, in an
apologetic tone, he added: "Look—you can stand easy, or whatever you
want to call it. Just don't try to attack me, or run away, or disobey me—or
communicate with the colony. Outside of that you can move any way you
like. All right?"
   Boris's neural circuits seemed to close again.
   "I guess it'll have to do," he said. The paralysis had left him so shaky
that he sat down and closed his eyes. He hoped that Brenda was hiking
toward the colony by this time. Probably, though, she would spend the
approaching night in a tree somewhere near here. And it seemed likely
that the colonists would come searching out this way in the morning, and
spot her parachute and the copter wreckage. Boris wished he knew more
about Mayor Kaleta and the other people back at the colony.
   "Well, maybe this is all right!" said Jones, suddenly pleased. "Yes, I
think so. You'll have to help me, and when we find more of the Thought-
Water I won't have to share it with you."
   Opening his eyes, Boris saw Jones climbing cheerfully back into his
groundsuit. If Boris moved quickly, he could beat Jones to one of the
rifles. Boris decided to leap for the weapon, grab it up, and kill Jones if
need be. Boris decided to do it, but that was as far as he could get. His
body would not even consider a translation of the plan into action.
   At least, he thought, I still have my sanity, upon which I took so tight a
grip. But what good is sanity to me now? And how long will it last?
   Jones resumed his westward march. By his order, Boris walked beside
him. I am a semi-robotic man, Boris thought, walking inside a semi-
robotic suit, that adds up to one whole robot, plus a little extra machinery.
Plus a little something else, all that is left of me. Or might the little bit of
something else be an illusion?
   Darkness found them on the first slopes of the western hills, and there
Jones called a halt. Ahead lay hundreds of thousands of square kilometers
of rough, forest-covered country, almost completely unexplored.
   "There'll be more copters out looking for us, sooner or later," said
Jones, turning his faceplate up to the first stars of the night. "So we'll light
no fire. And we'll take turns standing watch, just in case. Wake me in two
hours, or sooner if you see or hear anything I'd want to know about."
   So Jones lay down to sleep; and Boris found himself unable to do
anything but stand guard against those who might be coming to rescue
him.
   At first, the passage of time gave him some hope. The effects of any
drug would surely wear off, sooner or later. Probably, he thought, in a
matter of no more than hours. But two hours passed, and then he had no
choice but to awaken Jones. Then Boris, on command, lay down and
drifted off into a daze of sickly dreams, bad dreams, in which he was
compelled to fight with a child's thin arms against an overwhelming
faceless Something—
   Jones was shaking his suit to awaken him. Jones had been on watch for
more than two hours, for it was almost dawn. Twenty meters or so away a
figure was standing motionless, partially hidden by the thick morning
mist.
   It's a man, was Boris's first thought, it's a short Kappan savage without
clothes. The apparition was at least a head shorter than Boris, male, with
grayish leathery skin and a heavy growth of dark hair at crotch and
armpits, on the forearms and lower legs. The overall configuration was
undoubtedly prime theme.
   Standing up slowly, with his open hands spread out, Jones made the
planeteers' basic gesture for greeting primitive prime theme people. With
a bobbing, somehow apelike motion of its upper body, the figure half-
turned away from Boris and Jones. It hesitated in that attitude, as if on the
verge of flight but looking back over a shoulder at the two men. Its arms
were muscular, but short, not apelike. Boris imagined he saw intelligence
in the pale eyes, and then imagined he saw the lack of it. Jones gestured
again, and the creature turned and sped away into the mist, running easily,
like a man.
   "So," said Jones, in a tone suggesting that he was not greatly surprised.
"The Kappan hominid does exist. It was carrying something in one hand."
   "Yes. I believe it had a rock." So might Earth's first tool-maker have
looked, Boris thought, a few million years ago. "You'd say that it was pre-
human, then?"
   "Wouldn't want to stake my life on it." Briefly Jones had become a
planeteer again. "The survey missed the hominids completely. Only in the
last couple of years a few stories have leaked out of these hills. The other
Kappans who live in this area call the hominids the Forest People."
   "Our survey missed a whole species? A large, mammalian species at
that?"
   Jones removed his helmet and rubbed his neck. He looked tired, but no
longer particularly feverish. "Sounds like sloppy work, sure. But just look
at this country around here; you can see how it'd be easy to miss a lot.
High-crowned forest, very difficult to see under it."
   "That's true."
   "What we just saw looked a lot like a Kappan human. But the hominids
in my opinion are probably a separate species." Then Jones grew
distracted, surveying the morning sky. "The trees will help to hide us,
too—we'll need that." He picked up his energy rifle and adjusted the
vernier for a fine beam. "Think I'll take a little walk, scout around, and try
to get us some meat for breakfast. Why don't you get a small fire started?"
   Boris got to his feet and automatically began to look around for usable
wood. "That was a neat shot that you made yesterday."
   Jones looked blank. "What?"
   "Hitting my copter."
   Jones blinked. "I never saw your copter after it started down. Didn't
you just land it?"
                                    III.
   Brenda was awakened from uneasy sleep by the sound of a copter's
rotors. She had dozed off in spite of everything, after tying herself into the
crotch of a tree five meters up, a tactic she thought likely to foil any of the
local predators with which she was more Or less familiar. The sun was
barely up now, burning away a low ground mist. Above the mist the
greenish sky was clear.
   The copter was circling slowly, a hundred meters or so above her head.
Before climbing this tree she had managed to spread the bright cloth of
her parachute to its widest stretch, making a marker visible a long way
off.
   Brenda waved energetically. The copter circled once more, then started
down to land a little distance off, where trees were thinner. She unknotted
the belt with which she had secured herself to the tree, and started to
climb down. Sharp pain awoke in her right ankle whenever she put weight
on it, and she could feel that it was swollen above her low-cut shoe.
Should have worn boots.
   When she reached the ground, she remained where she was, clinging to
the tree trunk. Presently Kaleta appeared, coming toward her from the
direction of the landed copter. The mayor was carrying a machine pistol,
and he looked around him warily.
   "Mayor Pete! Am I glad to see you!"
   Something was wrong about the way the mayor looked at her. "Where's
Brazil?" he asked.
   "He went on chasing after Jones, yesterday before dark. Boris said he'd
come back in a few minutes, but he never did. I was worried, but I
couldn't go looking for him—my ankle's hurt. Something's happened to
him, and we've got to get more people out here and start searching, right
away."
   "Hm. We've got to find him, all right. Here, if you can't walk, lean on
me." They started toward the mayor's copter.
   "I'm sorry, Brenda," the mayor said, watching her limp as they drew
near the machine. "I didn't intend—well, now you're in this, I suppose.
There's nothing to be done about it."
   "What's up?" Don Morton demanded, leaning from the pilot's seat of
the copter. Jane, looking small and frightened, sat beside him.
   "Brazil's gone west, I guess," said Kaleta, motioning in that direction
with his gun. "After Jones, or with him."
   "I don't like it." Morton shut off the copter's idling engine and hopped
out. "Why couldn't we have had a couple more energy rifles?" he
complained to the world at large. He slapped his own holstered pistol. "I
don't know about one of these things—against those suits."
   "Are you going to call for help?" Brenda demanded, trying to cope
with growing astonishment.
   "No," said Don Morton. "Shut up and get in the back seat."
   Brenda had seen Morton in ugly moods before, but this looked like the
worst. She kept quiet for the moment, and climbed up into the rear of the
copter. Jane gave her a hand up, and then sat beside her. The men moved
away a little, talking to each other in low, urgent voices.
   "What's going on?" Brenda whispered.
   Jane was near tears. "Oh, Brenda, honey, I'm sorry. I knew Don and
Mayor Pete were up to something. I guess I knew it was smuggling. But I
didn't know that crazy business yesterday had any connection with it. And
there I was, telling everyone just what Eddie did outside the gate, before
Don could hush me up. I thought he was going to kill me, later."
   "Smuggling? Smuggling what?"
   "That—damned drink. It's some kind of drug…" Jane bowed her face
into her hands.
   Right now, to Brenda, the most pressing thing was still that Boris
needed help. Intending to call the colony herself, she reached forward to
the copter's radio—and found that all power was off, not to be restored by
pressing switches.
   She leaned out of the cabin. "Please, Mayor Pete! Don!"
   The mayor would not meet her eye. And Don Morton held up the
copter's power key, showing her that he had it. His smile was ugly indeed.
"Just behave," he said. "The good mayor and I are going to do our own
searching. In our own good time."
   "You're not drinking much from your bottle," Boris commented, when
he and Jones were on their way again, striding up a long slope through
open forest. After a breakfast of roast meat, Jones had taken a single
swallow of the Water of Thought; he had otherwise been content with the
ordinary water in his suit's canteen unit.
   "I know something about drug addiction." Jones smiled faintly behind
his faceplate. "This is something different from any addiction I've ever
heard of. In fact I'm not an addict, in the sense that I don't suffer
physically from abstaining.
   "No, the effect seems almost purely—mental. I can't describe it. I don't
think that any doctor could—or any poet. All I know is that nothing else
will matter to me, for the rest of my life."
   "How did you come to take the first drink?" Boris asked, and felt the
ghost of humor at sounding like someone interviewing an old alcoholic.
   "Why, I wanted to get in good with the witchmen." Jones laughed
without humor. "I told you I know something about drug addiction. I'm
here on Kappa for Space Force Intelligence. The crime syndicate's taken
an interest in this planet lately, and we've wondered about the attraction.
Some kind of exotic dope seemed like a good bet, but I swallowed the
stuff before I knew I'd found it. And once I'd swallowed it I wasn't about
to try any of the possible antidotes available. All I really wanted from the
witchmen was information about the tribes up in these hills, and to try to
get a line on Magnuson. He seems to be involved somehow, that story
about his being eaten by predators was never very convincing."
   "He worked for the Space Force too, didn't he?"
   "Yes. Toward the end he seems to have spent most of his time arguing
with his boss. There was research he wasn't being allowed to carry out; it
seems he wanted to make anthropology an experimental science. He had
theories about reinforcing natural selection, weeding out the unfit. Of
course the Tribunes vetoed any such scheme."
   "So you think he went into hiding here, to work in secret?"
   "That's what SFI thought when they sent me. Now, I think he might
have tasted the Water too." Jones looked at Boris. "It's hit you one way
and me another. There's no telling what it might have done to him."

   In the afternoon Boris and Jones passed four Kappans, who stood in a
group at some distance, watching them. These were not hominids, but tall
spear-carrying warriors who closely resembled the men of the tribes
nearer the colony and were certainly of the same species. Jones waved at
them in passing, but when he got no reply did not attempt a closer
approach.
   "They don't seem too surprised by our suits," observed Jones
thoughtfully. "Evidently they've had some contact with colonists. Maybe
with Magnuson."
   "So, what do we do now?"
   "For now we just walk on some more. Let ourselves be seen."
   At sunset Boris and Jones dined again on fresh-killed meat. And again
Boris was assigned the first watch after dark.
   He had not asked a second time for his freedom. It was not something
to be given him, but something to take when he was able.
   He would try now, with all the will that he could muster. Jones slept,
stretched out beside the little fire, whose flickering light made ancient
armor of his suit.
   Boris picked up a rifle. Experimentally, he tried to aim the weapon at
Jones, and found that he could not. There was nothing that could be
described as a struggle with himself; it was simply that his hands and
arms refused to make the required motions.
   At last he threw the rifle down, and looked up through the treetops at
the stars. Killing Jones, or threatening him, was not really the answer
anyway. The trouble was inside himself.
   Boris faced in the proper direction, back toward the colony, and drew a
deep breath. He willed himself to walk quietly away. But his feet would
not move. After a long time he sat down.

   Again Jones's shaking awakened Boris to a cool and misty dawn. What
had looked in the evening twilight like another valley about a kilometer
distant Boris now saw to be a lake, at least six or eight kilometers wide.
Much of its extent was obscured by patches of morning haze.
   Eight Kappan men, armed with spears and wearing loincloths, stood
about twenty meters off, watching the two Earthmen stolidly. The visitors
were obviously not much impressed by groundsuits.
   When he saw that Boris was awake Jones slowly stood up, making the
peace gesture. Boris imitated him, without being ordered. He welcomed
the appearance of the natives, on the theory that his predicament was so
bad that any random change was likely to be for the better.
   Some of the Kappans imitated the peace gesture. Others conferred
among themselves. At last the tallest one stepped forward and spoke,
clearly, in the language of Earth's colonies and Space Force: "You men of
Earth, why do you walk here?" He had an odd accent, but Boris had
understood worse.
   Jones answered: "We are looking for another Earthman, called
Magnuson. We are the enemies of his enemies, so we want to be his
friends."
   The tall warrior looked them over for another minute. Then he raised
one arm, as if waving to someone a considerable distance away. "Wait,"
he said. "Magnuson is not far. But if you try to use your far-speakers, he
will hear them. And then you will not find him."
   "We will wait," said Jones. He turned to Boris. "If Magnuson has radio
equipment out here, it means that he's been getting help."
   Boris came to a decision. "Jones, I don't think you're my worst enemy
on this planet. I'd better tell you something. You know that accidental
failure of one of these copters is very unlikely. If you didn't shoot at mine,
then someone probably sabotaged it."
   "So. Probably our smuggler didn't want you to catch me. Wants us both
out of the way. Who do you think it was?"
   "Probably the mayor. Another thing—Brenda was with me in the
copter, and she had to parachute. She's back there somewhere with a
twisted ankle. I didn't want to tell you when I thought you were wildly
murderous."
   Jones turned away, then back. "If she's in trouble, I'm sorry about it.
But if my own family means nothing to me now, then how much do you
suppose Brenda means?"
   The two Earthmen waited, not looking at each other for a while. The
warriors still leaned on their spears, watching impassively. Perhaps half a
standard hour passed, and the mist lifted slowly into the greenish sky,
revealing most of the lake's shoreline. Two or three kilometers away, set
back a little from the shore, the huts of a village slowly became visible.
The settlement straddled the mouth of a small river and was almost
concealed under the forest's edge.
   In the direction of the village, but much closer, another Kappan warrior
suddenly appeared on a hillock, waving his arms.
   "Walk," said the tallest warrior, the one who had spoken in Earth-
colonial. He had circles of red paint or clay that Boris was later to learn
denoted both his name and his rank daubed round his thick arms, and his
flint-bladed spear was longer by two hand-spans than any of those of the
men with him. Now he motioned with it toward the distant village. Jones
and Boris started in that direction; the Kappans followed.
   Coming closer to the village, Boris was mildly surprised to see how
well built it was, with an air of permanence. The houses—you could
hardly call them huts—were of dressed logs and shingles, a few even of
stone, and stone paths neatly connected them. There was a central
building, larger than the rest, which appeared to be a temple of some kind.
It was constructed half of smooth-cut stone, half of elaborately carved
wood. Boris was certain that other villages of the same or tributary tribes
must be nearby; there were not enough dwellings visible here to support
the social superstructure that was implied by the temple.
   It was quite possible that the Space Force survey, done ten years
before, had not even touched these people. The whole planet would of
course have been mapped by aerial and orbital photography, but ninety-
five percent of the surface could have received no more attention than
that.
   A little mob of village children promptly formed as men and women
came out of the houses. They seemed to be no more than calmly curious
as Jones and Boris drew near. The people of this village wore robe-like
garments, and their gestures were gentle. They were of the same stock as
the eight hard-muscled warriors, but obviously of some different class or
caste.
   The tall spearman with the red-circled arms now came to the front of
the procession to lead Jones and Boris through the village. Boris's
planeteering eye judged that the warriors were not conquerors here, for
they moved courteously enough among the soft-robed people.
   Spanning twenty meters of quiet river, a wooden bridge thumped and
squeaked under the booted weight of groundsuits. Just ahead was the
temple building, and now in its doorway there appeared a lean and shaggy
Earthman, dressed in worn coverall and boots. He had the bearing of a
leader, and the robed villagers who were near made way for him
deferentially.
   Jones halted a few paces from the temple doorway, and made its
occupant a slight bow. "Dr. Magnuson. I'm glad to meet you at last."
   The man returned the nod almost casually. He was casting quick,
appraising glances over Jones and Boris. "Gentlemen, you puzzle me," he
announced in a cool, detached voice. Boris felt that the tone contained an
assumption of superiority. "You've been walking for at least a day in this
area, but you've made no radio contact with the colony."
   "Magnuson, they say that your enemies are theirs also," the tall warrior
informed him.
   Jones smiled. "That's right, Doctor. I've come to prefer your way of
life."
   Boris thought that the appraising eyes were puzzled by this. But they
turned calmly enough to him. "And you, sir?"
   "He's drugged," Jones cut in. "Never mind about him for the moment.
Magnuson, I want to speak to you alone, right away. It's urgent."
   "Why not? Come inside and we can talk." Magnuson gestured toward
the entrance to the temple.
   Boris, compelled by a quick nod, followed Jones inside; Magnuson
came in after them. The interior was dim, divided into several rooms, and
held nothing immediately startling to an experienced planeteer's eye. A
couple of the soft-robed people were there. Magnuson said a few words to
them, and after hesitating for a moment they made graceful gestures and
went out.
   Magnuson turned to Jones. "Very well. What is it?"
   "I want the source of the Water of Thought," said Jones in a deliberate
voice. "And I want it right away."
   "So." Magnuson hesitated thoughtfully. "Once I wanted very much to
find that myself. I should still like to, but… may I ask what your reason is
for wanting it?"
   "I don't want to steal it, or smuggle it offworld. I just want some for
myself. I could agree to any of a number of different arrangements,
provided I'm guaranteed a steady supply. A few mouthfuls a day would be
enough. But that much I mean to have, make no mistakes. I've already
killed men for the Water. You know the power in these suits?"
   "I'm not a fool," said Magnuson shortly. Boris thought he was more
offended than worried by Jones's demand.
   Magnuson went on: "Some of the Water of Thought is available, right
here in this village. I'll undertake to guarantee the amount you say you
need. Provided that you work with me."
   "Where does it come from?"
   "The warriors make periodic raids into territory upstream along the
Yunoee—that's the river running through the village. They capture the
Water somewhere up there, and bring it back with them in pails."
Magnuson gestured at some containers stacked against a wall. "I don't
really know any more than that. I've made myself a person of some
importance here, as you'll see, but I'm still not privy to the tribal secrets.
In fact I am in some ways a dictator, yet I am still not a full member of
the people. Perhaps I shall be, soon." He smiled suddenly, with surprising
magnetism.
   Jones was looking about. "You say there's some of the Water here in
the village? Show me."
   Magnuson's brow creased in a small frown. "Remember, it's a sacred
thing to these people."
    "Show me."
    Magnuson hesitated briefly. "All right. Come this way." He led them
behind a stone altar, and through a door into another room. This was a
windowless place, lighted only by a few oil lamps on low stone pedestals.
Half a dozen of the robed men were here; two of them lay supine on a mat
of woven branches, and Boris was not sure that those two breathed.
    "They've drunk the Water of Thought," said Magnuson, indicating the
two men on the mat. "Kappans claim to experience racial memories under
its influence."
    It seemed to be all things to all men, thought Boris. He found himself
able to speak up. "What did it do to you, Doctor?"
    Magnuson's vital eyes flicked at him. "Nothing of importance."
    "Where is it?" Jones demanded.
    Magnuson bent down. From the floor near one side of the room he
lifted another woven mat, and then a tight-fitting hardwood cover. A
sunken bathtub-sized vat was revealed. The liquid in the vat looked black
in the dim light.
    Jones took a step forward, peering at it. "You mean, that whole tubful
is—the Water?"
    "Yes. The priests here try to keep a stock—what are you doing?"
    Jones had dropped to his knees beside the sunken vat. He pulled his
helmet off and tossed it aside. Turning to Boris then, he ordered: "Brazil,
watch them. If any of them starts to do anything dangerous to me, kill
him. Say you'll obey me."
    Boris's hands moved to unsling his rifle, and his finger flicked the
safety off. His chest forced air up through his throat, and his throat and his
mouth made a word out of it: "Yes."
    Jones bent over the vat, and there was a stir among the watching
Kappans. Magnuson gestured sharply, and said something; the robed ones
muttered but stood still Jones dipped a finger into the vat, then raised it to
his mouth, tasting. A moment later he had stretched himself out prone on
the stone floor, and was thrusting down his head to drink.
    Boris had to watch Magnuson and the Kappans, to see if they might be
going to do anything dangerous to Jones: To judge by their faces they
were not pleased at what was happening. There was a bubbling sound;
Boris wondered what his own fate was going to be if his master drowned
himself.
   At last there came a louder gurgle, followed by a gasp, and Boris was
able to look down. Jones was rolling over on the floor, his armor clanking
on stone. His whole head was wet, and his eyes moved like a baby's,
chasing things unseen by others. For an instant Boris thought that the man
had been poisoned, but then he saw that Jones' ecstasy was of pleasure
and not of pain.
   Jones cracked the stone floor with a metal fist. "Brazil, let them kill me
if they want to!" But a moment later he thought better of that order, and
sat up. "No, don't let them! I can drink again tomorrow, and the day after,
and every day, for years and years." As if his body were a new and
unfamiliar thing, Jones got unsteadily to his feet, and leaned for support
against a carven temple post.
   An oil lamp sputtered. Everyone else in the room was silent, while
Jones's gasping breath slowly returned to normal.
   His eyes came back at last to look at the others. To Magnuson he said:
"There's plenty of the stuff here for both of us. We have no quarrel."
   Magnuson was as coldly controlled as before. "I don't use the drug.
And you are forgetting those who do, the owners. My friends here will
not allow you unlimited wallowing in that vat. No. I told you it was
sacred to them."
   "We'll see about that."
   "Oh, I don't doubt that in those suits you could destroy this village. But
doing that won't help you find the source of the Water. Not if you kill the
whole tribe."
   Jones let go of his support. "I don't want any more killing. But I'll do
anything to find that source."
   Magnuson moved two paces away, and stood for a moment with his
back to everyone. Then he spun around. "You say you'll do anything. Will
you join this tribe? I'm supposed to be initiated into it soon. The ceremony
can be moved up, held a day or two from now."
   "What'll I gain by doing that?"
   "More than you know." Again, that sudden, magnetic smile. "Once
initiated, we will be entitled to know all the tribal secrets. And these
people will help and defend us like brothers."
   Jones thought it over. "Might be a good idea at that."
   Magnuson nodded. "I'll explain the details presently. But right now,
things will be easier if you'll leave the temple."
   Jones delayed, looking down at the Water of Thought in its dark vat.
"Funny. Now, when I try to imagine the source, I can almost see… a
green, peaceful place. But it's like—like trying to recall a dream that's
almost slipped away." Abstractedly, shaking his head, he moved to the
door and out of the room.
   Magnuson shook his head also, looking after Jones. "It's not good that
he should drink so much of it." Then he put a hand on Boris's suited arm.
"You must follow his orders?"
   "That's right."
   "When did you first drink the Water of Thought—both of you?"
   Boris thought back. It seemed like a year. "This is the third day."
   "I drank the Water once myself, and in five days its effects had left me.
I offer you this hope now; and I trust you'll remember me when I in turn
need help."
   Boris could not let himself start hoping very hard. "What did it do to
you, Magnuson? What was the effect that passed away in five days?"
   "I told you it was nothing of importance. But that isn't really true; the
Water brought me here." Magnuson looked round the temple. "To more
important things than drugs." The smile flashed. "Come. You are both my
guests tonight, and we are going to have a feast."
                                    IV.
   The calm water of Great Lake mirrored the greenish sunset. In front of
Magnuson's hut, or house, torches were set up on poles and lighted. A low
table was brought from somewhere, and platters of food prepared. Acting
as cooks and waiters and furniture-movers were Kappans who wore
neither the warrior's loincloth or the priests' robes, but a kind of kilt. The
kilted workers, men and women alike, wore their hair in long braids.
   Emerging from his dwelling, Magnuson addressed Jones cheerfully. "I
would suggest that you and Brazil get out of those suits, if you want the
people here to accept you. You'll certainly have to remove the helmets if
you're going to share their food."
   "All right, we can't live sealed in forever." Jones's eyes were still
distant, and his face had a feverish look again. He had spent most of the
day after his drink sitting alone, as if preoccupied with thought. "Let's
relax for a while, Brazil."
   A minute later, the empty suits lay with the rifles on the ground. Five
seconds after that, the necks of Boris and Jones were each ringed by half a
dozen spearpoints. Boris, at least, was not greatly surprised.
   Magnuson was pleased, but also worried. He chided the spearmen in
their own language, and pulled gently at their arms. The rings of flinty
points widened by a few centimeters.
   "I'm sorry to frighten you," said Magnuson, sounding sincere. "Still,
my Kappan friends here have the right idea. You must be subject to my
plans, not I to yours. A great deal more than your lives or mine is at stake
here. Humanity itself. Yes."
   Red Circles, who Boris had decided was probably chief of all the
warriors, appeared, and smiled to see the groundsuits and rifles already
separated from their owners. Red Circles held a brief dialogue with
Magnuson, then issued a few sharp orders. The ring of threatening spears
dissolved. Teams of kilted workers carried away the suits and rifles.
   Magnuson excused himself briefly. "I have a short radio message to
send, and I'd better do it before nightfall. There are nocturnal atmospheric
changes, as you doubtless know, that can make radio privacy harder to
maintain." He paused, nodding to his prisoners. "Soon enough, the colony
and the galaxy will know where I am and what I'm doing. But not just
yet." He turned and went into his house.
   Jones looked round. A couple of spearmen at a little distance were
watching. "Brazil," he said. "I'm sorry."
   "That we've lost our suits? I don't think I am."
   "I mean sorry about compelling you to help me. But then I didn't really
have any choice."
   "I know how that goes," Boris said.
   In a minute, Magnuson had rejoined them.
   "Gentlemen, shall we dine?" He motioned them to places at the low
table. "Sit down. Relax. Believe me, I mean you no harm. No. There is
suffering enough."
   With a slave's fatalism, Boris squatted on a mat and began to eat. He
was just getting a good start on his portion of roast meat when he heard
the sound of an approaching copter.
   Beside him, Jones jumped to his feet, shouting: "Our suits! Quick!
Bring them back!"
   But Magnuson, showing no great excitement, simply stood up from the
table and walked away, motioning his two guests to remain where they
were. The copter's sound grew louder in the darkness, slowed, and then
died abruptly, as if the machine might have made a radar landing nearby.
In a few minutes Magnuson was back, and Boris was not much astonished
to see Pete Kaleta, a pistol strapped on his hip, walking beside him. Don
Morton and Jane were a little more of a surprise; and then, provoking an
unexpectedly sharp reaction in Boris, Brenda walked into the firelight Her
hands were behind her as if they might be tied, and she was limping rather
badly, but she appeared otherwise unhurt. The relief in her eyes when
they discovered Boris tore at the raw wound of his helplessness.
    Kaleta stopped in front of him. "I meant you no harm, Brazil. Or
Brenda. I didn't expect your copter would fail quite so suddenly. I'm no
expert at sabotage."
    "No one on this planet has yet meant me any harm," said Boris. "How
far behind you is the Space Force?"
    "I meant I wasn't trying to kill you." The mayor stared thoughtfully at
Boris; the past tense hung in the air; the stare was all the worse in that it
did not seem intended to frighten.
    Magnuson suddenly noticed Brenda's bound hands. He yanked a knife
from a sheath at his belt and cut her free. "There's no need for this
damnable business!" He hurled pieces of cord away.
    "Who said you could—" Morton's move toward Magnuson was
stopped by Red Circles' spear leveled at his chest. Morton took a step
back, his hand going to the holster at his side.
    "No!" Kaleta grabbed at Morton. "Take it easy. We can't afford—take
it easy, will you? We'll talk this over later."
    There was a little silence. Morton, glowering, at last relaxed a little.
    "Go ahead, tough guy," said Jane to him at last. "Get us all killed."
With a little shudder she moved away from him, toward the table. "I see
supper's ready. Are we all invited?"
    "You are indeed," said Magnuson. He looked big, standing protectively
beside little Brenda. Beside him she looked very young. She rubbed her
freed hands, her brown hair hanging loose around her face.
    "Thank you," she said to Magnuson. Then she looked across the table
at Boris. "Are you all right? Our mayor came and rescued me this
morning, as you see."
    "I'm alive; I'm drugged," Boris told her. Her eyes went wide.
   Magnuson sheathed his knife. "Let's all have something to eat," he
advised calmly. "Then we can talk."
   While eating, Boris kept a planeteer's eye turned on the Kappans. None
of them were sharing Magnuson's table tonight, yet Boris got the
impression that they might be at the next meal. Their relationship with
Magnuson was undoubtedly complex; the robed priests deferred to him,
the warriors defended him and took his orders about some things at least,
and the kilted workers served him. Yet he had said that they would not
tell him the secret of the source of the Water of Thought; not that he now
seemed to be very much interested in finding out…
   Brenda from her seat across the table was silently appealing to Boris
for reassurance if not active help. He found himself resenting the way that
she was looking at him. He wanted to scream at Brenda that he was more
helpless than she was, that there was nothing he could do for her, not a
thing, whatever happened. With an effort he kept his face calm, kept
himself from screaming; that was about all that he could do.
   Jane was a frightened young woman, and showed it, eating almost
nothing, looking from one face to another for some sign of hope.
   Kaleta and Morton and Jones were all dining in poker-faced silence.
   Even now, relaxed, Magnuson still had the bearing of a chief. He ate
sparingly, though with evident enjoyment. At last he wiped greasy fingers
on a cloth handed him by a kilted worker-girl, and belched with healthy
satisfaction. The worker-chef, standing nearby, smiled at this sign of
approval.
   "On Kappa," Magnuson began the conversation, "Eden is here and
now."
   At Boris's side, Jones raised his head. He turned his face, with an odd
expression, down the table toward Magnuson.
   Magnuson gestured at the villagers nearby. "Oh, for these people, and
for the rest of their species scattered round the planet, Eden of course has
passed. But nevertheless, for some other creatures in the wilderness near
here, its time is now."
   The Kappan night was deep around the little torch-lit table, and vast.
Sounds from without the village indicated that various nocturnal animals
had wakened. Jane giggled nervously, and Morton ostentatiously yawned.
   Magnuson looked at Jones. "I told you that more than our individuals
lives is here at stake. We find ourselves privileged to aid the forces that
on another world created us. To become evolution's conscious and willing
tools. The Kappan hominid is on the verge of becoming human, and
chance has given us the opportunity to help."
   Red Circles had been leaning on his spear, a few paces from the table.
Now he stirred restlessly.
   Magnuson looked over at him, as if accepting a challenge implied by
the movement. "What are the Forest People, Red Circles? Are they men?"
   "They are enemies or slaves, Magnuson."
   "But, when some of them have become men, full men like you and me,
what then?"
   "Magnuson you know they are our enemies. I have seen you torture
them, and it was good. Now these others from Earth will help us kill the
grown Forest People and make the young ones our slaves. And we will
hide all of you, when your enemies come flying to find you. All this will
be good too."
   Magnuson sighed with weary impatience. "Red Circles, I do not mean
to kill the Forest People or to make them slaves, and well you know it.
You have learned new speech from me, with great skill; can you not learn
more than speech? When the Forest People have become full men, like
you and me, then it will be wrong to kill them, or to keep them at work by
whipping."
   "Yes," said Red Circles. "When they are men." He was not arguing
with Magnuson, but neither was he giving way.
   Magnuson looked round the table at his fellow Earth-descended. "How
many men and women, do you think, upon how many worlds, have lived
out the lives of baboons, among families of less-than-man? How many
bearing within them the spark of humanity have spent their days and years
grubbing for insects, beside their animal parents and siblings? I tell you, it
is happening here and now, on Kappa.
   "Tomorrow, we are all going up the river to the Workers' Village. The
council of chiefs has decided that a new temple is to be built, and the
stone quarry up there is busy. You will see how the hominids are used in
the quarry. They are beasts of burden, but among those beasts I fear that
there are slaves."
   "Helping the poor slaves is all very fine," said Pete Kaleta, wiping
grease from his hands. "But you know what we want."
   "I sent you some of the Water of Thought," Magnuson replied stiffly.
"In payment for the radio and the other things you got for me. And for
your silence. As if you didn't want silence for yourselves."
   "Yes, you gave us a little of the stuff. But just a sample. Well, the
people in the Outfit want some more. They like something with a real
kick to it, I understand. Don't look so disgusted. You knew who we were
doing business with. Now I swear to you, Magnuson, I mean to deliver
the stuff we've contracted for." Kaleta looked round; Red Circles had
walked away, and no other Kappan was listening, but he lowered his
voice anyway. "That's going to take a lot of Thought-Water, and it's going
to mean a lot of money. A lot. We'll give you a share of the profits. You
can spend it doing things for these hominids, if that's what you live for.
But understand, you're going to help us make the delivery."
   Magnuson looked at Kaleta and Morton as if they were filth just
dropped onto his supper table. Then he turned to Jones and Boris.
"Gentlemen, as you know, I have quarreled with the Space Force. Daily I
violate its narrow-minded rules restricting anthropological research, but I
still respect it and I respect you. When I see such as these… "
   "Don't get tough." Morton's voice was icy. Then he smiled over at
Jones. "I understand you're going to make a good customer for the Water
from now on. Stick with us and we'll see that you're taken care of."
   Jones stared back. Then he put his face down in his hands on the table.
   In the small hut where he and Boris were quartered for the night, Jones
poured himself a sip of the Water of Thought. Then he sat on a stool
silently clutching his stone bottle, which appeared to be nearly empty.
   "You look sick," said Boris, rocking on his own stool. They had been
allowed a small oil lamp, but no table to put it on, so it burned on the dirt
floor.
   "I am sick. Feverish. Magnuson hasn't given me any more of the stuff
yet. It may be killing me, but I don't mind if it does. If only I wouldn't
imagine strange things. That's the part that gets me." Jones got up, went to
the open doorway of the hut and looked out. Then he came back and
stretched out on a sleeping mat. He had recapped his bottle and he still
held it tightly.
   "What sort of things?"
   Jones did not answer. After a while he seemed to sleep.
   Boris went to the doorway and sat down there cross-legged, looking
out at the fire-spotted village night. He wondered where the groundsuits
and the rifles were being kept. Not that the knowledge would do him
much good if he had it. Against a tree in the middle distance there leaned
a warrior with a spear, visible in silhouette, probably watching Boris.
   Kaleta and Morton had not seemed to be worried about the Space
Force. Doubtless the cruiser was late, and doubtless before it got here the
smugglers planned to have a barrel of Thought-Water stowed away, and
no inconvenient witnesses on hand.
   The rest of the colonists were probably staying close to their firesides
on the mayor's advice, and thinking with admiration of heroic Mayor
Kaleta, brave Don Morton, and fearless Jane whatever-her-name-was,
who were all out risking their necks in the wilderness to rescue Brenda
and Boris from the berserk killer Jones…
   On the other side of the village common, a slender figure had just
appeared beside a small fire. It was Jane, and she was looking about her
as if in search of someone or something.
   Boris found himself free to stand up and walk out of the hut. Jane
watched his approach, and smiled tentatively when he drew near.
   "How goes the plotting?" Boris asked, moving up beside her. Though
the night was not cold, he spread his hands out toward the fire. It seemed
an ancient, almost instinctive gesture.
   "Not too well, I think." Jane's voice was like her body, small, firm, and
quick. Her hair was lighter than Brenda's, her face thinner, to Boris less
suggestive of sensuality. "Don and the good mayor have walked back to
the copter; they're going to radio back to the colony that all's well with
them and me but we haven't found you or Brenda yet. I suppose you're
worried about Brenda?"
   "Sure, not to mention myself. But how about you?"
   "What do you mean, how about me?"
   "I mean should I be worrying over what might be done to you—or
what you might do?"
   Jane gave her nervous laugh. "Both, I guess. I admit I'd like to be rich,
and I'd like to get off this planet permanently with Don. Or someone, not
Don if I can help it. But I really don't want to hurt anyone in the process.
And I don't want to get arrested. Isn't that a laugh?"
    "No."
    "No." Jane's eyes became sympathetic. "Boris, what's happened to you?
I can see something's—wrong."
    "I drank the Water of Thought. I lost my—free will." Boris's voice
cracked, and he realized that he was suddenly very close to breaking
down. He had lost count of the hours and days of his helplessness. "I have
to follow Jones's orders. If he told me to stick my head into this fire, do
it."
    "Don't say that!" Jane cried, quietly, impulsively. Her sympathy was
undoubtedly sincere. She took a step toward Boris, and gripped his arm as
if to save him from the flames.
    Having her do that was more help than he would have believed. "I'll be
all right," he said in a moment, and put his big hand over hers. "Are you
involved in this dope-peddling? Not yet, eh?"
    "No. Not yet." Jane let go of him, and shivered. Now it was her turn to
spread her hands to the fire as if for warmth. "But I'm afraid of Don. Why
haven't you asked about Brenda?"
    "How is she?" He had judged it wiser not to show concern.
    "All right, except for her sore ankle. Magnuson treated that for her.
She's sleeping now. Boris, you don't think I'm ugly, do you?"
    "Not by Earth-descended standards, certainly. Under normal conditions
I might well be chasing you around the fire."
    "No, you'd be chasing Brenda. Oh, I'm her friend, really, Boris, but I do
have this streak of… envy. Whenever she has someone or something that
I don't have, I envy her. Maybe that's how I got started with Don. He was
after her, though she was too smart to ever be much interested in him."
    "What kind of a guy is Morton?"
    "Not very nice. He can be mean, very mean, Boris. I've been around
him enough to know."
    "And you never guessed what he and Kaleta were up to?"
    "That's fairly recent. I knew something was going on. I was hoping it
was something that would make enough money for Don to take me
offworld with him. I guess I was afraid to find out what it really was, but I
didn't think it'd be anything this bad!"
    "But you knew it was connected, somehow with Magnuson?"
   "I found out little bits of things, here and there. Dr. Magnuson made
himself vanish, out here in the hills. Then he sent a Kappan he trusted to
Don at the colony, telling Don there was something up that might make a
lot of money. Oh, he knew what Donnie boy is like, all right. And the
mayor, too. Magnuson scares me."
   "What kind of help did Magnuson want?"
   "Oh, radio equipment, so he could listen in and tell if anyone was
searching for him. Other things, some scientific equipment, I don't know.
You ask a lot of questions."
   "It's about all I can do."
   "Oh, Boris, I wish it wasn't so. And to handle everything Don had to
cut the mayor in. Mayor Pete's greedy, too. Even greedier than Don, I
guess."
   "So they're using Magnuson and he's using them. Interesting. Any one
else in on it?"
   "No. Oh, you mean Brenda?" Jane gave him a cold, bright smile, and
shook her head almost regretfully. "No. I'm good at keeping secrets."
   Boris returned the smile. "So, here we are. You still think you might
get rich, and get away from this planet, and not have dope-smuggling and
maybe murder on your conscience when you do. But really you know that
the Space Force is almost sure to uncover all this sooner or later, because
so many people are involved." Boris himself was not so sure as he made
himself sound. "And when that time comes, you'd like to have me as your
friend. If I'm still alive."
   Jane put her hand on his arm again. "I'll do what I can for you, Boris.
Yes, for Brenda too. But I can't do much." She raised the hand and traced
with one finger the line of his jaw. "You know, I could wish you were
under my control, not Eddie's. But Don will be coming back. I'd better
go."

  Boris was almost back at the doorway of his hut when he realized that a
man was standing motionless in the shadows beside it. It was Magnuson.
  When Boris stopped, the doctor took a step forward, cleared his throat,
and said self-consciously: "I order you to stand on your head."
   "What?" Boris felt an almost hysterical urge to giggle. Then he
understood. "Oh, a test. No, Doctor, I don't have to obey your orders.
Only Jones's."
   "Good. Then you will not obey Morton or Kaleta either. Will you step
into the hut?"
   Inside, three warriors held Jones. His arms were bound, and there was a
flint knife at his throat.
   "Jones controls you. And now, as you see, I control Jones." Magnuson
was not boasting; he was miserable. "Oh, this is all horrible. But I must
remain in control, and there is no other way to do it."
   Jones spoke without moving his head. "Brazil, he wants you to get into
a groundsuit and disarm Morton and Kaleta. Wait until they finish with
the radio and come back to the village. It shouldn't be too hard a job."
   Boris looked from Jones to Magnuson. "You don't need to compel me
to do that—just give me permission."
   "I hate to use you as a slave." Magnuson was suffering. "But I have
done worse things. Yes.
   "I know you'd escape in a moment if you could. Perhaps you'd kill me,
and that would end my work. So I must control you in the groundsuit and
get you out of it again. I hope that I can soon convince you that what I do
here is the work of Man. But in the meantime—"
   There came a muffled clanking at the doorway of the hut. Red Circles
and two others bore a groundsuit in.
   Jones gave precise orders. "Brazil, put the ground-suit on. Disarm
Kaleta and Morton, but don't hurt them if you can help it. Then come at
once back to this hut and take off the suit." He glanced at Magnuson, who
nodded. The flint knife was eased a few centimeters away from Jones's
throat.
   "I think I will be the one to take the weapons from the two Earthmen,"
Red Circles said.
   "No." Magnuson looked steadily at the war chief. "They will be on
their guard, and you might have to kill them, especially if you went alone
against them."
   Muscles bunched along Red Circles' jaw. "Magnuson does not say that
I might fail."
   "I know you better than that. But bad as they are, I do not want the two
Earthmen killed. I mean to provide them with a chance to prove
themselves true men."
   Red Circles appeared to understand, if not to agree.
   Magnuson stared off briefly into space, fascinated by something that
only he could see. "Like a baptism," he mused. "It may wash away past
sins."
   Boris, getting into the suit, thought that he understood. Magnuson had
said earlier that all of the Earthmen present would become members of
this tribe. Then the "baptism" would be an initiation ceremony.
   "There may be shooting," Boris said to Magnuson. "Better see that the
village people keep their heads down."
   "Yes, that's right." Magnuson hurried out of the hut.
   "One thing," said Boris to Jones.
   "What?" Jones opened his eyes. He had seemed to be resting on his
stool, almost oblivious to the Kappans who stood by ready to kill him at a
moment's notice.
   "Let me make sure that Brenda's safe."
   Jones sighed. "I'll ask them to bring her over here so you can see she's
healthy—as soon as you come back here and get out of that suit."
   And that had to suffice. Boris went out of the hut, wrapped now in the
familiar fluid power of a groundsuit, but as helpless as ever. Outside, he
met Magnuson and strode across the village common with him.
   "They'll come back to the village along that path," Magnuson
whispered to him, pointing in the starlight. "The copter is in a clearing
over there. Remember, no bloodshed."
   "I want none."
   "Of course. Good luck." Magnuson moved silently away.
   I don't need luck now, thought Boris, watching the greater darkness of
the path where it emerged from the forest. Later he would need all the
luck available, when he tried to resist his orders, when he attempted to
keep the suit on and pick up Brenda and carry her away to safety.
   A flashlight appeared, far down the path. Moving expertly in the bulky
suit, Boris took shelter behind some bushes. He turned up the sensitivity
of his helmet's microphones, and picked up a low murmur of voices.
   "—anything fatal to Brenda, at least not right away. That'd be a terrible
waste," Don Morton chuckled.
   "Let's get the business settled." Kaleta sounded angry. "We'll be lucky
to manage that, without playing around."
   "All right, all right. Anyone who's dead or missing can be blamed on
Jones afterwards. I suppose eventually there's bound to be some kind of
investigation."
   "So we want to get the Kappans on our side. And we play along with
Magnuson until we find out where the stuff comes from."
   They were very close to Boris now, and evidently Kaleta caught the
gleam of his suit through the bushes. He stopped, grabbing at Morton; the
flashlight in Morton's hand swung suddenly to shine into the thicket.
   "Who?" demanded Kaleta sharply.
   "Me," said Boris, and plunged after Morton, who had spun around and
was dashing back along the path toward the copter. The race was no
contest. Morton heard the metal footfalls closing in, turned, and fired.
Bullets whanged off the armored suit before Boris got a grip on the barrel
of the machine pistol, yanked it from Morton's grasp, and bent it into
uselessness.
   "Come along." With compelled gentleness, Boris took Morton's arm
and towed him back toward the village. Morton made choking sounds of
rage and fear, but offered no more resistance.
   The good mayor had been smart enough to raise his hands and stand
still. Boris plucked Kaleta's firearm from its holster and squeezed it into
junk. Then, gripping one man's arm lightly in each metal gauntlet, Boris
marched his prisoners back into the village and across the common.
   Magnuson met them, an escort of warriors at his back. His face showed
relief. Jane and Brenda stood beside him.
   "I'm all right, Boris," Brenda called to him. There was hope in her eyes
again.
   Nothing would be easier now than to rage through them all, knocking
them aside until he had Brenda safe in his metal arms; then, to run with
her, spears bouncing from his back, trees crashing under his feet, carrying
her safe through the night toward the sheltering forcefield walls of the
colony.
   Boris removed his helmet, then his suit. He could not even try to
disobey.
                                    V.
   In the morning, again transmitting his orders through Jones, Magnuson
had Boris once more put on a groundsuit, then drag the other suit to the
river and throw it into a deep pool, together with the energy rifles.
   "We are going upstream," Magnuson announced, when the rest of his
prisoners had been assembled to hear him. "A few kilometers north of
here at the Workers' Village there are some things that I want all of you to
see. Probably we will stay at the Workers' Village tonight, and tomorrow
go on upstream again. Farther that way lies the Warriors' Village. There,
in a day or two, we shall all of us learn whether we are acceptable to the
Spirit of Man."
   "You're out of your head," Morton told him.
   "I know you think so, now. But come."
   When the march upstream was organized, Magnuson led the way, with
Red Circles and an elaborately robbed chief priest at his sides. Boris, still
wearing the groundsuit, followed, accompanied by Brenda and Jane. Then
Kaleta and Morton, both sullenly silent. After a few more priests, a small
band of warriors brought up the rear, with Jones secured among them,
gagged so he could shout no sudden orders to Boris.
   The path between villages was a well-worn trail, but steep in places
and fairly difficult. It zigzagged uphill among boulders and under
overshadowing trees. Brenda was still limping, though Magnuson had
treated her ankle. Boris helped her over the rougher spots. He found that
he was hardly able to speak to her. Her eyes were sympathetic and not
accusing—but still it was harder and harder for him to meet them with his
own.
   After the first kilometer and a half the trail climbed beside a low
waterfall and then smoothed out. Now it wound along beside the Yunoee
through cultivated fields in a broad, flat valley. Trees were widely
scattered here; anyone scouting in a copter could easily have seen the
procession, spotted the Earth-descended people and the glinting
groundsuit. Magnuson kept looking up and around at the sky, but it was
empty of machines.
   A few kilted fields hands looked up, from their labor or rest, to gape at
the procession as it passed. Soon another cluster of small buildings came
into view ahead.
   The Workers' Village, like the Temple Village, straddled the narrow
Yunoee. But instead of a temple this settlement was centered on sheds,
where logs and stone were worked and stored. A kilted worker-chief came
forth to greet Magnuson and the other two chiefs as equals. The six
captive Earth-descended people caused much curiosity, almost all of it
polite, among the workers.
   Again Boris was ordered out of the groundsuit, and it was carried away
to some hiding place; then Jones could be relieved of his gag. After that
Magnuson's prisoners were only casually watched.
   After talking privately until mid-day with the other chiefs, Magnuson
came to share a meal with the six other Earth-descended. He ate quickly
and sparingly, as usual, then rose to speak.
   "I have persuaded the other chiefs to begin the annual rite of passage
tomorrow night. When this year's class of young Kappans face their test,
we all of us will go with them." He smiled happily at the two young
women. "You of course will go to the women's ceremony, somewhat
earlier. Things will be much easier for you than they will for us."
   Kaleta jumped to his feet. "What are you getting us into?"
   Magnuson smiled at him briefly. "Why, Mr. Mayor, I am giving you a
chance."
   "To enter a tribe of savages?"
   "One who promotes organized crime has no right to use that word of
others. It is true, that if you survive, you will find the tribal secrets open to
you, and these warriors sworn to defend you like a brother. But what I am
talking about is a greater chance that that. If you can prove your own
humanity and your own manhood, to yourself, I think you will care less
for peddling dope."
   "And if I can't—prove myself, as you put it—to you?"
   "Not to me, Mr. Mayor. To yourself, and to the tribe. I'll be beside you,
undergoing the same things. And if we fail? Why, then we will die—
deservedly."
   Kaleta sat down, as if his legs were suddenly too weak to hold him; his
plump face had turned grayish. Morton sat beside him, smoldering. Boris,
watching, derived a certain satisfaction from the look of the two smart
operators as they revised their opinion of the crackpot who wanted to be a
savage and could somehow be disposed of easily when the time was ripe.
   Magnuson turned from the table. "Come along, all of you. This
afternoon I want to show you something of my work."
   He led them west from the Workers' Village, at right angles to the
river's course. The path here was wide and dusty, scarred as if by the
frequent dragging of heavy objects. When they had gone a few hundred
meters, staccato shouting and the cracking of whips could be heard from a
short distance ahead, behind a screen of trees.
   The path, emerging from the forest, spread to form a broad grassless
area rimming a quarry pit. Over the wide pit dust hung in the air. Along
its edge kilted workers were shaping blocks of stone with saws of copper
or bronze, the first metal tools that Boris had seen in native Kappan
hands.
   But stonecutting and metal tools were not what Magnuson had in mind
to show them. "There," he said, and pointed.
   Up over the lip of the quarry-pit, moving with painful slowness
through a haze of dust, beasts of burden came into view. They appeared a
pair at a time, gripping a crude rope with their human hands, hauling
upward with all their strength. There were eight of the short, two-legged
beasts in the team, and they dragged uphill a sledge weighted with a
single stone block. Under the flicking whip of a kilted overseer, the
hominids moved their load without outcry. Their naked leathery skins
were white with the dry dust of the quarry. One of the two females in the
team was obviously pregnant.
   Magnuson gestured for his little group of sightseers to accompany him
as he moved forward to the rim of the pit. Now Boris could see down into
the quarry, where other groups of hominids were toiling. He had seen
slaves before; he had seen humanity in most of its known themes abused
and brutalized upon a score of planets. The sight before him now was
somehow different from anything that he had seen before, and he could
not decide at once if it was worse or not as bad. These hominid faces,
prime theme though they were, outwardly resembling homo sapiens,
showed nothing Boris could identify as human hope or hate, fear or
resentment. Their five-fingered hands expressed nothing, hung limp when
not gripping rope or pushing stone. None of the beasts had been given
work requiring tools. The kilted men with whips barked out their orders in
repeated monosyllables, as if to horses.
   If these beasts were the product of some brain-washer's art, then the
most accomplished tyrants of the Galaxy might be able to learn new skills
on Kappa. But no, thought Boris. These two-legged brutes have never
been human.
   Jane had turned away from the sight. But Brenda watched, and Boris
saw tears in her eyes.
   "It is not as simple as it seems," said Magnuson to her gently. "If they
had the bodies of horses, and you saw them given food and water and rest,
you would not weep for them. They are given those things."
   "But they're not horses," objected Brenda.
   "Ah, that's the point, yes. Weep for those who are not. Perhaps as many
as one in five, even one in three, must bear in their brains the spark of
humanity. And that spark has never been fanned."
   "Why do you say they must?" Kaleta asked.
   "Look at them. Think about them. They can hardly be anywhere else
on the evolutionary tree. In the wild state they are quite capable of using
weapons, to fight the villagers and no doubt in hunting also. Biology is
not really my field, but their cranial capacity seems quite adequate for
abstract thought. It's true that apes will now and then use tools. But the
ape brain is always smaller, and the forelimbs adapted primarily for
travel, whether brachiating or walking. In the prime theme tree only man
and his immediate ancestors habitually stand erect. Come this way. I'll
show you my laboratory."
   Magnuson led them away from the quarry, along a narrow, little-used
path that curved through the woods for a hundred meters and ended at a
big, new-looking cabin of solid log construction. At one end of this
building was a pen of upright logs, like a prison stockade.
   Inside the stockade were eight hominids. The one female and one of
the males looked old and completely crippled, obviously unable to to any
longer haul stone in the quarry. The remaining six were all younger
males, all comparatively healthy-looking, though one of them was minus
a hand. Looking more carefully at the six, Boris saw that each bore the
scar of some serious but now healed injury. Probably primitive ropes
broke often in the quarry, and heavy stones slipped and slid and fell.
   A water trough ran into the pen. "Dry again," sighed Magnuson, taking
up a pail. He began to fill the trough up from a nearby well. "I can't get
the villagers to feed or water a hominid that does no work. They give me
the ones that are badly injured in quarry accidents, and my first aid and
Earth drugs save some of them, as you see. Red Circles will not
understand that my treatments are not meant as torture. There, you were
all thirsty, weren't you?"
   Inside the pen, the hominids had clustered along the trough, cupping up
water in their hands, or bending over to slurp noisily. The one-handed
male drank, then turned and reached out between the logs of the palisade
toward Magnuson. Magnuson touched the gray leathery hand, as if
knowing that was all the creature wanted.
   "Have they any speech?" Jones asked. He was staring with an odd
expression at the hominids.
   "No. Oh, according to the villagers, the wild adults have a language of
their own. But I doubt it's more than a system of warning cries such as
monkeys use. I've never been close enough to a wild adult to hear it
myself."
   "But they must have a speech. I can remember—" Jones abruptly
stopped speaking. He stared at the hominids as if something about them
frightened them. They were paying him no attention.
   Magnuson shook his head, watching Jones carefully. "No, they have no
speech. The young ones are captured when they wander away from the
wild troop, then brought here and trained like horses or dogs. I've tried to
teach them to speak a few words, but I think none of them is psychically
ready for symbolic thought. So I mean for the six young males here to go
with us tomorrow night, into the rite of passage."
   Boris, having followed Magnuson's thought this far, was not surprised.
He tried to picture members of three species being initiated into the same
tribe—he didn't yet know the details of the initiation, but he could
imagine what it would be like. Still, he refrained for the time being from
arguing.
   Jones was surprised. He asked: "Will the villagers stand for it?"
   Magnuson nodded. "Just barely. Oh, perhaps all six of these will die in
the ordeal, for no mere animal can pass through alive. But in pain and
shock is man born, as an individual or as a race. If the ordeal awakens
none of these six to manhood, why I must try again; I must somehow get
time to try again. In the end I must succeed. Then I shall have made man,
and what our so-called civilization does to me will not matter."
   Morton, who had been silently expressing disdain, now laughed.
"You'll play hell starting a tribe with those. Six males."
   Magnuson was unruffled. "The female is not so important." He bowed,
smiling, to the two young women in the tour. "Until civilization is
attained. And even then a psychic difference remains, which we ignore to
our cost. What we now call civilization abandons the formal rite of
passage, and thereby enfeebles the race. Eventually we must return on our
home planets to the ordeal to the weeding-out. Only males who can prove
their manhood should survive long enough to reproduce."
   Magnuson's Earth-descended audience heard him in silence, angry,
fearful, or indifferent. Maybe, thought Boris, some of them half believed
him. But Magnuson was not interested right now in their reactions. The
one-armed hominid still stood at the palisade, thrusting out both hand and
stump between the logs. Magnuson touched the gray hand again.
   After feeding his hominids, throwing leaves and roots from a bin into
the pen, he beckoned again to his visitors. "Come inside, all of you."
   Most of the interior of the large cabin was a single room, floored with
stone slabs. There were village-made worktables and shelves, holding a
scattering of books and papers, a small computer, various chemical and
electrical apparatus.
   "I took a chance, stealing this for you," said Kaleta, pointing to a
microscope under a dusty plastic cover. "Why'd you want it, if you're not
working with the Water of Thought?"
   "I was mainly interested in the Water, at first. Drinking it, as I have
mentioned, brought me here. But once here I turned to more important
things. Yes. I've now almost entirely given over the physical and chemical
sides of research. But here, here's an interesting bit of physical evidence."
   From a table Magnuson picked up a skull of somewhat less than adult
Earthman size but still, thought Boris, of a brain capacity probably
sufficient for intelligence. It was certainly prime theme shape. The teeth
were omnivorous, human-looking, and noticeably worn—probably a
quarry-beast chewed a lot of grit along with its rough food. The jaw was
short, heavy, almost chinless. Below a receding forehead the supraorbital
ridges stood out boldly, joining together between the eyes.
   "What do you think about it, gentlemen?" Magnuson spoke to Jones
and Boris.
   Jones, briefly a planeteer again, accepted the skull. He turned it in his
hands, looking at the face, the sides, and the top of the cranium. "Prime
theme presapient hominid. Rare, but hardly astonishing."
   "Correct. Now, tell me, upon how many planets has the transition from
beast to human been observed? The achievement of sapience, in any
theme, prime or otherwise?"
   Jones shrugged. "It's never been observed, as far as I know, but that's
not surprising. If you want to talk technical evolutionary theory, it's an
instance of the automatic suppression of a peduncle. The beginnings of
anything tend to be out of sight and out of reach."
   "Right again." Magnuson nodded, smiling and intent. "But here and
now, upon this world, the rare moment is before us. Or it will be, if we
choose to create it. And I so choose."
   Jones put down the skull, and leaned wearily against the table. "All this
has ceased to concern me, or I'd argue with your methods."
   "Argue, then. I've told you that your slavery to the Water of Thought
will probably soon be over."
   "If I'm soon dead, it will." Jones displayed a sickly smile. "If I argue
with you, will that induce you to refill my bottle?"
   "No. But I can promise you that you'll drink the Water of Thought at
least once more. We all will, on beginning the initiation ceremony."
   Kaleta and Morton almost jumped at Magnuson, cursing him and
demanding explanations; Boris came near joining them.
   "I tried to have you all exempted from drinking," Magnuson said. "But
the chiefs refused. They gave in to me on the more important point of
letting the hominids participate, so I would not press them on this."
   Only Jones relaxed. "Then I won't argue. I'll accept as true any theory
that brings me more of the Water."
   "If you won't argue," Boris said, "I will. Our going through a paddling
to join some half-wit fraternity is not going to prove anything, except that
we'd rather suffer than die. Neither will it prove much about your hominid
pupils here, as far as I can see. If you can't educate them now, a torture
session won't make them any smarter. What's wrong with just letting them
along, to go to hell in their own way? That's all the Space Force wants, as
I see it. And for once I tend to agree with my bosses."
   But it was no use; he was not getting through to Magnuson. They were
thinking in different coordinate systems. Well, Boris had expected
argument to fail, but he had had to try.
   Magnuson faced Boris more in sadness than in anger. Or perhaps he
was controlling his anger well.
   "Oh, yes. I am—what is the phrase?—a do-gooder. I interfere. My
interference in evolutionary processes has been forbidden, on this and
other planets. I remember the words of one Tribune—she said my work
would be cruel, cruel to animals and humans both. As if hominids and
humans alike were not already on the anvil of evolution! The only mercy
granted the Kappan hominids now is their ignorance of the transformation
that lies just beyond their reach. Cruel! Perhaps that Tribune would forbid
a woman to give birth, because the experience would be likely to
traumatize her child."
   "Well, I can't stop you." Boris picked up the hominid skull from the
table, and on a hunch turned it upside down. The foramen magnum had
been enlarged by crude hacking into a gaping hole, big enough to have
permitted extraction of the brain.
   Magnuson was smiling at Boris's discovery. "Yes, more evidence of
proto-humanity. When one of the hominids dies in the quarry, the others
usually cut or break open the skull, and devour at least part of the brain.
Unpleasant, yes. But still, as a twentieth-century anthropologist wrote:
'Nearly the most ancient human trick we know.' "

   Boris sat on a log at one side of the sunny common of the Workers'
Village, while Brenda stood behind him, massaging his tired neck.
Children, kilted and kiltless, goggled shyly and laughed at them.
   "How's your ankle now?" he asked.
   "Not bad. Better than it was. Afraid I wouldn't get far, though, if I tried
to run for help."
   "I can't do that, or anything," he said. "I've tried."
   "I know you have. You'll get over it, though. You will."
   "Magnuson thinks that Jones and I will recover in another day or two. I
suppose just in time to drink more of the stuff for the ceremony. But
Magnuson isn't trusting me in the groundsuit any more."
   "That's a good sign. Isn't it?"
   "I suppose it is. But I can't afford to start hoping." That was a shameful
thing to say, especially to anyone as brave as Brenda was turning out to
be. But Boris said it. He could feel himself hitting bottom.

   Quartered that night with Jones in a hut in the Workers' Village, Boris
dreamed again. He was a hominid, dragging a heavy sledge up the side of
a quarry-pit. He felt a whip. Planeteer Hayashi was behind him, pulling
desperately with one hand at the monstrous growth upon his face, and
lashing Boris with the other.
                                  VI.
   In the morning the Earth-descended were served a breakfast of fruit,
stewed meat, and freshly baked bread. A pair of robed priests arrived
from the lower village, and helped Magnuson lead his six young hominids
from their pen, after first roping them together like hand-bound
mountaineers. Then the procession of the day before, enlarged now by
hominids and more priests, moved on upstream. This time the groundsuit
was left behind, and Jones was no longer so closely guarded.
   After a couple of kilometers the flat valley pinched in again, becoming
a gorge through which the Yunoee tumbled. Again the trail became
difficult; but the group moved at an unhurried pace, and the journey was
short.
   The Warriors' Village at the influx of a tributary creek, straddled the
Yunoee as had the two settlements below. In this settlement the huts were
roughly made, and crudely shingled with thorny bark.
   Here the villagers' greeting was a screaming mob scene. Boris put his
arms protectively round both Jane and Brenda as howling warriors leaped
past them, brandishing knives and clubs. But the Earth-descended were
not really menaced. It was the roped-together hominids that drew the
brunt of the threatening uproar. It took all the shouting and gesturing that
Magnuson and the robed witch-men could manage to keep the hominids
from being physically assailed and probably slaughtered. The hominids
cowered and snarled, huddling together inside a ring of screaming
warriors and squaws. Magnuson needed half an hour to get his pupils into
the village, to the comparative safety of a pen that had been built for
them.
   Boris had little worry to spare for hominids. He was relieved when the
village women took gentle custody of Brenda and Jane and led them
away, evidently to some ceremony which males were forbidden to attend.
   While Magnuson conferred with the chiefs, the four other Earthmen
were shown where they were to stay. Kaleta and Morton sat down and
whispered together. Jones paced restlessly around the portion of the
village where he was allowed to go. Boris sat down in the abandoned hut
in which he and Jones had been billeted, and tried to keep out of trouble.
   He had been there only a few minutes when a shadow darkened the
green brightness of the doorway, and Morton stepped in.
   "Brazil, you're still under Jones's orders, huh?"
   "Yes. But I can defend myself if need be."
   "I didn't come in to start a fight." Morton seated himself on the dirt
floor. "Look, do you know anything about this initiation business
Magnuson's got us into?"
   "Not this one in particular. I've seen 'em on other planets."
   "What's the best way to get through one?"
   "You're asking me for help? When do you plan to murder me?"
   "All right, so I've got a lot of nerve. I said I didn't come in here for
trouble, but you don't scare me a damn bit, colonel, or whatever the hell
you are. You don't have your tin suit on now."
   Jones came in. "What's this all about?"
   Morton stood up. "Maybe you'll tell me something about this initiation
thing. After it's all over you're going to want me around to fill your bottle
for you."
   Jones's cheek started twitching. "There's no big secret about getting
through an initiation. As Brazil says, it's not much different from joining
some halfwit fraternity. Just grit your teeth and follow orders, and don't
try to fight back."
   Morton nodded slowly. "That's about what I thought. And it might get
pretty rough, right? Suppose we tried to get out of here, today or tonight,
what do you think our chances would be?"
   "Just about zero," said Jones, "and I don't want to get away."
   "That's right, you'll do anything to stay near the Thought-Water."
Morton thought for a moment. "Well, I agree with you, for once. I've gone
through a lot already to get my hands on that stuff. I'm not about to give
up now."
   When Morton had gone out, Jones sat down, his cheek still twitching.
He pulled his little stone bottle out of a coverall pocket. "Brazil, you're
lucky. If and when you're cured, you're a free man. If I'm cured of this I'm
still a murderer."
   Temporary insanity might be a good defense."
   "Legally, I suppose. But I'll still know what I've done, and why, and
how it felt to give up everything for this. For water. You know if I lose
the Water now, I won't have anything."
   "You think we'll be cured, Jones?"
   "Magnuson thinks so. And he's so calmly sure of everything it's hard to
argue with him. Right now he's debating with the chiefs again. They still
don't like the idea of initiating his six hominids, but he's still insisting, and
he'll probably win. He's quite a man."
   "He is. But what chance will his hominids have in an initiation?"
   "Almost none. They don't know what it's all about, ritual, ties of blood,
sacrifice. They're just simple, ignorant people."
   "People?"
   Jones raised the dry bottle to his mouth, holding it vertical to drain any
last possible drop. Then he hurled it across the hut, and began to laugh, in
quiet near-hysteria.
   "They're people," Jones said. "I'm mad, but I know. Don't ask me how."
With that he collapsed, laughing or sobbing.
   Boris sat quietly, looking out into the green Kappan sunshine.
   Somehow, the day passed, and most of the night.
   In the dark pre-dawn Boris found himself suddenly awake, listening to
a distant rumble of drums, and to a howl like that of whirled bull-roarers.
Across the hut, Jones too was awake, and sitting up. Before either could
speak, the hut was filled with warriors, masked and painted as Boris had
never seen them before. He was jerked to his feet and dragged from the
hut with Jones beside him. Their escort was joined by another little swarm
of warriors surrounding Morton and Kaleta, and the whole mob moved
out of the village, taking by torchlight the path that climbed yet farther
upstream beside the riverbank. Magnuson was ahead of them on the path,
going in the same direction under his own power, holding the lead end of
a rope which the six cowering hominids gripped like blind men traversing
a place of danger.
   There was much howling and jostling. Boris staggered and scrambled
and was pushed along. Torchlight fell on frenzied or frightened faces, on
night-black river water and the white curl of rapids. Ahead the sky was lit
by a huge fire, and from there came the sounds of drum and bull-roarer.
   The steep riverbanks fell away again as the place of the fire drew near.
The procession moved on into the glare and the heat of the flames before
it halted. The young villagers who were candidates for initiation were
standing beside the fire already, in kilt or robe or loincloth, frightened but
trying to be stoic. The five Earthmen and the six hominids were pushed in
among their group. The drums were very loud.
   "Tell Brazil that he is free," Magnuson shouted to Jones. "Until he has
passed through the ordeal, or failed it, he must act for himself. Tell him!"
   "All right." Jones turned to Boris. "So be it. You're on your own, sink
or swim."
   Boris hated both of them. He was not property, not a robot to be turned
off or on. And at the moment, any talk of his having freedom was a bad
joke. The hands of half a dozen warriors were on him, pulling off his
clothes. Each candidate for tribal membership was first stripped, then
draped with a net-like garment of tough fibers, weighted with fist-sized
stoned. Someone thrust another such rock, painted with a crude design,
into Boris's hand, making sure that his fingers gripped it tightly.
   "Hold on to your rock at all costs," Magnuson was shouting at the other
Earthmen. "To drop it means to reject the use of tools, and if you drop it
you will be killed."
   The candidates were pushed into a ring, scorchingly close to the fire. A
warrior thrust a cup under Boris's nose; he drank, draining the vessel, and
the Water of Thought was cool and familiar in his throat. Beside him,
Jones gasped, and drank; they had to tear the empty cup away from him.
The hominids gulped, like so many thirsty animals. The young villagers,
tasting the drug for the first time, swallowed it with reverence. Boris
could not see how Magnuson and Kaleta and Morton faced the moment;
they were now somewhere on the other side of the fire from him.
   Someone screamed a signal and a dance began, the candidates circling
the fire, the warriors keeping pace with them in an outer ring, flourishing
weapons and leaping in the firelight, to the roar of drums.
   Boris, positioned in the inner ring between a village youth and one of
the hominids, jigged and hopped, doing what seemed to be expected of
him. Somehow the hominids were moving with the others, so far at least,
not dancing but keeping their relative places in the ring. What would the
Water of Thought do to them? At least it had not paralyzed Boris again;
he felt nothing from it yet.
   One warrior leaped in from the outer circle, and slashed lightly with a
small flint knife across the chest of one of the young villagers, who gave
no sign of pain or shock. Then the man whirled back to his place in the
outer ring, and others danced in, each to single out a different victim.
   Boris felt a sudden sharp gouge on the back of one leg, and managed to
keep himself from showing any reaction. The man who had wounded him
now spun dancing past in front of Boris. He was masked, but Boris
recognized Red Circles by his size and his painted arms. It was
undoubtedly a compliment to be favored with the personal attention of the
war chief, though not one that Boris could fully appreciate.
   The creeping hypnosis of the drums and the dance was available, and
Boris knew that it could help. He let himself move into it, gradually. He
concentrated on holding a part of his mind ultimately clear, ready to take
control.
   Abruptly, screaming hell broke loose; the warriors had started to
torment one of the hominids. Boris turned just in time to see the victim
react with the simple directness of an animal, striking back with the
sacred rock that it had been given to hold in its fist. In the next instant the
hominid's body seemed to sprout spears like porcupine quills. Then it was
only a gory and lifeless thing, being dragged away.
   In the next moment, another hominid fought back, and died. And in the
next, another. Between the explosions of violence only seconds elapsed,
but Boris found himself able to think as if leisurely minutes were passing.
The hypnotic influence of the dance had brought him to a state of
observant detachment; he felt he was able to calculate long plans between
throbs of the hammering drum. He saw the warriors with torture-knife and
killing-spear, getting rid of their hominid enemies one after another,
killing them within the rules of the ordeal, but with hair-trigger good will
for the task. He saw Magnuson, standing still, arms half raised, ignoring
his own fate, watching while his work and hope died on Kappan spear
points.
   And with this detached clarity, and tremendous speed of thought, Boris
saw the fifth and sixth hominids still standing in their places behind
Magnuson, while the fourth was dying before Magnuson's eyes.
   Those remaining two hominids still stood, moving obediently with the
circle, holding firmly to their ritual rocks, while one warrior jabbed at
them with a point and another scorched them with a glowing stick. The
two hominids watched Magnuson like dogs, and they obeyed him like
trusting men, amid this violence and death. And Boris saw two warriors
look at each other, look and come to silent agreement. They thrust with
their spears, and the fifth hominid died, not by the rules of the passage,
but by racist murder.
   Then the two murderers saw Magnuson turn toward them. And though
he turned too late to see what they had done, they moved away as if
ashamed, and so the sixth hominid still lived, under Magnuson's watchful
eye.
   To Boris all these things seemed to hold deep mystical significance. He
knew that he was sliding deeper and still deeper into the hypnosis of
rhythm and pain and the Water of Thought, and whatever else might be
here at work; he knew it with the corner of his mind that was still normal,
and had been assigned to hold control, but kept shrinking into less and
less importance. Boris was not frightened now. Mayor Pete Kaleta hopped
past him, glaring wildly, muttering his terror, but that meant nothing to
Boris. Even Red Circles had become an unimportant figure, who now and
then approached bringing unimportant torment.
   That fifth hominid had died unjustly, killed by murderers who were
false to the tribe and false to the spirit of man. Sometime Boris would tell
the story, and see the murderers punished. Sometime in the future. But
there was no future, really; this dance was eternal.
   The figure of Magnuson drifted past, dancing mechanically, bending to
look at the stained earth where his hominids had died, then looking up
again, eyes prayerfully following the lone hominid survivor.
   It was the young hominid with one hand.
   Magnuson should be praying, now. There should be some atheists'
prayer, to the Spirit of Man, that he could say.
   Let us call you down, Man, from your abode of evolutionary law. Let
our fire and the sound of our drum bring you descending through this
planet's night to enter the brain's of those who dance for you. Make us all
men. Make us all men. Boris could almost see the Spirit now, brooding in
the rolling heat above the tongues of fire, coming and going with the
heartbeat of the heaviest drum.
   Then there was a disturbing noise that served to give his mind a
foothold, and he fought his way up from deepening trance, pushing spirits
and dreams away. One of the village adolescents had cracked and gone
wild, had screamed and tried to run from the torture and the dance. And
spearmen, ruthlessly obedient to the law of the ritual, forced their
weapons home. The young Kappan died with a bubbling scream.
Magnuson did not care about this one; Magnuson did not take his eyes
from his hominid. But Boris saw the corpse dragged away. The sacred
rock had fallen from the boy's hand, and a man kicked it into the fire.
   Don Morton danced past; Boris was vaguely surprised to see him still
alive. Morton's eyes were glazed, and he shouted incoherently. He did not
blink when a warrior jabbed him.
   The next thing Boris realized clearly was that the dance was over. The
sun was touching the eastern horizon, and he and the other survivors were
being led through the gloomy woods in torchlit silence. Was the ordeal
finished? Not very likely.
   Boris heard one awakening bird, and then found himself entering the
mouth of a cave. His head still echoed with the now-silent drums, and his
minor wounds blended into one pervasive ache, but it was not over yet.
He was herded forward with the others, into damp and stony silence.
   The twisty passages of the cave linked together chambers so big that in
some of them the torchlight died out without revealing all the walls. Feet
shuffled behind Boris and ahead of him, along a well-worn trail, and from
somewhere came the sound of trickling water. His throat burned with
thirst, but he knew there was no use hoping for a drink.
   The procession of candidates for manhood wound to a halt at last inside
another enormous chamber. Here each candidate was made to sit in a
separate niche among the rocks, isolated from sight of the others. Boris
sat down with relief; there was a moment of rest and almost of peace.
   Magnuson walked past him, croaking: "Do not move from where you
have been placed, under pain of death. Do not move from where you have
been placed—" He went on, repeating the warning, evidently for the other
Earth-descended.
   Sitting in his rocky niche, probably carved out many generations ago,
Boris could see no one. In most directions, his field of view in the
wavering, indirect torchlight extended hardly farther than his arm could
reach. Directly behind him was a shadowy opening between rocks; it
looked as if Something might crawl out of it at any moment. Directly in
front of it was a sizable open space. Niches and folds of rock and
stalagmites surrounded the open space like rows of seats around an arena;
and now in the arena there gathered half a dozen robed medicine men,
carrying torches and chanting.
   As they sang, the witchmen began extinguishing their torches, one by
one, so that the darkness grew up a leap at a time. Boris waited,
fatalistically ready for whatever might come next. He was sitting tailor-
fashion, holding his sacred rock on one knee, while the other stones tied
to his net-garment dragged wearily down upon his shoulders.
   Now only one torch still burned; the rocks of the cave all leaned and
swayed with its light. The medicine men were close around it, doing
something—Boris squinted through bleary eyes, and at last decided that
they were lighting small shielded lanterns of some kind. And now the
priest-chief, wearing the biggest mask and longest robe of all, had
appeared in the arena. Another animal-skin robe, dripping wet, was in his
hands. He raised the wet robe above his head, and slowly brought the
night down with it, putting out the light. The last syllable of the chant died
with the sputtering of the torch.
   With sight gone, the sound of trickling water seemed louder. And now
Boris was able to notice that the air in the cave was fresh, and that it was
moving subtly past him. Probably there were several exits. A clever man
might crawl silently through this darkness, find his way out, and be
kilometers away in the woods, drinking safely from a fresh stream, before
his tormentors even missed him. Never mind; any man who thought
himself that clever would be certain to crawl into a trap and get himself
speared to death. Still Boris could not free himself of the thought that
escape was now a possibility. This cave seemed to have been designed for
concealed movement.
   At least, he told himself, he was now free to try. Or had his free will
really been restored? Was Magnuson planning on the ordeal as part of the
cure—
   A hideous scream tore through the blackness, echoing and re-echoing,
like some frenzied animal leaping from one wall to another of its cage.
Boris kept himself under control. He continued to sit still. There was a
shuffle of movement nearby and the sound of heavy breathing. The
sounds died out again. Somewhere a Kappan boy began a hesitant,
groping chant, as if inventing prayer.
   Boris's eyes had slowly grown more sensitive in the darkness. Now he
could detect a faint blur of light across the upper part of the cave.
   "Brazil? Magnuson? Anyone near me?" The quiet voice was that of
Jones, and it came from somewhere nearby on Boris's right.
   No one jumped at Jones to kill him for speaking, so Boris judged it was
probably safe to answer. "Brazil here. What's up?"
   "Good. Listen, Brazil, some of these guys with the spears may have
taken a drug to sharpen their night vision. Before this started I heard one
of the women saying something about it."
   "One of the women?" Talking was rough on the dried-out throat, but it
might help the cause of sanity.
   "Yes. Judging from what I heard, the women have their initiation in
this cave too. None of them ever get killed; Brenda and Jane are probably
having a feast with their new sisters right now. How long do you suppose
we've been in here?"
   "I don't know."
   No one else seemed disposed to join the conversation. Either the other
Earth-descended were out of earshot, or they thought that talking was too
risky. Or they were simply saving their throats. There was silence for a
little while.
    "Brazil, you don't think I really wanted to leave my family, do you?
Leave, abandon, everything I had and everything I was? Maybe you
wanted to be a slave to this Water of Thought, but I didn't."
    Boris's head jerked around. He stared into the darkness, toward the
invisible Jones. "What do you mean, maybe I wanted to be a slave?"
    "Well. Some people do want to get rid of all responsibility. It occurred
to me."
    For a moment Boris was unable to reply. He felt a great, hollow rage.
There's no truth at all in that, he thought. Not in my case. I wasn't tired of
being responsible for myself.
    God. It couldn't be true, could it? He shivered, sitting still in the damp,
moving air. It couldn't. But suppose…
    Suppose that the effect of the Water of Thought upon an Earth-
descended human, or human male at least, was this: to push the mind in
whichever direction it happened to be leaning, making a fatal obsession
out of what had been only a potential weakness.
    Was this realization in itself the cure that Magnuson had predicted? Or
was it the cure, but Magnuson didn't realize it?
    From off among the rocks there came a sudden weak flash of light—
one of the dark lanterns flicked open for just an instant. There was a
startled gasp from someone and then a return of darkness and silence.
After some timeless interval, another lantern flashed in another part of the
cave, accompanied by sounds of sudden movement and a cry of fear.
Boris made his muscles relax and tried to keep his mind on things other
than thirst and physical danger.
    Perhaps it was well that he did, for the next light that flashed
illuminated the area just in front of Boris, and he saw that between him
and the lantern crawled the figure of Red Circles, knife in hand. In the
next instant blackness had returned. Don't move, Boris reminded himself,
under penalty of death. He would like to crack Red Circles on the
knuckles with a kilogram or so of sacred rock, that would be more fun
than moving even, but it too might be considered bad form.
    Surprise. Instead of the now-familiar pain of Red Circles' dull knife,
the lantern beam came again, in the same place. Red Circles was not in
sight. A couple of meters in front of Boris on the cave floor, just far
enough so he would have to leave his place to reach it, was a large cup
holding something that looked like water. The light went out again.
    He was not to move from where they had placed him; they would
know, somehow, if he moved. But Boris's memory held and enlarged the
sight of that cup, full to overflowing, a little water sloshed out carelessly
onto the stone floor as if the cup had just been hastily set down. Boris's
thirsty throat argued that no one could notice a difference if a mouthful of
water were taken out. But his brain knew it was a trap. The cup might
even be poisoned. If he had to, he could go a long time yet without
drinking. And he had to.
    He shifted and stretched his fingers, which were growing stiff from
gripping the sacred tool-rock; it would not do to drop the thing by
accident. Then he gave a little jump, and cursed, as Red Circles jabbed
him nastily from behind, out of utter silence and darkness. Boris felt sure
it had been Red Circles again; he thought that he could recognize the
technique by now. He kept himself from trying to kill Red Circles.
    What price free will now?
    From somewhere in the cave there came an animal sound, a growling
and snuffling that spoke plainly of a prowling predator. Boris's intellect
insisted that it must be only a warrior doing imitations, and with some
effort Boris kept his intellect firmly in control.
    Soon, from close in front of him, came the faintest possible sound. As
if someone might be there, examining the cup, or removing it.
    Immeasurable time hung in the cave. Its darkness swarmed with ghosts
of sound, like the murmur in a man's ears of his own bloodstream. Like
the unimaginable sounds inside an anthill whose inhabitants are seeking a
way to climb out toward sentience. Growing louder now in the mind, a
whispering that might have been blind cells; evolving, pre-conscious still,
but desperate to grow, to find the long, hard way to Thought…
    This was becoming much worse than the dance.
    Boris ached to leap up, to fight, to run away; but he made himself sit
still. When the animal snuffling sounded again, it was almost a relief.
    Now Boris could hear Red Circles coming to stick him again, behind
the rocks to his left rear. It was a very faint sound of movement, but Boris
heard it. How good it would be to turn around and smash the Sacred Rock
into—
   "Boris?" It was only the tiny ghost of a whisper, but he knew
immediately that it came from Brenda. Great Gods of all the Themes! He
wanted to whisper to her to get out of here, but his dry throat choked.
   "Boris, it's Brenda. I can see, a little. Do you need water?"
   "Yes," he got out, in a faint whisper. "But—"
   She was moving away already, crawling in almost perfect silence,
apparently going to get him a drink. She must be mad, completely mad.
But what was he to do, call her back and start an argument?"
   Then Jones's voice came again, from somewhere on Boris's right.
   "Brazil, I did want to. I've thought it out, I've faced it."
   "Jones? What's that?"
   "I did want to give up everything. I sit here in the dark, and I can see
into myself. I left Kitty, and I left my work, and everything else I had. I
wanted to be a fanatic, to give up my whole life for something, and I did.
For the Water."
   "It—may work out." Boris could hardly understand what Jones was
talking about. He was listening for Brenda, expecting every second to
hear the sounds of her capture or murder. He wondered if any of the
warriors who must be listening now could understand his talk with Jones.
Quietly Boris stretched and flexed his legs, getting ready for the hopeless
running fight that seemed inevitable now. At least such a distraction
might give Brenda some chance to escape. But how had she got into the
cave? and where was she?
   "It'll work out, all right, Brazil. I'll tell you how it will. I gave up
everything for the Water, and now it's given me up. I'm cured." Jones's
voice was dead.
   "What?"
   "That last drink we had, starting this initiation business. It tasted the
same, but it meant nothing to me—it had no effect. I'm dead, Brazil. My
life has gone, for nothing."
   Boris was listening and listening for Brenda, sifting every whisper of
sound from the far reaches of the cave. He almost shouted for Jones to
shut up. "Maybe so, Jones," he said.
   "Maybe so? Maybe so? Listen, Brazil, they put a cup here, right in
front of me. I wonder what's in it."
   "They set a cup here too but I didn't taste it."
   "No, you wouldn't. You're not the kind to give up your life for
something. Nobody's ever understood me. Not my wife or anyone else. If
I thought that this cup had the real Water in it, and that I might feel it
again—"
   "Can't you keep quiet?"
   "Quiet? Quiet? Gods of Space, I'm dead, and you say keep quiet. All
right, Brazil, I'm putting you back under orders, right now. Don't move
unless I tell you, and don't lie to me."
   Boris heard a faint sound behind me, and he knew somehow that it was
Brenda coming back, bringing him water. He was afraid to try to move.
His freedom had been only an illusion, and at a word from his master it
had flickered away into nothing. Boris could do nothing for Brenda, or for
himself, or for anyone else. Whatever happened was not going to be his
fault, no, not this time.
   Jones said, "Brazil, is your cup still there? Taste it and tell me what it
is."
   "I don't know if it's here."
   "Boris." It was Brenda's whisper, from behind him. Boris realized
suddenly that they must have given her the Water of Thought during the
women's ceremony, and that it must have unbalanced her in some way.
That was what brought her here now, trying in this mad fashion to help
him.
   Jones said: "Brazil, I order you."
   "Boris." She whispered his name again, and this time one of the
warriors heard her. Boris could -vaguely see the man's upper body; he
was passing nearby, turned at the sound of Brenda's voice. He stood for a
moment without moving, probably incredulous, and then, soft-footed as a
cat, came closer to investigate. In ghostly silence the warrior passed so
near that Boris could see he carried a short spear, and was going to probe
with the spear for Brenda.
   Boris moved, without thinking of whether it might be possible—the
terrible thing called freedom was his again.
   He should have used the sacred rock, but for some reason he set it
down before he rose up silently behind the warrior. Boris's left hand
shoved low into the Kappan's back, ready to break his balance, and
Boris's right arm whipped around in the silent-killing throat attack. Boris
was stiff and weak; the man was not properly caught but retained balance
enough to twist around and gasp in air, getting ready to yell. Boris drove
knuckles into the man's throat, preventing any intelligible outcry, and then
grappled for the spear.
   A second later the silhouette of the warrior's head bent backward;
hands had reached from behind him to claw at his face. Boris managed to
wrench the spear away, spun it end for end, and drove it home. A dying
weight sagged away, sliding quietly to the floor of the cave.
   Then Brenda had Boris by the hand. She was kissing his hand and
tugging on it at the same time, pulling him away. He let her lead him. The
only hope now was to get out of the cave, and quickly, by whatever route
she had used to sneak in. Other warriors must already be approaching to
check out what had caused the scuffle.
   Behind Boris, a far louder struggle exploded in the darkness. Jones's
voice bellowed: "Brazil! There is no cure! Obey me! Fight for me!"
   Lantern beams were springing alive, centered upon Jones. He had
captured a spear, and was fighting like some mad Norseman. Another
spear had already been thrust through his body. One warrior lay at his
feet, while more of them closed in.
   There was nothing to do but go with Brenda and get out of there. Boris
followed her insistent tugging, away from the lights and the struggle,
under an overhang of rock that forced them both down to hands and
knees, on after that into still deeper darkness.
   "Brazil, fight for me! I'll have the Water—before—"
   Jones's voice died away, and the sounds of fighting with it. The faint
reflected glow of the lanterns had now vanished entirely from Boris's
vision. Jones is cured, he thought suddenly.
   It was as dark as total blindness here. Brenda had released Boris's hand
and crawled ahead of him. Now and then his hand, groping for the way,
fell on her shoe or ankle. The way had now become a tight, low passage
through which he was almost too big to scrape. He lost the rocks from his
net-suit, and he lost a little more skin, but he got through, still gripping his
captured spear. After perhaps thirty meters of this kind of crawling he
could hear insects. A few meters more and the overhead suddenly
receded. Raising his head he glimpsed a sliver of comparative brightness,
like the night sky. And there, a star.
    There was room now for him to move beside Brenda. "This way out is
the women's secret," she whispered. "One of them showed it to me today.
And I took some of their night-vision drug."
    Now at last there was room for them to stand and walk; the secret
passage emerged into the open air through an otherwise almost
inaccessible hole in the rocky hillside. Only now did Boris fully
understand, with dull surprise, that night had indeed fallen again; he had
been all day inside the cave.
    They were standing on a sort of rocky balcony, in front of which a
boulder made a crude, chest-high parapet. Anyone starting up the hillside
from below would have a hard climb getting to them, and they were going
to have a hard time getting down.
    "We'll be safe here, for a while," Brenda whispered. "All alone." She
put her arms around Boris and pulled his head down and kissed him
fiercely. Then she let go of him abruptly. He could see in the starlight that
her hands were busy with the front of her own coverall.
    He was so stupid with thirst and fatigue and weary pain that for a
moment he did not comprehend what she was doing. "What… ?"
    "Boris, please. I can't help myself." She had started to take off her
coverall; it was pulled down to her waist; and now Brenda threw an
undergarment aside. "Here." She grabbed his hand and pulled it to her
breasts.
    "No," he croaked. Stupid as he was, he realized that it was the damned
Thought-Water making her do this. She had been leaning toward loving
him, and the Water had pushed her, as it had pushed them all. Anyway,
the only animal urge he was able to feel at the moment was thirst.
"Water," he croaked, looking downhill over the starlit forest.
    "Boris! Boris?"
    But he was already climbing over the irregular natural parapet. He
scraped himself some more, but hardly felt the damage. Down under
those trees somewhere was water, real water, cool and drinkable. He
hadn't staggered far down the slope before Brenda was with him, her
clothing more or less arranged again, holding his arm to keep him from
falling on his face. "The river's this way," she said. Her voice sounded as
if she might be weeping.
    He was headed that way already; it was obvious from the shape of the
land where the Yunoee must lie. He reeled toward it with only elementary
caution, and when he came to it at once threw himself down on the bank.
He thrust in his head, he drank and wallowed. He emerged with a
sharpened awareness of all his pains and problems, but he felt able again
to think with something like clarity.
   Brenda was lying beside him on the bank, waiting for him. "Now,
Boris. Please. Love me." Again the coverall was open. Almost off, not
quite. He understood with pity that she was trying to be as provocative as
possible.
   "Brenda, not here, now now. I've got to run for my life, they'll be out
here after me any minute. It's the drug making you do this now—"
   She gave a little scream, pure suffering, as if he had burned her with a
hot iron. Her hand lashed out to slap across his face. "You filth! I risked
my life to save you!"
   "Brenda—" He hesitated. Was it worse to bring her with him or to
leave her here? Was her ankle ready to stand a long flight? He didn't
know how fast he himself was going to be able to move, shoeless and
battered as he was. If she stayed here, and they didn't know she had
sneaked into the cave, Magnuson might protect her; whereas if she fled
with Boris, and they were caught… but Morton and Kaleta were here,
too…
   Brenda lay on her back. She spoke now in a sober voice: "Boris, I tell
you I've got to have you. I can't help it. Otherwise I'll kill myself."
                                  VII.
   Boris scrambled to his feet and reached to pull Brenda up beside him.
"Then come," he said, and kissed her quickly, once, and turned and trotted
away, dodging among the trees as if flint points were already hurtling at
his back—as well they might be, at any moment.
   Brenda kept pace at his side. Her ankle must be healed, or very near it,
or else she was ignoring pain—as he was. They ran in silence, saving
breath. Once Brenda, with her augumented night vision, pulled at his arm
to steer him clear of an almost invisible stump.
   After a few minutes of this Boris halted, in a small clearing, breathing
hard, long enough to get his bearings from the stars. Then they were off
again. Boris had decided to set a course northward, at right angles to the
easterly direction of the colony. Some of Red Circles' men were sure to be
sent to the east, to get ahead of the fugitives and cut them off. Boris meant
to go far enough to the north to get around them.
    But the most immediately important thing to do was to put distance
between themselves and the warriors' village. So far the grassy footing
was fairly easy, and Boris meant to make the most of it. With daylight
they would have to find a place to hide and rest; then he could think about
improvising shoes as well as scrounging food.
    Brenda, who had not spoken since he had pulled her up from the
riverbank, still matched the speed of his long strides through the night.
She at least had shoes on. But her ankle… so far she was giving no sign
that it might be a difficulty.
    More minutes had passed, and there was no sign of pursuit as yet. Now
a small ridge of land cut across their way, and Boris, saving breath,
indicated silently that they should climb it. Going up, he avoided any way
that looked in the starlight like a path, for beside a trail on this rim would
be an ideal spot for a sentry. Red Circles, he thought, you're going to have
quite a chase before you catch us, giving us this much of a start. In fact
you'll find to your surprise that you can't catch us at all—positive thinking
is the thing.
    At the top of the ridge they paused again for breath. Boris looked back
along the way they had come, and reached to grip Brenda's hand tightly in
his. Now there were torches visible among the trees; but the searchers'
lights were scattered widely and uncertainly, and Boris and Brenda had
several hundred meters on the nearest of them.
    Her face was turned up to him in the starlight; an anxious, trusting face,
very beautiful to him now. "Are you all right?" she whispered. "Can you
go on?"
    "I'm all right. Your ankle?"
    "It doesn't hurt."
    He was about to remind her that it was not too late for her to turn back
and seek Magnuson's protection. But something in the way that Brenda
was looking at him now reminded him of her pledge to kill herself if
Boris abandoned her. "That's good," he said. "Come on."
    He set a course along one side of the ridge, north into the hills. Brenda
with night-seeing eyes chose the easiest path among trees and brush.
Again they were silent as they traveled, and Boris used the time for
thought.
   As he read the situation, once the ordeal was over Magnuson would
willingly join in the pursuit. When officially a member of the tribe he
would be a great Kappan chief, and could have no tolerance for those who
fled from baptism. That Morton and Kaleta, if they survived the test,
would also join the chase was obvious.
   His thinking seemed to be discovering nothing but new problems, not
ways out of them. When the ridge they were following mingled with a
jumble of other hills, Boris continued to direct their flight northward,
angling a little to the east. Their pursuers seemed not to be prospering, for
when he looked back from high spots he saw no more torches. But the
real pursuit had not got started yet. The Kappans would probably wind up
the initiation ceremony, and wait until dawn, before organizing an all-out
search.
   Now for a while north was downhill, and the going correspondingly
faster. Presently they came to a stream. Boris was almost sure it was the
Yunoee again, here upstream from the villages. Brenda agreed with his
judgment that there were probably no more villages up this way; neither
of them had heard any mentioned. He drank deeply again, and this time
she drank at his side.
   "We've got to keep going," he told her. "But first I have to rest a
minute." He sat down for a moment on the grassy bank beside the star-
reflecting water…
   A vivid flash of memory came, a picture of Jones, fighting in the cave,
his body transfixed by a spear. Boris's head jerked up in alarm. He had
dozed into sleep, sitting slumped over on the bank of the murmuring
stream; he woke now with his head pillowed on Brenda's lap.
   Gods of Space, he had more than dozed, the eastern sky was gray!
Boris jumped to his feet in a near panic. He turned his head this way and
that, looking and listening, ignoring Brenda's soft protests that she had
been on guard all the time.
   "You should have wakened me!"
   "You looked so bad, so worn out. I was afraid you'd collapse if you
tried to go on without rest."
   Muttering, he waded into the stream, and bent to drink again.
   The water here tasted faintly fishy. Well, what was so strange about
that? There were doubtless a number of different things that could make a
stream taste fishy. Fish, for one.
   "What is it, Boris?"
   "I don't know. Nothing. Come on, we've got to move. We'll travel in
the water now."
   Brenda followed him. The Yunoee flowed dark and quiet around their
knees, swallowing their trail as they waded upstream. Boris stopped now
and then to bathe his stiffening little wounds. He washed the dried
Kappan blood from the spear that he still carried.
   Dawn was becoming a fact. Boris tasted the river again. It wasn't just
fishy; there was no use trying to deny that here it savored faintly of the
Water of Thought. That was one taste that he was never going to forget.
   Tangled thickets nearby grew right down to the water's edge. Boris
probed his way with the spear into the densest growth, where midnight
gloom still held. "There's a little space in here. We'd better rest here
through the day."

   When with the second dawn the ordeal came to an end, Magnuson with
the other survivors returned to a joyful welcome in the Warriors' Village.
Their wounds were treated, and the new members of the tribe drank and
ate and rested beside the old. The festivities were marred and somewhat
rushed by the news of Brazil's so-far-successful flight. But before
allowing himself to think much about that problem, to sleep, or even to
relax, Magnuson had first to see that the new man, the one-handed
hominid, was safely housed in the pen where he had been one of six
confined animals the day before yesterday. Then, planning the new man's
protection and education, Magnuson fell asleep.
   He was awakened by a not-too-gentle prodding. Standing over him was
a figure wearing a ground-suit. Startled, Magnuson jumped to his feet.
   It was Morton's face inside the helmet.
   "Magnuson, you're coming with me. They haven't caught Brazil yet,
and we can't let him reach the colony, him, or Brenda either. I can run
them down easy in this suit, if I can get on their trail. But I need some
guides and trackers to do that, and I need you along to interpret. Also I
want to keep you under my eye."
   Magnuson thought about Brazil. It was too bad, but… "Yes, he must be
caught. And I suppose the girl too."
   "Damn right. I'm glad you see things straight for once."
   Jane, excited, came running up to them. "I'll come with you, Don. I'll
help."
   "Woman on a war party? I don't think the spear-carriers would go for
that."
   "I suppose you're right." Jane was pale, breathing heavily. "But you'll
catch them, won't you? Both of them, and bring them back?"
   "You just a little jealous, Janey?" Morton grinned.
   The young woman's face twisted into a mask of insane excitement; of
hate, the like of which Magnuson had never seen on a rational human.
Jane raised clawed fingers. "When I get my hands on her again…"
   Magnuson, watching, felt a weary concern. He had too much to do, too
many responsibilities. Jane and Brenda had both been given the Water of
Thought for the first time, and he, under the press of other worries, had all
but forgotten to consider the fact. Of course the Water was likely to have
a drastic effect on their psyches. Not so great as if they were males, of
course but… and Morton! Again Magnuson was going to have to deal
with a madman clothed in the power of a groundsuit.
   Magnuson looked closely at Morton. "How do you feel?" he asked,
carefully.
   "Feel? I'll feel fine, as soon as I get Brazil in these." Morton raised the
suit's armored hands, and smiled again. "You look a little surprised to see
me dressed up, Doctor. Why, you told me the whole tribe would be my
brothers now. Nobody stopped me putting it on."
   "Will you two get going, then?" urged Jane, her fingers twisting
nervously at her hair. "Catch them. Why should she ever have him?"
   "She's right, Professor," said Morton. "Come on, let's get the show on
the road."
   "All right. All right, I'll come with you. Where's Kaleta? I'll have to
leave some instructions with him."
   "In there, still sleeping it off. Hurry up!"
   Magnuson entered the indicated hut and shook the mayor awake.
"Kaleta, can I trust you to do something important?"
   "Uh. I can hardly move."
   "You needn't move much. I've got to go off with Morton, for days
perhaps. My hominid is in the pen, here in the village. I don't really
expect any of the villagers to attack him now, but I want you to guard
him, just in case. And give him food and water. It is supremely important
that he survive. You must watch over him till I get back."
   "Awright. When I wake up."
   "You're awake now. You can move out there and sleep in front of the
pen. No one will bother you."
   From outside, Morton shouted: "Get the lead out, Magnuson! I'm
taking a regular war party north! That's the way they went!"
   But Magnuson persisted. Half-dragging, half-cajoling, he got Kaleta
out of the hut and posted where he wanted him. Then there were a few
other preparations to be made as rapidly as possible. Morton fumed, but
had to concede grudgingly that the prospect of an extended march made
them necessary.
   Setting out at last with Morton and six warriors, Magnuson glanced
back into the empty-looking village. Kaleta's plump form was stretched
out in sleep beside the pen. Above him the one-handed hominid reached
out through the palings, as if still asking some patient question.

   Boris woke to find the sun near the zenith, one greenish glint of its
surface coming through the close tangle of the thicket to strike him in the
eyes. His head was on something yielding… not Brenda's thigh this time,
but her folded coverall. The bare softness of her body lay curled and
snuggled at his side. Last night… yes, last night.
   The thicket was quiet. The river murmured just out of sight. Boris
eased himself up to a sitting position, his cuts and bruises protesting
fiercely. He was ravenously hungry, and reached out at once for a sample
of the juicy stalk of a likely-looking plant. While awaiting his stomach's
judgement on this morsel, and for Brenda to awake, he maneuvered
himself into a crouching position under the close overhang of branches,
and pulled off one of the small rocks still hanging to his net-garment.
With this he set about quietly trying to detach the sleeves of Brenda's
coverall, with a view to making himself some kind of footgear.
   His moving around soon woke her, and she looked up at him
unreadably. Even before she moved, she asked him: "Boris, do you love
me?"
   "Yes." He knew he was answering the Water. But what else could he
have said?
   Brenda sat up and looked at what he was doing. "Let me help you with
that," she offered, having grasped at once what he was trying to do.
   After a little discussion of the project he let her take over, and crawled
about cautiously prospecting for more food. A few trees grew up through
the thicket, and under the loose, shaggy bark on their trunks Boris
discovered some grub-like things. These creatures were no doubt rich in
protein and fat and the first one he sampled was quite palatable, at least to
an experienced planeteer who thought about something else while
swallowing. Brenda made a face at the idea of such fare, but then she
wasn't really hungry yet. Boris wasn't either—that is, not approaching
starvation—but he didn't need to let things go that far before he could
suppress his civilized tastes. Today even raw and hairy food meant
strength, and strength meant life.
   Brenda did try some of the juicy plant, whose sampling had not as yet
made Boris sick.
   "I wish they hadn't made this damn thing so well," she muttered,
working awkwardly with rock and spearpoint to separate the coverall's
seams. Naked, crouching over her primitive job, she looked like a
primitive herself. Not really, though.
   "Hey."
   She looked up, from under a tangle of soft brown hair.
   "I do love you."
   They ate a little more, and lay together once more and rested, and then
worked again on the job of making footwear. At last Boris had, if not
shoes, at least a pair of very tough socks bound onto his ankles with net-
strings. The loss of the net garment didn't bother Boris much; it had
provided neither modesty nor protection. Then they slept.
   It was nearly dark again when they were wakened by men's voices,
moving along the opposite bank of the stream, no more than ten meters
away. It sounded like the villagers' language. The two in the thicket, he
with spear in hand, she gripping a rock, waited silent and motionless until
the sounds of speech had faded out into the distance.
   "What do we do now?" Brenda whispered cooly then.
   "Let's discuss."
   It was nearly six days now, to the best of Boris's calculations, since
Jones had pointed an energy rifle at him and compelled him to swallow
the Water of Thought. It was a couple of days since the ordeal had started,
and doubtless that had been over for some time. For nearly twenty
standard hours Boris and Brenda had been free, a state of affairs that
would not sit well with the Kappans, or with Magnuson, or with the
smugglers either.
   "The Kappans probably won't care a whole lot one way or the other
about you," he whispered to Brenda, watching her work, her way as
quietly as possible back into what was left of the coverall.
   "I suppose; what's one female more or less? But Don Morton and our
dear mayor will have other ideas." She reached for her shoes.
   "But I think Magnuson is probably still in charge."
   "Are you telling me I should give myself up?" Her fingers, ready to
pull on a shoe, were still.
   "No. Only that if worst ever comes to worst… your ankle's still
swollen, isn't it? You're having trouble getting that shoe on."
   "I can walk."
   "We ought to be able to tie some-kind of bandage on it."
   They did. By that time it was quite dark, and Boris, spear in hand, led
the way out of the thicket and into the river again. When he drank, he was
again aware of the taste of the Water of Thought. It was faint but
undeniable. This time he spoke of it to Brenda, and she agreed with him.
Now was not the time to debate possible explanations. They moved on
upstream.
   Within a kilometer, as Boris had more or less expected, they ran into
steep rapids. Here they had to climb from the stream; and when he stood
on the high bank looking back he got a nasty shock. There were lanterns
bobbing about near the thicket where they had spent the day. His plan had
used up their strength and time, and had moved them a score of
kilometers farther from the colony, but their pursuers were now as close
on their trail as ever. Or at least some of them were. He had succeeded in
scattering and worrying his tribe of enemies somewhat, but that was about
all.
   There was a reasonable path here following the course of the river, and
he led Brenda upstream along it. If they struck off through the bush now
they might slow themselves down critically and would certainly leave a
plainer trail. The sleeve-socks were an enormous help; getting, even this
far without them would probably have been impossible; but Boris doubted
whether they were going to be enough. Tonight, he thought, my feet will
give out on rocks or plant-stubble somewhere. From then on I crawl.
   As before they spoke little on the trail, giving them both plenty of time
for private thoughts. Boris looked up frequently at the stars. The cruiser
had been scheduled to arrive three days ago, and it might very well be up
there in orbit now. But then, the difficulties of astrogation being what they
were, the ship might very well be three days more, or even longer, in
reaching the system. And when it did arrive, and the people on board
learned something of the colonists' difficulties, they would hardly start
their search during the hours of darkness.
   These were not very positive thoughts that Boris was entertaining
himself with, but they were the best he could do at the moment.
   It was a nightmare of a night. All through it, four or five lanterns stayed
on their trail in the dark, becoming visible whenever Boris and Brenda
topped a rise. At last the undergrowth beside the riverbank trail thinned
somewhat, and they could move away from the river long enough to start
a false trail or two. These seemed temporarily effective; each took their
pursuers a little time to figure out.
   His feet. His weary muscles. He was debating with himself whether to
try sending Brenda on ahead; and then he saw in the starlight how her
mouth was set. Now when he looked at her movements closely he could
see that she was trying to conceal a limp.
   "Your ankle. I thought it was all right now."
   "I must have given it another little twist back there. One of those
underwater rocks. Boris, go on ahead. They won't hurt me if they catch
me, you said so yourself. But they'll kill you."
   He might have laughed, if his throat wasn't so sore. If several other
things. "I'm moving at about top speed right now, girl. I was about to send
you running on ahead."
   After that there seemed no more to say.
   At dawn there were no dense thickets to hide in readily available, and
the last look at the lanterns had shown them so close behind that Boris
dared not delay even a minute to look for a good hiding place. They were
following the spine of a high, wooded ridge now, and they just kept
moving along it. Boris considered going downhill into the ravine, hoping
to find a wadable stretch of the Yunoee, or some other stream to drown
their trail; but if he went foothill and then missed finding an escape, the
hunters would be down on them like an avalanche. He didn't think that he
could climb another hill.
   Having just admitted that to himself, he saw a place just ahead where
the ridge that they were following angled higher. A sketch of a path led
upward, and in the soft dust were several sets of prints, from what
certainly looked like bare prime-theme-human feet. He pointed a finger at
them and croaked something.
   "Boris, I can't make it." Brenda stumbled, tried to get up, then stayed
down on her knees. "Go on. I'm going to try to hide."
   If he tried to help her walk they were both going to fall down. "I
shouldn't…" He wanted to say that he shouldn't have brought her, let her
come along, however it had happened. Too late now. He bent over Brenda
where she sat in the dust and they clasped their hands, all four of them,
together.
   He could do nothing for her unless he got away.
   "They won't hurt me. Go on."
   Actually he thought she was going to be better off being caught
separately from him. He croaked some kind of a farewell and turned and
tried the hill. Somewhat to his surprise he found that he could manage it,
at least on this soft dusty trail. His feet had once been useful things, and
he supposed they might someday be so again, but right now he would
prefer not to know them. As for things like water and food and rest…
rest…
   He was getting lightheaded, and all he had to do now was faint and roll
back downhill; that would fix everything nicely. Scion of the Martian
Brazils, famous bon vivant and adventurer, adjudged not quite human by
Red Circles, scion of the Kappan Circles…
   Boris topped a small rise in the trail and stopped to breathe. Brenda had
managed to get out of sight somewhere, he couldn't see her. He could see
the warriors coming, though, only two hundred meters behind him now,
and they undoubtedly saw him. There were ten of them, and one had
something over his eyes as if to shield them from the light. So, one had
taken the night-vision drug, that was how they had tracked the fugitives
through the night with only torches and lanterns to light the trail. It
seemed unfair.
   Boris climbed on. He had to pause now at every second or third step to
rest, and he looked back each time he paused. The warriors saw him, all
right, for they pointed at him, and waved their weapons as if to urge one
another on. But still they advanced only hesitantly, making no real speed.
Could they possibly fear him? Did they think he had magic powers which
had let him escape the ordeal?
   Gritting his teeth and gripping his spear, Boris kept going. They
weren't gong to take him prisoner, no, not again. His hunters continued to
gain on him, but as it were reluctantly. Maybe from down there he looked
like a man walking deliberately, contemptuous of his pursuers. Maybe if
he turned around and walked toward them they would run.
   He glanced back once more and nearly fell, for his hunters were indeed
retreating, backing downhill with nocked arrows and leveled spears. Boris
looked uphill, and saw the hominid troop coming down in a slow semi-
circle, dozens of wild adults, armed with stones and crude clubs. He faced
immediately toward the retreating hunters and hurled his spear after them,
staggering with the effort. The spear fell ludicrously short, but the gesture
just might suggest to the hominids that his heart was in the right place.
   About half of the hominid numbers charged downhill past Boris,
howling at his erstwhile pursuers, who turned and fled. The other half
surrounded him, yipping and jabbering about him, not knowing what to
make of him. These were no dead-eyed quarry beasts. It seemed to Boris,
groggy as he was, that these might very well be men. He made a
planeteers' gesture designed for communicating with Apparent Primitives,
and aroused some interest. The hominids formed a loose squatting circle
around Boris, and took turns jabbering. They shooed insects, and panted
and yawned, incidentally displaying their human teeth.
   Boris's head was spinning, but he kept on making gestures, and tried a
few words of this and that, being careful not to sound like a villager. His
audience gaped unappreciatively. To blazes with them all, and also with
the idea of preserving a show of something or other. If he was going to
die here, it would not be while standing on these feet. He sat down in the
dust, and by probing gingerly through the fabric of his improvised socks
tried to decide how much was left of his soles.
   From somewhere downhill came cries and shouts that sounded like a
fight in progress. Most of the crowd lost interest in Boris and charged off
in that direction. But half a dozen stayed behind, still watching him.
   Should he try to tell them about Brenda?
   First he was going to have to try to ask them for some water. Because
the sun was so hot…

  He was being carried, his head on a leathery shoulder, other arms and
shoulders supporting his body. Hominid smell was thick about him.
Overhead, treetops flowed by at a fast walk.
   Boris's mouth was wet; it seemed that water had been poured on him,
and he had a memory of recent choking and swallowing. It was dim here
under the tall trees, though what little Boris could see of the sky was still
bright with daylight. The trail he was on was narrow and twisting,
overhung by many branches. His unspeaking bearers were carrying him
into some secret fastness of the dim green forest.
                                 VIII.
   Capture, thought Brenda, had been something of an anticlimax.
   The scowling warriors who had at last come upon her trying to hide in
the woods had jabbered contemptuously. Obviously they were at first of
two minds as to whether to take her into custody, or simply hurry on with
the important part of the chase, ignoring the alien female with the flat
forehead, close-set eyes, and what they must think of as disgustingly soft
skin.
   But in the end they had collected her, and one of the junior members of
the party after some protest had been delegated to lead her back toward
the Warriors' Village. Once deprived of his part in the glorious chase, her
disgruntled guard had seemed in no great hurry to get home, which was a
relief. Brenda hobbled along in front of him as best she could, wishing
that she had a crutch. And she thought about Boris as she went.
   Looking back now, she was abruptly horrified at the memory of how
she had acted on first getting him out of the cave, how close she had come
to getting them both killed…
   But he knew what the Water of Thought could do; he would
understand. After going through one day of it himself, Brenda wondered
how Boris could possibly have retained his basic sanity through five.
   Hobbling through the woods, almost back at the village now, she
smiled, lightly and briefly, remembering that day in the thicket. There was
something good to be said for madness. If you could only turn it on and
off…
   She had felt the madness and now she knew it for what it was. And she
considered herself free of it now. And she would be ready this moment to
rejoin Boris if by doing so she could be of any help.
   He hadn't been caught. He hadn't been caught yet. There had been
yelling on the trail ahead, immediately after they had separated, when
Brenda had crawled off the trail and tried to hide. But those yells had not
been cries of triumph, she was sure of that. And now, on her way back to
the Warriors' Village as a prisoner again, another search party, outward
bound, passed her and her escort. And the warriors in it were made angry
by what her escort had to say to them. And, when no one could see her,
Brenda smiled.
   As with her capture, there was no particular excitement about her
arrival, when she limped at last back into the village common, and was
allowed to sit down there in the dust. The few children playing nearby
took little notice. Nor did the women who were passing to and fro,
stolidly engaged with their eternal chores. Brenda was one of the tribe
now, and the women made friendly gestures to her across the barrier of
language. They didn't mind that she had run away. Probably they had
done that, or felt like doing it, themselves.
   "Brenda!" It was Jane, her face showing relief, running toward her.
"Brenda, honey. Oh, I'm so glad you're all right. You are, aren't you?"
   "Basically. How about you? Where are the others?" Brenda let Jane
help her to her feet, and lead her to a nearby log that served the village as
a bench.
   "Nothing's happened to me, honey. Except… Don went wild when
Boris got away. Worse than any of the Kappans. He's out chasing Boris
now, and Dr. Magnuson is too." Jane, her face troubled, sat down at
Brenda's side. "Eddie was killed, in the ordeal."
   "I know. I'm sorry."
   "Yes. I don't think he'd have taken me offworld anyway. I think he had
one of those permanent marriages." Jane pulled her arm from Brenda's
touch. "Bren, I have to confess something. It must have been that drug
that made me do it. When I heard that Boris had run away with you, I—I
was hoping that they'd catch you. In fact I ran around here screaming, like
some terrible… I wanted to see him dead, and you too, rather than see
you with a good man I couldn't have." Jane began to cry. "I don't suppose
you can understand. How could you?"
   "Oh, Janey, it was that awful drug. I know. It—it made me do things
too."
   The two small town girls who had grown up together sat side by side,
trying to comfort each other, both of them weeping.
   "Where's Mayor Pete?" Brenda asked, finally, dabbing at her eyes and
looking around the village.
   "Lying around somewhere. He hasn't got over the initiation yet. I wish
I'd never heard of him, or Don Morton either. I knew they were both
rotten, and still I played along with them."

    Pete Kaleta peered cautiously around the corner of the hominid's pen,
looking across the village common at the two girls, who were now crying
on each other's shoulders again. Probably they were set to talk and weep
the rest of the day. They were not likely to interfere with anything he did.
    The hominid inside the pen reached out through the palings to touch
Kaleta's coverall; Kaleta brushed the single leathery hand away with
distaste.
    "So, you and I belong to the same club now," he said aloud, looking at
the hominid. Both bore practically the same ritual wounds from the
ordeal. "I hope you feel as lousy as I do."
    The pale eyes looked back at Kaleta with what might be frustration, as
if the creature wanted to talk to him, and almost but not quite knew how.
    Kaleta turned away. Since the ordeal he had not been able to think for
long of anything, not even his injuries, but one thing: what he had seen in
the Temple Village, only a few kilometers away—a vat, filled with many
liters of the Water of Thought.
    The interstellar crime syndicate would pay a fortune, a vast fortune, for
the contents of that vat. And now the warriors were gone from all the
villages, Magnuson and Morton were gone too, Jones and Brazil were out
of the way. There was no one, really, between Kaleta and all that wealth
down in village.
   And the copter was still parked in concealment down there near the
Temple Village. Magnuson believed himself to have the only power key
for that copter, but Magnuson was wrong, not as smart as he thought he
was. Kaleta had hidden an extra power key inside the copter's cabin, and
he had also concealed a weapon there.
   It was not likely that Kaleta would ever get a better chance than this.
He could walk downstream right now, go to the copter, and arm himself.
Then he could raid the virtually undefended Temple, and fly away with
buckets full of the Water of Thought. He would hide the stuff somewhere
nearer the colony, and when the Space Force came he would put them on
a false trail and try to keep them away from these villages. Of course
there were great risks involved. But the possible reward was so great as to
be worth any imaginable risk.
   Kaleta saw himself safely away from Kappa and the wife who had
gradually become no more than an irritation, amid the fleshpots of Earth
or Planet Golden, maybe allowing a few of the more beautiful women
there to help him spend some of his money.
   He drew a deep breath, and found that his decision was already made.
He would do it; he would gamble everything now. A helpful idea
immediately suggested itself, and Kaleta smiled and opened the door of
the hominid's pen. Let the creature wander away. Then Magnuson,
returning here, might think Kaleta had gone chasing after the escaped
hominid. Or, Magnuson might even blame the villagers for both
disappearances. Either way there would be a diversion.
   Without waiting to see whether the hominid took immediate advantage
of the open door, Kaleta turned and walked calmly away himself, as if he
was just going into the woods to relieve himself. No special preparations
were necessary for his plan. The few Kappan women and children in sight
ignored him; he didn't think Jane or Brenda were aware of him at all.
   Once the trees were solidly around him, Kaleta quickened his pace.
Going downhill, he hoped to be able to reach the Temple Village in two
hours or less.
   As he emerged from the woods onto the riverside path, he stumbled
awkwardly, and cursed. He was still worn out, aching all over, from the
ordeal. He had had only about six hours sleep before Magnuson awakened
him, and very little since then. Plenty of reason to worry. His original plan
with Morton now appeared hopeless. Morton in a groundsuit was another
good reason for Kaleta to get out; he didn't trust Morton a bit. But
overriding all details was the thought of that vat of the Water of Thought,
and the price that the Outfit would pay for it.
   He would get away with twenty or thirty liters if he got a drop; maybe
he could get a lot more. He could force some of the Temple Villagers to
help him carry pails. All Earth-descended men probably looked a lot alike
to them, and he might easily manage to blame his actions on someone
else. There were all kinds of possibilities as well as dangers in his plan; he
would just have to work it out as he went along. But he could not turn
down this chance of enormous wealth—because nothing else mattered, by
comparison.
   His legs were already weary, but still Kaleta walked quickly, sliding
and scrambling down the steeper places in the path. As a member of the
tribe, he expected no trouble from any Kappans he might meet. Even
Magnuson halfway trusted him now, and that was the biggest joke yet.
Magnuson was, must be, highly intelligent. And yet, blinded by his
obsession with ordeals and weeding out the unfit, wanting to be God and
decide who could live and who couldn't, creating men from baboons.
   It was strange, thought Kaleta, how everyone among the Earth-
descended except himself had been mentally twisted by their draughts of
the Water of Thought. Jones, driven to give up everything else just to get
another drink of it. Brazil curiously paralyzed in his will. Magnuson
probably confirmed in his pseudo-religious fanaticism. Jane driven mad
with envy of Brenda, and Brenda… Kaleta hadn't seen enough of her
since the ordeal to know what the effect on her had been. And Morton…
Kaleta hadn't seen much of Morton either, but enough to get the idea. He
looked over his shoulder now and shivered slightly. Morton in his right
mind was bad enough.
   A collection of nuts, all of them. Psychos. It seemed that he, Pete
Kaleta, was the only one who had not been unbalanced by drinking the
Water of Thought. Probably that was because he was the only tough-
minded realist among them to begin with.
   Could he be that firmly certain of his own sanity? As he hurried
downstream now he frowned, trying to step back mentally and view his
present actions with complete fairness, objectivity. His basic goal,
realistically enough, was wealth. Very well. Then it was perfectly logical
for him to steal the most valuable property within reach (which happened
to be the Water), hide it somewhere, and sell it later on. Of course, he
repeated to himself, it was a dangerous plan, but you never gained
anything important without taking risks.
    After he had somehow weathered the inevitable Space Force
investigation, the smart thing would be to smuggle the stolen Water
offworld in small batches. That way the whole thing could never be lost at
once. He had his contact with the Outfit They would know ways. But he
would have to be very careful that they didn't cheat him.
    He would have to be careful in other ways, too. For example, about
suddenly leaving Kappa to enjoy his new wealth. That would look very
suspicious. If need be, he could forego the fleshpots and continue to put
up with his wife's whining and nagging. Once wealth was his, nothing
else would bother him greatly.
    Maybe, with a little luck, Morton and Magnuson and Brazil would all
eliminate one another. That would help a lot, if Kaleta didn't have to try to
kill them himself, or cut them in. And the two young women would have
to be put out of the way somehow; he had known them since they were
just children, and it was sad, but there it was. They were all dangerous to
Kaleta's wealth.
    Anyway, back to the heart of the plan: when he had surmounted all
such dangers in one way or another, he would smuggle his stolen
Thought-Water off world in small batches. He would have his payment
smuggled in, in installments, just as the Water went out. None of your
electronic credits, not in this case. He wanted something more tangible.
He would arrange to be paid in bills of high denomination, which would
take up little space, and so could easily be hidden.
    Puffing with effort, his feet hurting, Kaleta still smiled and maintained
his rapid pace downhill. His vision of wealth, before vague and abstract,
had now taken concrete form. He could almost see the money, the dozens
of crisp bills coming into his hands. Possibly he'd get away with forty
liters of the Water today, and possibly the Outfit would pay him five
million for that much. Maybe just the first installment, for the first small
batch smuggled off-world, would be half a million. He would bury it in
the woods, probably, somewhere fairly near the colony. Interstellar
currency was made to last, physically, and it would stay buried years and
years without any special precautions and still be fresh and crackling
whenever he went to dig it out and look at it and fondle it. Kaleta could
almost see that first payment of half a million, maybe three-quarters of a
million right now, he could see the numbers and the zeros on the bills—
   A rock tripped him, and he sprawled painfully on the path, skinning the
hands he used to break his fall, awaking pain in all his wounds from the
ordeal. He cursed and scrambled to his feet and hurried on.
   After he had stolen and sold this first barrel-full of the Water of
Thought, collecting his first five or six million and putting it away, what
was to prevent him from raiding these villages again and again, getting
away with more and more of the stuff? Maybe the Space Force could be
put off somehow. Maybe he could bribe someone, even a Tribune. Kaleta
grimaced. He would try that only as a last resort, for bribing anyone
important would mean giving up a substantial portion of his wealth. A
crooked Tribune would certainly be very greedy. Kaleta groaned aloud,
hurrying through the woods. It seemed he was doomed to share his
money, with Morton or with someone else.
   A sudden thought stopped Kaleta in the rocky path, and made him face
back upstream. The real wealth, the source of the Water was somewhere
back up there. Immediately after the ordeal, he and the other new
members of the tribe had been told something of its secrets, Magnuson
translating for the others. Most of what had been revealed was magical
nonsense about this and that, but one real secret was that the Water of
Thought was obtained by raiding the territory of the Forest People, north
of the villages. Kaleta had been too groggy then to think or care about it,
but now he saw how this offered unlimited possibilities for the future.
When he had weapons, and a copter, and time.
   But the vat in the temple was a sure thing, and he had better
concentrate now on today's job. When he had that vat emptied he could go
on with further plans. Kaleta faced downstream again, and hurried on.
   Now the Workers' Village was just ahead. A branching trail joined in
here, and along it a few kilted Kappan men were approaching, dragging
with them a half-grown male hominid, gagged by a stick tied into its
mouth, its arms bound. The men were laughing and pleased with
themselves; evidently they had just caught a beast that would be useful in
the quarry. When they saw Kaleta they stopped and stared at him, letting
him pass the intersection ahead of them.
    He waved and smiled at the workers, as he would have done on
meeting Kappans near the colony. He half-understood these villagers'
speech, but now he did not want to try to say anything. All he wanted was
to pass these men without alarming them.
    He apparently succeeded in this, and in another minute was entering
the Workers' Village. The few people he saw were, appropriately enough,
at work, and paid him little attention. Trying to look like a man on a
casual stroll, he stopped at the village well, where the river water came up
mudless after filtering through twenty meters of sand. Taking his time,
Kaleta hauled up a bucket and then drank from a gourd hung at the well.
He smiled at some watching children, and then walked on along the
downstream trail.
    When he was a couple of hundred meters below the Workers' Village,
he looked about to make sure that he was unobserved, then waded out into
the Yunoee. If he had all his directions straight, the copter should be less
than a kilometer from him now. It was hidden at the edge of a landing
clearing in the woods on the other side of the river, just a minute's walk
from the Temple Village. Probably there would be a Kappan guard or two
watching the copter, but Kaleta now had the wounds of the ordeal to
prove that he was one of them. The half-wit fraternity, Brazil had said.
Right now Brazil was probably wishing he had joined.
    The river, nowhere more than a stone's throw wide, was not swift at
this point. Kaleta did not even bother to remove his light boots, though he
had to swim a few strokes near the center of the channel. Then he was
wading again, reaching the opposite shore, and climbing out. The only
people in sight were a few kilted laborers, and they were a long way off
and paying him no attention. He walked away from the river, across a
cultivated field, and then into woods again.
    He located the copter's hiding place with little trouble. It was just a
little natural clearing whose two or three obstructing trees had been
hacked or burned away. The copter was just where Kaleta had last seen
it—pulled a little way back out of the clearing, under high trees whose
canopy of branches would make it virtually invisible from the air. There
were two guards in sight—not fierce warriors, Kaleta saw thankfully, but
a pair of robed priests who looked as if they did not know what to do with
the clubs in their hands. Evidently Red Circles' men were all busy hunting
Brazil.
   Kaleta approached casually, and walked calmly out into the clearing.
He smiled and waved to the priests when they saw him; though not very
martial, they were muscular youngsters, and he was going to have to be
careful.
   "I must enter bird," he said—or tried to say—in their language, as he
walked toward them. He pointed at the copter to show what he meant, and
continued to smile.
   The two regarded him with some dislike, he thought, but no real
suspicion. They gave the impression of being uncertain about the duties of
guards, and jabbered between themselves, saying something about the
chiefs. Finally they made way for Kaleta to approach the copter.
   Still smiling, he stepped past them. He opened the door to the cabin,
and felt inside a small storage compartment under the front seat, letting
out a breath of relief when his fingers located the machine pistol and the
spare power key exactly where he had hidden them, taped to the top of the
compartment out of the way of a casual inspection. There were also a
couple of extra clips of ammunition for the pistol, which he pulled out and
stowed in a pocket of his coverall.
   Then he climbed up into the copter and looked over the controls.
Everything appeared to be in order, ready to go. Now all he had to do was
collect his cargo.
   As he hopped down from the copter and approached the guards with
the gun aimed, his hands were shaking. He had never killed anyone
before, and he felt almost sick at what he was going to do now. But then
he visualized the money again, and saw these two Kappans standing
between himself and it. They would never stand by and let him load
buckets of the Water of Thought and fly away with it.
   The pistol made a low, ripping sound, like heavy cloth tearing. It was
not very loud, but the two young Kappans were twitching on the ground,
amid a great deal of blood. Kaleta saw that he had used up half a clip, and
reloaded. Now his hands were steady. He dragged the riddled bodies into
the bushes, out of sight, and kicked leaves over the blood.
   So far, so good. Now, should he fly the copter into the village? Easier
to get the Water aboard that way. But that would attract the attention of
everyone in the area; and, Kaleta recalled, there were enough trees in the
village to make it difficult at best to land. He wasn't all that great a pilot.
He made sure there were no bloodstains on his hands or clothing, stuck
the pistol inside his coverall, and started briskly along the path to the
village. This was where Brazil in a suit had once confronted and disarmed
him. Not this time, Brazil.
   At one point along the path he had a good view of Great Lake, which
was as calm as ever, rimmed by distant green hills under the greenish
Kappan sky. Lake and hills and sky made a peaceful scene, and Kaleta
stopped for a moment to look at it. He felt a twinge of yearning. Why did
life have to be the grim and ugly thing it was? But there was no getting
around it, the game of life had to be played by the rules of harsh reality.
   He went on. A few seconds' walk took him past the spot where Brazil
had jumped out in the ground-suit. Kaleta smiled.
   His smile grew broader as he entered the Temple Village; it was, if
anything, more nearly deserted than the other two settlements had been.
Kaleta proceeded straight to the Temple and went in. He found no one in
the first chamber. The door behind the stone altar led him into the room
where the Water of Thought was buried. An old priest and a young one
were sitting on mats. They looked up as Kaleta came in, and were
astonished when he went straight to the sunken vat and pulled aside its
coverings. The priests both shouted angrily at him, and he drew the pistol,
wondering if they even knew what it was.
   The older man came forward, waving his arms and yelling. Kaleta shot
him, knocking him back across the room. The young man just stood still,
gaping, frozen with shock.
   Against one wall was a neat stack of wooden buckets with fiber
handles, clean and painted utensils. Possibly, thought Kaleta, they were
the means by which the warriors who raided hominid territory brought
back the Water of Thought. He grabbed up a pair of the buckets, one
nested inside the other, with his left hand, and held them out. The young
man remained frozen. Kaleta cursed him with no effect, and had to kick
him a couple of times before he would start to move.
   "Fill them! Like this!" Kaleta got himself a third pail, and dipped it into
the opened vat. He would be able to carry only one himself; he had to
keep the pistol ready.
   At last the young man got the idea, and obeyed. Then Kaleta prodded
him toward the exit. "Go on! No, stupid, take the pails with you! Carry
them!"
   A woman saw them come out of the Temple. She saw what they were
carrying, and ran away screaming before Kaleta could decide whether or
not to shoot at her. It was too bad, but he would probably have to do some
more killing before he got away.
   "Go—that way—go on!" Kaleta urged his coolie through the village.
The Kappan moved ahead slowly, carrying his two buckets dripping with
the Water of Thought, stopping every few feet to look back in unbelieving
terror, as if he expected Kaleta to vanish at any moment. Kaleta snarled at
him and jabbed him on with the pistol.
   "Don't slop that stuff around, you—" But if he hit the man, more of the
Water would certainly be spilled. They made slow progress, but
fortunately the village remained empty, as if the only effect of the
woman's screams had been to scare the remaining people away. It seemed
to Kaleta that it took him an hour to urge his trembling, laden captive as
far as the copter.
   Luckily the young man had set down the buckets before he saw the
four dead hands of the two guards that protruded from a thicket; at that
sight, he went completely to pieces. Kaleta shoved him aside, and
carefully hoisted his thirty or thirty-five liters of wealth into the rear of
the copter, a pail at a time. He found a roll of sealing-plastic in the copter,
and wrapped the pails to minimize any further spillage during flight.
Everything was working out.
   He hopped down from the copter, and was about to shoot the only
potential witness who might be able to identify him, when there flashed
before his mind's eye the picture of those other empty pails inside the
Temple.
   It was agonizing. There had been so much Thought-Water left in the
vat. Should he attempt another trip? The delay meant risking what he had
already gained.
   Maybe he could make ten million today. Or even twelve. All for
himself.
   Instead of shooting the blubbering youth, Kaleta grabbed him by one
arm and slung him staggering back toward the village.
   "We go again. Hurry!" Kaleta made the youth run, and ran beside him.
At the edge of the village Kaleta had to stop for a moment. He was still
weak from the ordeal If he fainted now—
   But the vision of his wealth was plain before him, and he knew he
would not faint.
   "Come along, hurry!"
   The village still looked empty of people; Kaleta gasped with relief.
Only the old priest's dead body inhabited the Temple. Kaleta handed two
more of the pails to his unwilling partner, and again took another for
himself.
   This time the Kappan youth knew what was wanted, and moved a trifle
faster, filling the pails and starting off to the Temple again. He kept
darting fearful glances at Kaleta's pistol, but he was starting to think
again, and Kaleta watched him carefully.
   Kaleta felt a rising certainty that he was going to be able to get away
with it; he could almost feel and smell the money. From here on it was
easy. Even if half a dozen warriors came at him now, he thought, he could
fight them off with the pistol, and get away.
   They left the village and traveled the long-seeming path again, with its
view of the calm lake. They were halfway across the landing clearing
when Kaleta heard a boy's voice shouting. A half-grown robed youth ran
out of the forest near the copter, Red Circles gasping four steps behind
him. Kaleta's porter set down his buckets and fell on his face. Red Circles
had a bow and arrow in his hands, small things that it seemed a child
might use for practice. The angle was wrong for Kaleta; if he shot Red
Circles from here, some of the bullets might hit the copter, and could
drain priceless wealth from the Water-laden buckets already stowed
inside.
   Kaleta sidestepped for a better angle. The bow twanged, and the little
arrow came so swiftly that it was sprouted between Kaleta's ribs before he
could try to dodge.
   He looked down at the arrow in surprise, found that he could not
breathe, and dropped his pistol. He managed to set down his pail of the
Water of Thought without spilling any before he fell.
                                    IX.
   Don Morton dug in his metal-shod feet and with his servo-powered
gauntlets took a good grip on the trunk of a sapling. He bent his legs, then
straightened them, lifting, grunting a little at the tree's resistance. With a
mighty ripping sound, roots snapping like shots, the sapling gave up its
hold on the soil.
   It was a satisfying feeling. Morton stood up straight, waving the tree in
one hand almost as easily as a feathered wand. "There. I'm getting pretty
good, huh?"
   Magnuson was busy studying the rugged landscape through a pair of
binoculars, and did not answer at once. He and Morton were alone, for the
moment, atop a ridge somewhere near the hidden headwaters of the
Yunoee, deep in hominid territory. The six warriors who had
accompanied them here as trackers on the search for Brazil were out now
hunting down an evening meal.
    In Morton's view, Magnuson's behavior ever since the ordeal had been
even more arrogant than usual, as if the professor deliberately wanted to
anger everyone he dealt with, Morton in particular. Now, the scientist
gave no evidence of having heard what Morton had just said to him. And
Morton had spoken plainly.
    "How about an answer, huh?"
    At last Magnuson put down the binoculars. "If the other party's report
is true," he said abstractedly, "the hominids could easily have killed him."
    Talking about Brazil. Changing the subject without answering. Was
this man trying to get himself killed?
    "I SAID, I'M GETTING PRETTY GOOD WITH THE SUIT!" Morton
roared, turning up his helmet's speakers to amplify his voice. "ANSWER
ME! ANSWER!"
    Magnuson heard him this time all right. He looked vaguely sick and
uneasy. "I'm sorry," he said. "Very sorry. Yes, you are getting good with
the suit. Better than Brazil was. When you find him, he won't talk to you
the way he did last time."
    "Damn right he won't." Morton took the tree in both gauntlets and
cracked it over his armored knee, and threw the shattered wood away.
"And I don't believe that the hominids got him, either. I'm gonna get him."
    Brazil was the kind of guy who liked to get into one of these superman
suits himself, and then push people around. Morton remembered Brazil
disarming him, back in the Temple Village. And then Brazil had
somehow escaped from the cave of the ordeal. Doubtless he had been
laughing again as he sneaked out of that and ran away, while Morton had
had to stay there, and suffer, and…
    "I'LL KILL HIM!" Morton bellowed. Then he remembered to turn the
speakers in his helmet down again. "A rotten bastard like that. I'll break
his arms and his legs, and then his neck, when I get these hands on him."
Morton raised the steel fingers that trembled in sympathy with his rage;
oh, this suit was a wonderful thing!
    "Yes." Magnuson heaved a tired sigh, put his binoculars back into their
case, and sat down on a log. "In another day or two we may find him."
   "Any idiot knows that; we may find him." Morton mimicked
Magnuson's voice; then he puffed out a sigh of his own, and let the
subject drop. He wished he could reach a hand up inside his helmet and
rub the back of his neck; he was getting a headache. He felt weary. There
hadn't been much time to rest after the ordeal, and he had worked hard
today, practicing with the suit, and climbing cliffs and trees to look for
Brazil. And the world seemed to be against him, as it had always been.
   Ever since the start of the ordeal, when he had tasted the Water of
Thought, all the causes of just rage that Morton had been forced to endure
in his lifetime had seemed to take on doubled force. The Water of
Thought was good stuff after all, for a real man; it just made him see
clearly the way things really were.
   The Water had made Morton fully aware of all the injustices that had
ever been heaped on him, culminating in the ordeal itself. And during the
ordeal his rage had been so great and pure that for a while it had made
him meek. Morton had endured the sufferings of the initiation with what
amounted to calm patience, because that was the only way he could
survive to eventually enjoy revenge. When he had finished Brazil and got
back to the village, Morton was going to look up the warrior who had
tormented him during the ordeal, and devise for him some elaborate,
slow, and particularly horrible death. Morton wanted to spend a lot of
time and thought on that project, not to hurry it.
   Thinking of his enemies, Morton, tired or not, was unable to stand still
a moment longer. He spun around, pacing nervously this way and that, his
armored hands flexing.
   "Oh, sit down," said Magnuson peevishly. "Better save some of that
energy."
   That tore it. With the gorilla-strong arms of the suit, Morton grabbed
Magnuson and hauled him to his feet. He aimed a backhanded slap at
Magnuson's face, but at the last instant pulled it, stopped it almost
completely. He was going to need Magnuson yet for a while.
   Magnuson fell back over the log. He lay there with his mouth bloody,
conscious but making no move to get up.
   "Why don't you stop making me mad?" Morton demanded. "You just
keep asking for trouble."
   "I'll try to stop."
   Magnuson's cold eyes were uncomfortable things to face, and Morton
turned away from him. "Where are those goods?" he wondered aloud.
"They're supposed to be hunters, and it takes 'em all day to catch one
animal. I'm gonna see what they're up to." He trotted away down the hill,
moving heavily.
   When Morton was out of sight, and he was alone, Magnuson struggled
wearily back up to a sitting position on the log. He spat out some blood,
and tested his loosened teeth with tongue and fingers. It was a narrow,
extremely dangerous path he had to walk with Morton, every moment,
until the effect of the drug had worn off. And then? He could not shake
the conviction that Morton would still be deadly dangerous in the suit.
Magnuson would never be able to fully trust him.
   And yet, Morton had come through the rite of passage, had proved
himself a man.
   Magnuson shook his head. Morton's case proved only that real men
could do bad things—as the case of Brazil proved that apparently strong,
complete men could have fatal, hidden flaws that showed up only under
the X-ray probing of the ordeal.
   Magnuson was certain that only by such ritual testing of all its men
could galactic, or at least prime-theme human, civilization save itself from
decadence. What ritual might be applicable or necessary to humanity in
other themes—squid-like folk with tentacles were not the farthest
removed from homo sapiens, and some forms were completely sexless—
was an ultimately fascinating question, but far beyond the scope of his
own life's work. He had dedicated, consecrated himself, to the cause of
prime-theme Man, here and now, on Kappa. To help the cause, Magnuson
had stolen and lied, and worked with the dope-smuggling scum of the
very civilization he detested, making himself doubly a criminal in its
eyes. He had interfered with fatal effect in Kappan affairs, and he would
be prepared to commit worse crimes still—but if prime theme civilization
survived in the galaxy, Magnuson felt sure of being remembered as one of
its saviors. And again it struck him as ironic that two planeteers, members
of that civilization's elite Space Force, had failed Man's test.
   Magnuson remembered his first drink of the Water of Thought, which
he had taken about a year ago. It had been part of his first initiation. Then,
in the peculiar Kappan way, he had become a shaman without first
becoming a member of a tribe. On that day, immediately after he had
taken the drug, while the drums pounded and the chant soared, he had
seen with new and overpowering certainty how right and necessary was
the work he had already chosen to do—to pull the Kappan hominids
through the sieve of testing, extracting from them the new branch of
humanity which some of them must be ready to form. This mystical
certainty had continued during the four or five days it had taken
Magnuson to arrange his own disappearance and flee to these remote
villages. Then, though he had never begun to doubt his work, a certain
transcendent quality in his belief had faded. He understood now that the
drug had brought that quality about, and had given him the courage that
he might otherwise have lacked, to act on his convictions.
   But the truth of his convictions had in no way depended on the drug.
During his first weeks among these villagers, he had taken a good deal of
interest in the Water of Thought. But he was more anthropologist than
biologist or chemist, and in those early days the Kappans had not trusted
him with free access to the Water-vat in the Temple. Soon his work with
the hominids from the quarry had absorbed him, and he had thought less
and less about the Water. In fact he had never tasted it again until just
before the recent initiation, when all the candidates drank. It had been a
pleasant surprise to find that his earlier draught had evidently given him
immunity; if that was the usual case with Earthmen, the crime syndicate
was due to suffer a disappointment, which made Magnuson feel
somewhat better about his indirect involvement with them.
   Now, the Water of Thought interested him hardly at all. On Kappa or
on Earth, the key to Man's future lay in his deliberate evolutionary
selection of himself, not in drugs.
   He yearned intensely to get back to the Warriors' Village, where the
new man-hominid waited, newly human intelligence in his eyes. Living
proof, who must convince the Space Force that Magnuson's way was
right! Oh, in the name of Man, if only Kaleta was taking good care of the
hominid!
   Some distance below Magnuson, at the foot of the ridge, the suited
figure of Morton now reappeared. The six warriors were with him, and
one of them was carrying game. There was water down there, a small
tributary of the Yunoee. It would make a good place to camp for the
night.
   Morton looked up and waved imperiously for Magnuson to come
down. It might be fatal to irritate Morton again. Magnuson stood up with
a sigh, and began to descend the hill.

   The sun was warm above. It came and went on Boris's eyelids as if
perhaps moving leaf-shadows intervened. Before he even opened his
eyes, he tried to remember where he was. He could tell that he was sitting
on grassy earth, his back propped against a rough-barked tree. Oh yes, of
course, the picnic. Brenda was so beautiful—
   An unearthly voice jabbered nearby, and memory returned with a rush.
Boris cracked his eyelids open cautiously. He beheld a daylight scene in
the shady forest. Nearby and in the middle distance, a number of gray,
two-legged forms moved about. None of them seemed to be paying him
any particular attention at the moment.
   Had they carried him here to be guest or dinner? He was still alive,
which argued for the former. And they had given him water, which was
also a most hopeful sign. Boris tried to think his situation over, before he
moved so much as a finger, or even opened his eyes completely, while his
accumulated physical discomforts were still soothed by inertia.
   At least he had escaped the villagers, Magnuson, Morton and Kaleta.
Of course Jones had died in the ordeal, and for all Boris knew the other
Earth-descended men might have also. It would be ironic indeed if
Magnuson were killed in the very ritual he loved so well and prescribed
for all—but Boris couldn't really believe that he had been. Magnuson
would survive if anyone did.
   And Brenda—at the thought of her, Boris opened his eyes wide, and
raised himself a little from his position against the tree. She was either
crawling about lost in the woods or the Kappans had taken her. If Boris
was going to have any hope of ever doing anything for her, he had to start
from where he was, by first finding out just what these hominids intended
to do with him.
   A few of the gray figures noticed his movement, and heard the
accompanying groan. They turned toward him with mild interest. There
was nothing like a general alarm, no monkey-cry of alert. What jabbering
took place was between individuals. Watching and listening, Boris got a
strong impression that it was genuine though doubtless primitive speech.
   This was a gathering-place, obviously, but he could not call it a camp.
The hominids who had driven off the village warriors had been carrying
rocks and dead branches as weapons, but here not an artifact was in sight.
There was not a lean-to, a fire, a bed, a shred of clothing or an ornament.
With only his sleeve-socks and the remains of his net-garment, Boris
could feel overdressed among these leathery nudists.
   On other planets he had seen primitive prime-theme people who lived
almost this simply. Yet something was very different here. Something
was wrong in this Eden, something missing. A small crowd had
accumulated and was watching Boris with curiosity before he realized
what the odd thing was. There were babes in female arms, and there were
hominids who appeared to be not quite fully grown. But above the age of
beginning toddlers, there were no pre-pubescent children anywhere in
sight.
   Maybe it was a school day.
   Boris decided that if anything like a joke could still occur to him, he
was probably not yet dead. That made it necessary to sooner or later try to
get to his feet. Slow movement, with many grunts and pauses, interested
his primitive audience but did not startle them. Not that he could have
moved fast enough to startle anyone anyway. At last he reached
something like his full height, and began a planeteer's routine of
supposedly friendly gestures.
   He towered, a bit unsteadily, over the crowd, whose taller heads
reached just about up to his armpits. These creatures were of the same
form as the quarry-beasts that Boris had seen—and yet they were
completely different. Apart from any moral or intellectual problems
posed, the others had struck Boris as repulsive. He would personally have
preferred to be away from them, to look at something else. But seen like
this, in their own world, the hominids did not strike him as ugly creatures.
Somehow the thickness of their grayish, leathery skins appeared to be
perceptible, and was not unattractive.
   As he went slowly through the sign-language routines meant to
demonstrate his admirable qualities of goodwill and fearlessness, Boris
became especially aware of one individual in his audience—this was a
male, taller than the average and probably a little older, if silver in
hominid hair meant age.
   The others seemed to make way for him, with slight and perhaps
unconscious movements. Boris paused in his presentation and looked at
this individual, who took the opportunity to toss something toward Boris.
Boris found himself catching and holding the raw hind-quarter of a small
warmblooded creature.
   The haunch did not smell especially appetizing, but at least it was
fresh, and Boris's stomach rumbled approval. He made his best thank-you
gesture, peeled away some fur, bit, chewed, and swallowed.
   The food-giving one said something to Boris. Boris wished him good
health in return. In his professional judgement, the odds that these were
human beings had just risen enormously. Near-humans might use tools to
fight and hunt; but when a dominant male went about handing out food
instead of grabbing it, it seemed a good bet that the sometimes blurry-
looking line at the border of humanity had been crossed.
   But the prime-theme human slot on Kappa was firmly occupied by the
villagers' species. That they were true prime theme was proven beyond
doubt by their extremely close biochemical kinship with Earth-descended
humans. On a planet as Earthlike as Kappa, theory predicted, demanded,
evolution of life in the prime theme, with earthlike humanity at the top…
but could evolution on Kappa have two heads?
   Anyway, today's dinner was not where a planeteer was eaten, but
where he ate. The raw meat tasted better than the grubs that Boris could
remember devouring in a certain thicket—though not a whole lot better,
actually. Boris stopped gesturing for the time being and attended to his
food.
   The food-giver, watching him, alternately smiled and frowned, as if he
might be considering the obvious language problem. Or perhaps he was
only stretching his face.
   Before attempts at communication were resumed, a real monkey-troop
alarm was called. The hominids all scrambled away in one direction,
jumping and shrieking. The food-giver ran with the others, trying like any
leader to get ahead of his followers as soon as he could be sure where
they were headed.
   The mass movement turned out to be not a flight or an attack, but a
greeting. It seemed that a war party, or at least some all-male group, was
returning to the gathering place. Boris could not recognize the individuals
in it, but he thought it was probably the aggressive gang who had gone
skirmishing after the village warriors. This was borne out by the fact that
several of the arriving hominids were wounded, two of them badly
enough to require their being carried by others. One of the two had a
disabled leg, and clung to a stretcher improvised from a springy branch.
The other one looked dead.
   There was a great deal of jabbering on all sides, and Boris was almost
forgotten in the excitement. He noticed that the dead hominid was
receiving more attention than the wounded ones. This struck Boris as odd,
and he moved to a position where he could watch what was going on
around the corpse. He could pick out no chief mourner, but it seemed to
be an indignation meeting.
   People as primitive as these were probably basically quite non-
aggressive. Still it made Boris uneasy to be the lone outsider around when
they were angry about something. It was a time to be unobtrusive, though
not too timid; and that was a balance hard to strike, for a man who stood
two heads taller than the crowd and came from a different planet.
   But Boris, to his relief, found himself almost ignored for the moment.
Here came a man with an edged stone in his hand, and Food-Giver beside
him, making their way through the small crowd around the corpse. They
both squatted down by the head of the body, and the man with the rough
hand-ax went to work on the neck.
   This was intriguing. Boris watched closely, with a hardened planeteer's
interest. He thought he could guess what was coming next, for he
remembered the hacked-open hominid skull that he had seen in
Magnuson's laboratory near the quarry.
   By now there were nearly a hundred hominids gathered around the
dead man, watching. But Boris's height still let him see. The head came
free, and was more or less peeled. Then the man with the hand-axe turned
the skull upside down and attacked the base, enlarging the foramen
magnum to get at the brain.
   Boris was expecting an immediate ritual cannibalism of the brain. But
to his surprise nothing of the kind was performed now. He missed some
details of what was being done, but what he did see astonished him.
Perhaps half a cup of clear liquid, only faintly tinted with blood, was
drained from the skull into a gourd held ready by Food-Giver.
   And that appeared to be that, for the present. The crowd gradually
began to disperse. Boris saw that some of them were weeping, but this did
not surprise him as it almost certainly would have a few days earlier.
Here, after observing the hominids in their natural state for only minutes,
he had seen and heard enough to convince himself of their human status.
   The question was, what had been drained into that gourd, and what was
going to be done with it now? The clearness of the fluid suggested lymph;
Boris wasn't at all sure of the details of hominid physiology, except that it
must be somewhat different from his own, and even from the Kappan
villagers'. Boris had a wild and horrible suspicion about that clear liquid.
   Some of the females were now gathering closely about the
dismembered corpse. Boris did not wait to see what they were going to do
with it. Wincing along on painful feet, he followed Food-Giver and a
couple of others who were walking away with the gourd.
   They took it without ceremony a couple of hundred meters into the
woods, to a small clearing centered by a smoldering pile of logs. The
grass near the logs had long since been burned away. A faint, worn path
surrounding the blackened area showed that there was more or less
regular foot traffic here. Possibly lightning had once fired a dead tree, and
the embers had been fed and maintained for some unguessable time since
then.
   At one side of the blackened area stood a crude, knee-high cairn of
rocks, and a couple of hominids were already pushing a portion of the
smoldering fire in that direction, scooping with sticks and leading the fire
to the base of the cairn with a lure of fresh, dry wood. Others in the group
had gathered large, thick leaves, which were now wrapped around the
gourd. Then the gourd was settled on the cairn. Its exact positioning took
some time. Boris thought it was left too far from the fire to cook, but
where it would be heated. One man squatted down nearby, concentrating
carefully on the fire's progress; the other hominids drifted away.
   Boris found himself ignored for the time being. He was thirsty, and
limped downhill, following the lay of the land toward the probably
location of a watercourse. Though he had no plans for immediate flight, it
was reassuring that no one hindered his movement. Before he started once
more for the colony he meant to eat, and rest, and do something about
improvising shoes, if not pants—the sleeve-socks had probably saved his
life, but they were not what you could call adequate footgear for hiking.
   At the foot of the slope, only a few score meters down, he came upon
the small stream that he had expected to find; he wondered if it was the
upper Yunoee. Boris lay down at the edge of it and drank, and felt a chill
as if he had seen a great snake about to strike at him from the water. This
stream was, though much diluted, undoubtedly the Water of Thought.
   The stuff could hardly run in every river on the planet, or it would have
been found long ago by Space Force people or colonists. So this must be
the Yunoee, or a key tributary. The farther upstream, evidently, the
stronger the taste. Down at the villages, it was indistinguishable from
ordinary river water. What would be found at the source?
   Boris took off his sleeve-socks and sat for a few minutes, cooling his
sore feet in the stream, and telling himself that mere survival in his
situation presented enough problems without trying to do exploration and
research as well. But he could not shake the idea that here, especially,
knowledge and survival were connected. At last curiosity won out, and he
tied his footwear on again and began to hobble upstream along the bank.
After a couple of bends in the watercourse he could see a waterfall not far
ahead, a high slender curtain of crashing spray.
   Studying the bank on behalf of his sore feet, Boris's eyes spotted an
arrowhead; then another, a few steps farther on, half buried in dried mud.
It was more than likely that Red Circles' men had once been here.
   Now, looking for more clues, he could see in a nearby bush a broken
pail, with a rotted handle of twisted fiber. Where had Boris seen the like
before?
   In the temple of the lower village, he remembered. Pails like this one
had been stacked in the room where the vat of the Water of Thought was
buried.
   He stepped into the river, and bent and tasted it again. The
unforgettable flavor was there; now it seemed to be growing stronger with
every few meters he advanced, to the very foot of the waterfall. But still it
was a flavoring only, not the strong Water itself.
   Climbing the rocks beside the fall was a tricky job, but Boris was
determined. He took his time about it, and at last gained the highest rock
and sat on it, getting his breath, nursing his feet, looking ahead on a level
at a green meadow of Eden. Above the narrow fall, rocks held the river
back into a long, sinuous spring-fed pool, enclosed on three sides by a
park of stately trees. When he had rested briefly, Boris stood up and
walked through the lush, well-watered grass that rimmed the pool. All
was so peaceful that he thought of serpents.
   It was no serpent's head that rose from the grass at the very edge of the
water. The head was that of a half-grown hominid, who had evidently
thrown himself down to drink.
   Boris made a peace gesture. The boy stared back at him for long
seconds, then rolled over toward the water and drank again, as if still
deeply thirsty. Boris wondered if he might be sick. He was the youngest-
looking hominid, except for infants and beginning toddlers, that Boris had
yet seen in the forest.
   The youth took his time about drinking. At last, with a sigh and a
gurgling belch, he rolled back to look once more at Boris. Something in
the look brought back the snaky chill Boris had felt on discovering what
the stream just below the waterfall contained.
   Now Boris stepped carefully toward the upper pool meaning to taste it.
But for all his caution, the young hominid was alarmed. The hominid was
a gaping boy no longer, but a startled ape, leaping up heavy with drink,
grabbing a fallen branch as weapon, hooting and snarling wordless
threats. Boris stood still.
   In response to the noise, another hominid torso rose from the tall grass
on the other side of the pool, this one showing the budding breasts of a
young female. She hooted a questioning response to the male. She too had
obviously been drinking, for silvery drops fell from her chin.
   Boris stood quietly waiting. He was not physically afraid of the two
small ones, but he wanted no misunderstanding with the tribe. Soon, the
head of the girl on the other side of the pool bent down again to drink. But
the young male on the near side was not so easily placated; he still
crouched, baring his teeth and growling at Boris, a dog, an ape, an animal.
   Then a thing happened that was perhaps one of the ordinary miracles of
the universe; but Boris was to remember it with perfect clarity for the rest
of his life. A critical synapse closed, perhaps, somewhere in the hominid
brain; or some other threshold was reached, some other trigger clicked.
The hominid body stood a little straighter, and a human being looked out
of the hominid eyes. The boy distinctly spoke some words, which
sounded to Boris like a slowed-down version of the adult hominids'
jabber.
   An answer came, from not far behind Boris. He whirled; Food-Giver
stood there, a club held with apparent absent-mindedness in one hand.
Food-Giver was a head shorter than Boris, but his limbs were heavily
muscled; Boris had a rough moment or two before he could be sure that
Food-Giver was not annoyed with him.
   The young hominid dropped his own branch, and sighed. He gave the
impression of having understood Food-Giver's words, and being reassured
by them. Then he sprawled prone again at the edge of the pool to drink.
   Food-Giver stood quietly watching Boris. Cautiously Boris stepped to
the edge of the pool, bent, and put out a hand toward the calm surface. It
seemed that he was committing no offense. He cupped up a few drops in
his hand, and tasted; it was the Water of Thought, nearly as strong as what
he had been forced to drink from Jones's stone bottle, and again before the
ordeal.
   Boris sighed, and started away from the pool, heading slowly downhill
out of Eden. If he was allowed to, he meant to do nothing but rest and
think and eat and drink for a day and a night. He was very weary and
there was much to think about.
   Food-Giver tossed aside his club and walked beside him.
                                   X.
   Getting food, as long as he was willing to accept what the hominids
thought of as food, posed no particular problem. The moment Boris
showed interest in anything that an adult hominid had and considered
eatable, some of it was sure to be handed him. It was not, he observed,
that he was being regarded with any special favor; the hominids did the
same thing constantly among themselves. It was not surprising in such an
extremely primitive culture. Food-Giver had probably achieved what
dominance he had simply by being a better provider than anyone else
around. The other side of the coin was probably that there were
drawbacks to accepting too much charity, and Boris made sure to dig up
some food for himself, lest he lose all status before his career in society
could get off the ground. He even managed to give away a couple of juicy
roots, and a few fat grubs that he felt no reluctance to part with.
   At night the tribe bedded down under the trees, mostly paired male and
female. Boris found himself a comfortable spot near the edge of the fire-
clearing, and when he woke during the night made himself useful and
kept warm by adding a log or two from a pile that other people had
brought in. The leaf-wrapped gourd still waited on its cairn, and he was
careful not to disturb it.

   It was morning, and Food-Giver was prodding Boris awake. Grunting
and stiff, Boris arose from his grassy nest, and saw at once that something
important must be going on. Four or five of the graying elders of the tribe
were inspecting the gourd.
   Evidently they decided that whatever purpose had made them put it by
the fire was now accomplished. It was handed to Food-Giver; and he,
surrounded by the irregular honor guard of the others, took it off through
the forest. Boris's feet were feeling a little better this morning, and he kept
up with them. They looked at him curiously, and talked about him, but
made no objection. Actually he thought that Food-Giver at least was
pleased.
   By a roundabout way that avoided any steep rock-climbing they
reached the pool of the Water of Thought, above the waterfall. Food-
Giver waded out a couple of steps and poured into the pool, carefully but
without any ceremony, half the contents of the gourd. Then, using as
dipper another gourd that was handed to him, he added Water from the
pool to the original vessel until it was once more full.
   Now the path to the fire-clearing was retraced; a gathering of the
younger adult males awaited the elders and Boris there, and things were
solemn. Attention was centered on the gourd in Food-Giver's hands.
Boris, noting some serious looks directed at himself, was willing to fade
into the background, until even sharper looks and some jabber made it
obvious that he was expected to stay.
   There were no drums or chants here. Still, what followed now was
certainly ritual, the first that Boris had observed among the hominids. The
young men sat down in a circle facing the leaders; Food-Giver motioned
Boris to take the place at the end of the young men's line. Food-Giver
then solemnly handed the gourd to the man at the other end, who took a
sip and passed it down. Each man sipped in turn, and the gourd moved
down the line from hand to hand.
   Well, it hadn't killed Boris before he knew what it was; and there was
no way to avoid it now. When the gourd reached him, Boris was ready.
He touched his lips to the stuff inside.
   It was the Water of Thought, and, as far as he could tell, nothing but.
Far stronger than he had ever tasted it before. What was the connection
between the clear Yunoee and the lymph inside hominid craniums?
Almost absently, Boris handed the gourd to Food-Giver, who had walked
over to stand directly in front of Boris with what might be termed an
expectant expression.
   Food-Giver gently pushed the cup back, then raised his own empty
hands in a pantomime of a man draining a drink to the last drop.
   Well, Boris's second deep draught, just before the ordeal, hadn't
seemed to affect him at all. What with his drinking from the tainted river,
he might be building up an immunity. There was a good cupful left in the
gourd, and like a good diplomat Boris drank it all.
   The taste was not bad, really, but it was very strong.
   With that, the meeting was abruptly over. The members of the council
with one accord returned to their individual problems of digging roots and
scratching parasites. Boris, finding that his hosts had begun to share with
him other things than food and drink, made his way again to the river
below the falls with an idea of drowning some of these gifts or persuading
them to leave.
   After some moderate success with that job, he hunted up a good flint
point among the wasted arrowheads along the bank, and started to get
some tough green bark from a tree. He had rather enjoyed planeteers'
survival school; he thought now he might try his hand at making himself
some moccasins.
   Before he even got as far as peeling the bark for them, he knew he had
a fever which was rapidly getting worse. He tried to keep working for a
time, but then gave up and threw himself down in the shade; he was not
only burning up, but getting lightheaded. Damn the Water of Thought,
you thought you had it beaten, and then… Jones, too, had been feverish
from drinking a lot of it. What now, plenty of bed rest?
   He tossed restlessly on the grass, wondering if he ought to go back to
the river and try to cool himself. What a mad shivering chill that would
produce. Someone came to sit beside him, and he looked up to see Food-
Giver.
   "I hope you can talk soon, Swimmer-With-Berries," Food-Giver said.
   "Soon, but I feel sick," answered Boris, abstractedly, speaking the
hominid language. The jabber felt strange on his tongue, and yet not
strange. Then Boris sat up straight, gazing in awe at Food-Giver, who
looked back in mild alarm.
   "Great Gods of the Galaxy," said Boris softly, in Space Force-Colonial.
There were no hominid words for that.

   Fortunately the fever leveled off before he became delirious, though all
he was able to do for it was lie in the shade and hope. Food-Giver and a
revolving delegation of other adults stood or squatted around him, now
and then questioning him softly and mournfully—or rather, questioning
Swimmer-With-Berries, who had died yesterday from a villager's spear
thrust. Boris of course was still Yellow Monster, his original self, but as
the newest male around he had been chosen to bear the reincarnation of
Swimmer too.
   Boris fairly well understood all these things without asking about them,
for he found himself now possessed of a profusion of hominid memories
in addition to his new knowledge of the language. And yet, fever and all,
he knew himself still as Boris Brazil; there was for him no real confusion
of identity, no sense of any alien personality crowding him inside his
skull.
   Food-Giver (which was a correct title) and the others asked polite
questions of Swimmer-With-Berries. Was he comfortable now? Had it
been painful, they asked, to die?
   No, it hadn't been, Boris remembered. Not very.
   He could plainly recall looking down at his own gray leathery chest,
watching his own spilling blood, glimpsing near his feet, where his failing
hands had dropped them, the rocks he had carried into the fight. Vaguely
he remembered seeing the grotesquely tall, pale-yellowish monster who
had thrown a spear at the villagers following him.
   Much farther back, he remembered himself at other sessions like this
one, asking the traditional mourners' questions of the newly dead, who
through the Water of Thought were merged again with the living.
   But it was Boris who remembered all these things. Squatting around
him now were not old friends talking with Swimmer-With-Berries,
though they thought of themselves that way. They were in fact still
Kappan hominids talking to a Mars-born, Earth-descended planeteer. As
Boris saw it, Swimmer was dead and gone, but now parts of his memory
had been implanted like segments of recording tape in Boris's brain.
   Like cronies at a wake, Food-Giver and the others chatted of old times,
growing more cheerful as the conversation moved along. Boris could not
recall many of the events they spoke of, and this did not surprise them.
That was the way the Water worked; some parts of the life of the departed
one were always lost to death.
   But Boris now had Swimmer's memories of many everyday routine
things, of eating and mating and—on comparatively rare occasions—
fighting. And Boris now searched those memories for information.
   There was a scene in which the dead body of a young female was being
ritually buried. Rows of hominid faces looked at Swimmer as his hands
scooped earth into the grave where food and flowers had been placed
already. There had been tears on Swimmer's face, but there was no
emotional content now for Boris, in this or any of the other memories.
   The earliest of Swimmer's memories that Boris could find was one in
which he lay beside the Sacred Pool, drinking and drinking. His belly was
already bloated with the Water of Thought, but it was still pleasant, even
necessary, to drink more.
   Of course. Young hominids after being weaned ran free in the forest,
on the fringes of the tribal territory, surviving there as best they might. No
adult tried to teach them anything, for they were not yet real Thinking
People. They were Dark People still, like other animals. And sometimes
the hated villagers trapped the young ones, and took them away to a
terrible place where they were tortured, and made to spend their lives in
moving stones. There they remained Dark People as long as they lived,
because they were kept from the Sacred Pool.
   At about the same time that a free young wild one grew into the power
of sex, the taste of the Sacred Pool, which had been repugnant, suddenly
became irresistably attractive. For long days the young ones spent most of
their time lying by the banks of the pool, drinking until their bellies
bloated, hardly leaving the place even to seek food. Then there came a
time when the taste of the Water no longer pleased them greatly. Then
they came and joined the tribe, bringing with them the powers of speech
and thought, and the tribal memories.
   The tribal memories?
   Why, of course.
   Now that he thought about it, Boris could easily remember himself in a
female hominid body, gathering sweet roots along the base of a great ice
wall that blocked the upper end of a valley…
   As a planeteer, Boris could recognize the great ice wall as a glacier.
But his Kappan memory brought back the looming size of it, and made
him feel again its cold breath on his leathery skin, as if he had passed it
yesterday.
   Might that memory be ten thousand years old? Boris knew that at least
that much time had passed since glaciers last scoured these subtropical
valleys.
   Restless with his persisting fever, and with the awe of what was
happening to him, Boris got up and walked unsteadily away from the
mourners. He made his way own to the Yunoee again, and splashed its
fresh water on his fevered face. The Yunoee was cool, but Boris could
find no memory of its ever being frozen, not even when the glaciers were
near. All adult hominids knew that its Sacred Pool had to be defended. It
was the Water of Thought, a River of Thought that flowed in the brains of
men, generation after generation.
   After drinking of the Thought-tainted water—there was nothing else
available to drink—Boris scooped up a shaky palmful and held it close to
his eyes. It looked perfectly clear.
   Hypothesis. A microscopic organism of some kind—call it the X-
bug—lives and thrives and reproduces in the Sacred Pool, and perhaps
nowhere else. Some X-bugs are naturally carried out over the waterfall,
but for some reason they die or lose their potency as they drift
downstream; after a few kilometers, only the fading taste of them is left.
   A hominid drinks from the pool. Suppose that the X-bugs resist
digestion and are taken live into the drinker's bloodstream. Suppose that
they have an affinity for the brain, and suppose further, if it is not too
feverish a thought, that they become a loosely integrated but necessary
part of the hominid brain, serving some critical synaptic function and also
bringing information that is henceforth available to the hominid as
memory. And also, while in the brain, they record at least some part of
what the hominid experiences.
   Boris discarded his handful of water and started groggily back uphill.
He rather liked his theory. There were the planarian worms of Earth, one
of which could acquire part of the simple learning of another by eating the
educated one's minced body. There were analogs among lower forms in
the other common themes of known Galactic life.
   How did the X-bugs manage to keep storing up new data, century after
century, and still retain at least something of the very old information
from ten thousand years ago? Perhaps the X-bug reproductive process
started out each new individual with half its data-capacity blank.
   Boris was not a biologist, only a feverish and beaten-up jack of all
trades; but he thought that his theory could not be too far from the truth.
   The doctor, back at the colony, had said that Earth-descended humans
and the Kappan villagers were remarkably alike, biologically. But after
all, Earthfolk were not meant to imbibe their memories and the neural
connections of their speech centers. So when an Earth-descended person
drank the Water of Thought, the X-bugs rushing to the brain found no
ready welcome; they just raised frustrated hell there until eventually the
body's defense systems did them in. A Kappan of the villagers' species
who drank the Water probably experienced much the same thing in milder
form—they spoke of going into trance under the Water's influence, and
tapping racial memories. But it was small wonder that the Water of
Thought should cause mental imbalance in the Earth-descended.
   The mental effect of Boris's first drink had been so overwhelming that
he had noticed no particular physical effects. But Jones had been feverish.
Come to think of it, Jones had said things suggesting that he had picked
up at least a few hominid memories with his draughts of Water. Then,
after four or five days, both of them had recovered. Boris had regained his
freedom, and Jones had discovered that the object of his fanatic passion
no longer satisfied.
   Perhaps their first drinks had given them a certain immunity, for their
second drinks, at the beginning of the ordeal, had seemed to have little or
no effect. Kaleta and Morton on the other hand had taken their first drinks
only when the ordeal started, and therefore were probably still crazed in
one way or another.
    And Brenda—Gods, he had to get out of here and help her, or at least
find out what was happening. But at the moment Boris was very glad just
to be able to reach his shaded nest again, and sink down weakly into the
grass.
    "I am sick," he told Food-Giver, who was still waiting nearby. Food-
Giver grunted sympathetically, and offered him half a mouse. Boris
waved the gift away and closed his eyes.
    Why should the third drink have sickened him, if he had been immune
to the second? Well, for one thing, the third drink had tasted much
stronger than the other two, and for another, he had been forced to
swallow more of it. If his theory was correct, that third drink had brought
X-bugs to his brain in such concentration that the data they carried
somehow became available to him. Such close biochemical coordination
was not unheard of between two races or species of the same theme from
different worlds. Skin grafts could be made to take from Kappan to
Earthman, Doc back at the colony had said…
    But this time, though the drink had been stronger, Boris had not been
mentally unbalanced by it. Maybe his psyche had actually been
strengthened by that first bout of temporary madness—another intriguing
theory. The Water of Thought was going to keep a lot of research people
busy for a long time.
    Magnuson was, or had been, a scientist of reputable standing. But he
had swallowed the Water, and then apparently had never tried to work on
it, to solve its puzzles.
    Wearily puzzling about Magnuson, Boris fell into a fevered sleep. The
mass animal-screeching of animal children awakened him. Swimmer's
memory knew that particular sound, though faint with distance, to be an
important warning, and it brought Boris jumping up from sleep. His first
clear impression was that he felt much better. His fever had broken, and
he was in a cold sweat.
    Boris ran with other members of the tribe toward the distant sounds of
alarm, picking up a club as he went. A couple of adult scouts who had
gone out to investigate an earlier outcry were already hurrying back with
their report to where the tribe was assembling.
    "There are six villagers coming this way," one reported.
    "And another monster, like this one," said the second scout, pointing to
Boris. "And yet another monster, who is even stranger. It has no face or
hair, but shines all over like the sun on water. They are all coming this
way in a group, along the river, four or five shouts from here."
    Food-Giver turned slowly to Boris, silently asking for expert advice on
the subject of monsters.
    Boris's fever was gone. If his theory was correct, the last living cells of
Swimmer-With-Berries had been repelled from Boris's Earth-descended
brain, and were food for phagocytes in his alien circulatory system.
    But Boris found that he still understood the hominid language. With a
moment's thought he could still recall the image of the glacier, though
perhaps some of the detail had been lost. Evidently his own brain had
somehow re-recorded much of what Swimmer's cells had tried to bring to
it.
   "I know this monster-who-shines," said Boris. "I think he and the other
monster have come to find me and kill me."
   "If they come with the villagers, they must be our enemies, too," said
someone. There was general agreement.
   Boris was thinking that whoever was in the groundsuit could hardly be
a real expert in its use. And would doubtless be demented in some way by
the Water of Thought. Mentally tilted in some aggressive way, probably,
since he came hunting.
   Boris asked the scouts: "Did one of these monsters have shaggy hair on
his face and head?"
   "Yes, the one who did not shine had much hair, darker than yours."
   Magnuson. Which meant that either Morton or Kaleta must be in the
suit; and Morton was the tough-posing one. If it was true, as it seemed to
be, that the Water of Thought pushed an Earth-descended man toward his
weakness, Morton might well be afflicted with blind rages. This
suggested a plan; it was rather a scary plan, and Boris looked for another
one. Unfortunately without success.
   He interrupted a strategy conference to say: "This shining monster is a
very great fighter. Clubs and little stones will not hurt him."
   There was an awed murmur at this; all eyes were turned on Boris.
   Swimmer's segmented memories were unclear about something, and
Boris asked for information. "Food-Giver, have The People ever attacked
the villages?"
   Food-Giver was perhaps astonished at having to explain any historical
matter to Swimmer. But he was tolerant of monsters, and finally
answered:
   "Yes. The last time was six father's-times ago."
   "If we go to fight in the villages, the villagers will kill us," observed
another large man standing nearby. There were grunts of agreement. The
Sacred Pool meant humanity to future generations of The People, so it
would always be defended to the death. But what good reason was there
for going to fight in an enemy village?
   "I think that today all their warriors are busy in other places," said
Boris. "And if we go to the villages we will frighten their whole tribe very
much, so tomorrow their warriors may stay home instead of coming here.
But first there is the shining monster to think about, who may kill all of us
if we let him."
   Again there was murmuring; but Swimmer's word seemed to be
trusted.
   "I wanted two of you young men, the most agile, to come with me,"
Boris said. "We will fight the monster among the high rocks, two shouts
below the Sacred Pool." It was a bend of the Yunoee that Boris's eyes had
never seen, but he could remember how it looked. "Then the rest of The
People can easily drive off the six warriors and the other monster."
   The Home Guard was much astonished; they were not at all used to
such strong suggestions. For fanatically poor discipline, this army would
have made Old American backwoodsmen look like Prussian regulars.
Still, this proliferation of monsters was an unheard-of situation, and
Boris's try for leadership was therefore at least tolerable to The People.
   "We know six villagers are coming this way," said Food-Giver,
sticking conservatively to facts. "Maybe there are more. I'm getting ready
to fight." He made no appeal for others to join him, had no comment on
the plans of yellow monsters. He might have argued jealously against
such plans if his culture had been slightly less primitive, but leaders in the
simplest human societies everywhere rarely argued. Everyone did much
as they pleased, anyway.
   Boris called firmly for two volunteers. "You," he said. "And you. Will
you come with me? And will you do as I say? We will have a hard fight,
and a strange fight, against the Shining Monster. We will save many of
The People from being killed."
   The two young males he had chosen had youth in their eyes, as well as
in their supple bodies. They came with him. They knew no more of
groundsuits than of quadratic equations, and quite likely he was going to
get them mangled; but he told himself it was for Brenda. And for The
People, too.
                                 XI.
   "Now something's gone wrong with the damned suit," growled Don
Morton, standing knee-deep in the swift rapids of the upper Yunoee. The
suit's left arm had developed some kind of a hitch in movement; he
couldn't control it precisely any more.
   Magnuson, breathing heavily with his effort to keep up with Morton,
was ascending the steep riverside path. The six village warriors were all
out somewhere ahead, scouting. Or more probably loafing, Morton
thought.
   "I said, there's something gone wrong with this!" Morton waved the
defective arm.
   "Yes." Magnuson nodded agreement. It was easy to tell what he was
thinking, though.
   Morton demanded: "I suppose you think I shouldn't have broken all
those rocks back there. Well, they kept slipping under my feet. Why
shouldn't I hit 'em?"
   "You know more about the suit than I do," said Magnuson.
   "Damn right I do."
   Morton climbed a little higher, enjoying the way the water roared at
him, and couldn't push him back, as long as he had solid footing. He
paused, scanning the hillsides around him. Here, the hills were very steep,
the bones of rock thrusting up through the soil, into occasional crags and
pinnacles. Brazil could be hiding out right here, somewhere, thinking
himself safe. Oh, to catch one glimpse of Brazil, who was the cause of all
this effort and trouble! When he got a grip on Brazil he was going to tear
him into handfuls. Slowly.
   Magnuson had stopped to drink from the river. When he arose from the
bank, he had a funny expression on his face; he smacked his lips, and
looked thoughtfully upstream.
   "Well, you got any more bright ideas?" Morton demanded.
   "At the moment, no," said Magnuson, at once giving Morton his full,
polite attention. Magnuson wasn't really such a bad guy; ever since
Morton had slapped him he had been polite and respectful. It just showed
that people needed a bit of rough treatment every now and then; it was
good for them.
   Morton got a drink, too, turning his head inside the helmet and sucking
insipid water from the suit's small tank. Blah. Maybe he should chance
taking off his helmet, so he could get a real drink too.
   "Look! There!" Magnuson was crouched, his arm pointing, body
tensed.
   Morton whirled, sending up a spray of water. A few hundred meters
distant, a figure moved along a steep hillside. An Earthman, tall and blond
and nearly naked.
   Morton hesitated momentarily.
   "Go after him!" urged Magnuson. He straightened, groping for his
binoculars. "There's something burning between those little hills near
there—see all the smoke?"
   "So what?" Morton took some slow steps in the direction of the distant
figure. "I'm gonna get him!" Rage came to a focus. Running, the suit's
legs ripped sheets of water from the river. Morton sprinted up the steep
bank, smashing aside brush and saplings, his eyes fixed on his enemy who
was at last in sight. The figure of Brazil soon vanished behind some
rocks, as if he had seen Morton coming. Morton exulted. Go on, run, try
to get away! This time, I've got the suit!
   Running in the groundsuit was an athlete's dream come true, a joy that
Morton experienced more keenly with every trial. Almost effortlessly he
now made the first rough hillside flow down past him. Rocks spurned by
his heels flew back like missiles.
   He pounded along the top of a rocky ridge for fifty meters or so,
heading toward the broken hills and pinnacles among which Brazil had
vanished. Something was indeed burning there, something sizable to
judge by the size of the smoke-pall that hung between the rocky hills.
   Was Brazil trying to send up a signal? Morton stopped momentarily,
anxiously scanning the sky. There were no copters in sight, no Space
Force shuttle craft.
   Was the smoke, then, part of some kind of trick? But he was
invulnerable! Morton laughed aloud, and flew on. At the end of the ridge,
he recklessly broadjumped a ravine; misjudging his landing on the other
side, he fell, sprawling and sliding halfway down the next slope, among
rocks. He was unhurt, but even a second's delay was maddening. Cursing
and scrambling, he got himself reoriented and rushed on.
   Here, he was sure, was the very spot where he had last seen Brazil.
And now—there he was! The tall, unmistakable figure was hurrying away
along a dangerous rocky slope, toward the heaviest smoke. Morton could
see now that the dark gray clouds were rising from a row of fires, banked
with smoldering greenery, arranged along the foot of the hill. Did Brazil
really hope to confuse him with smoke? Morton laughed again at the
futility of such a plan, and launched himself after his enemy.
   Something struck with a sharp clang against his helmet. On the
precipitous slope above Morton, a hominid snarled and jabbered, hurling
down fist-sized rocks at him.
   Morton growled in rage and charged the hillside. Sand and loose gravel
flew out from under his metal feet; he fell, then slid down into the greasy-
looking smoke.
   The air inside his helmet stayed fresh—as fresh as it ever got—but now
it was difficult to see. Again, a thrown rock clanged from his suit. He saw
no one, but he could hear the chittering of his enemies plainly. As if they
were laughing at him.
   Were a whole group of hominids helping Brazil? That was fine with
Morton. It would simply mean more targets for his revenge. He stood up,
trying to see through the smoke, smiling coldly. Let them laugh all they
wanted, let them think they might make fun of him and then escape. He
could afford to let them laugh a minute longer.
   Rocks pelted around him, here and there into the burning brush. As
long as he stayed down here he could see almost nothing.
   He climbed, carefully. But when he emerged from the smoke he found
that he had got turned around somehow, and was on a different slope from
the one he had slid down. Over there was the hominid, still in sight—but
over here was another one, atop another peak. Morton tried to make up
his mind which one to go after first, while more rocks clattered insultingly
around him. As soon as he started after the nearest hominid, he heard a
shout behind him. Brazil was there, up on another pinnacle, hurling rocks
like an ape himself. So! Hominids forgotten, Morton reversed himself
again. The shortest way to Brazil lay straight through the fires. But when
he had kicked his way through the smoldering piles of brush, he found
that the suit's faceplate was fogged over with greasy soot and adhering
dust. Looking out through it, Morton could hardly have distinguished a
crouching man from a boulder. He stopped, fumbling around inside the
suit. There should be a washing system for the faceplate.
   A hominid raced by, running like a mountain goat not ten meters away,
and with a shriek hurled some kind of filthy muck at Morton. It spattered
all over him, and part of it hit his faceplate, obscuring his vision even
more. Morton roared, and gave chase. But where had the ape gone? He
couldn't take his helmet off to clean it, they were pitching those stones
much too accurately. But he had to stop for a moment and get his
faceplate cleaned. Forgetfully, he brought his left arm up in a wiping
motion, to try to scrape off some of the mess. The erratic arm smashed
against the faceplate glass and the helmet just above it. That did it. In a
frenzy, Morton pounded his own helmet again and again, with raging
fists. The suit-builders had turned out junk, useless junk!
   But the helmet and faceplate withstood the beating; and when Morton's
fury had abated enough for him to finally locate the interior control for
the washer, even it still partially worked, cleaning half of his faceplate.
   He looked up, and was just in time to see Brazil, rolling a boulder
down at him. With a yell, Morton charged. He meant to catch the rock
and hurl it back, flattening his enemy like an insect on a wall.
   The rock hit him before he realized that it was too big to catch, on this
loose footing anyway. The boulder bore him downhill, and he screamed
in terror as it bounded with him, spinning and rolling him helplessly
among other rocks, shooting him finally against immobile masses of
stone, with a clanging like the end of the world.
   In an awkward position, almost standing on his head, Morton lay
gasping for long seconds, before he could feel sure that he was not killed
or maimed. In fact, he gradually realized, he had hardly been hurt at all.
Just bruises here and there, and the wind knocked out of him.
   "I'm gonna break your arms and legs, Brazil, and then your neck!" he
called aloud, when he had got back on his feet at last. The threat sounded
weak and somehow inadequate to his own ears; but he was almost
incoherent. He knew his enemies were right up on one of these hilltops.
They would be laughing at him, as they got ready to roll down more
rocks.
   Both sides could play that game! With a sudden inspiration, Morton
picked up some small rocks, and looked around him for a target. Now
where was Brazil? It was almost impossible to see anything clearly
through this smeared and damaged faceplate. Morton would like to get his
hands on the madman, the degenerate, who built this suit, and—
   There was a hominid, looking down at him, gesturing what must be
insults. Morton threw an egg-sized stone. It seemed to go like a bullet, but
it missed the target, whizzing off harmlessly into space.
   He could swear he heard them laughing. They would be getting more
boulders ready to roll down on him. He started climbing; he had to come
to grips with them. He picked up half a dozen throwing pebbles, but then
his maniacal left arm dropped and scattered them, halfway up the slope.
Another rock hit his helmet. Smoke drifted around him.
   Morton was beyond rage. He made a crooning sound, like a lover
singing. When he saw Brazil, he charged at full speed paying no heed to
anything else. A wide chasm was almost under his feet before he saw it.
Morton leaped desperately, and the edge of the far side struck him in the
chest. He clung there with his arms, emptiness under his feet, and the
suit's left arm failed him again just as Brazil hit him with another big
rock. Then Morton was endlessly falling, bouncing and falling again, with
the world of rocks and sky spinning around him and suddenly going dark.

  "Is the shining monster dead?" one of the young men with Boris asked
him.
   Boris had sat down shakily, collapsed would be more like it, on a
ledge. His hands were bleeding from the edges of that last rock, and his
chest was heaving. It had been a very near thing.
   "I doubt it," he answered, when he could afford the breath for speech.
"But I hope he will be hurt at least. Enough to make him stop fighting us."
   "It will take—" The hominid held up a hand against the course of the
sun. "This long, for us to climb down there and see whether or not the
monster is dead. If the river does not carry him away. I think he finished
falling in the river."
   "You are a good fighter, Yellow Monster," said the other hominid,
climbing up to join them.
   "Thank you. Both of you are good fighters also. Let's just leave the
Shining One where he is. I want to lead some of The People downstream
now against the villages."

   An hour had passed since Morton had gone charging away after Brazil.
Magnuson was crouching behind a log, still within earshot of the
murmuring Yunoee. The six village warriors were scattered around near
him, also in concealed positions. Shortly after Morton had left, another
band of hominids had appeared, and launched a stone-throwing attack, but
the villagers' arrows had driven them off.
   Some yelling had come from the rocks into which Morton had charged,
but now all was quiet. Could Morton be still venting some fiendish
vengeance upon his enemy? Or had Brazil out-thought him and escaped,
or even found a way to defeat him?
   Magnuson rather suspected the latter. It was hard for Magnuson not to
admire a man of Brazil's capabilities. Maybe Brazil hadn't simply broken
and fled from the ordeal. Perhaps there could be some deeper reason.
   Magnuson, when Morton was dashing off an hour ago, had been on the
verge of calling some final warning after him, a caution to be careful. But
Magnuson hadn't called. It probably would have been a waste of breath
anyway, at best. But also he must have been hoping that Morton, the
proven man, would somehow be eliminated.
   "Magnuson, someone comes."
   The whispered warning roused him from deep and troubled thought.
Around him the warriors were stirring cautiously, turning their attention
downstream, to the south. Were the hominids trying to encircle and trap
them? But Magnuson felt sure that such tactics would be beyond them, in
the wild state.
   And it was Red Circles who came into view on the riverside path. He
was leading a comparatively strong war party, twelve or fifteen men, and
as they came into sight Magnuson saw that all were carrying the painted
buckets from the Temple. This, then, was meant to be a raid after the
Water of Thought.
   Red Circles came forward, walking tall, a bow and arrow in his hands,
his eyes scouting the woods and cliffs. He stopped, and Magnuson stood
up to greet him.
   Reserved triumph, and perhaps amusement, were in Red Circles' eyes.
"Magnuson, the Earthman Ka-le-ta is dead."
   "What? How?"
   Red Circles put a hand to his belt and pulled out a machine pistol,
holding it awkwardly by the barrel. "Ka-le-ta violated the Temple, and he
killed three men with this. So I killed him."
   "What of the hominid-man?" Magnuson asked. "Be careful with that
weapon; it is dangerous." He couldn't see if the safety was on. Kaleta
must have had the pistol hidden somewhere; and he had still been dragged
by the Water—
   Red Circles curled at his lip at the mention of danger; but he held the
pistol out to Magnuson. "Maybe you can kill some of the Forest People
with this, Magnuson, though you have no skill with the bow. Maybe you
will kill your hominid-man, for he has run away." Now the triumph in
Red Circles' eyes was plainer.
   "Run away?" Magnuson took a step forward, almost grabbing at Red
Circles. "Where? How do you know?"
   "The pen stands open."
   Red Circles would not lie, but his tone was insolent. Magnuson
accepted the pistol put the safety on, and stuck it in his belt. Then he drew
himself up.
   "Red Circles, you will speak to me with respect. The Spirit of Man
speaks to this world through me, and that is a greater thing than you can
understand." Magnuson understood that there was no Spirit, no God, and
there would be none until Man had evolved himself upward to infinite
power. But Magnuson's work brought that moment closer, so he was not
lying to Red Circles. Red Circles had perhaps some dim appreciation of
all these things, but he could not know them as a civilized man knew
them, so their weight was all with Magnuson.
   The war chief scowled, but he was still unable to look Magnuson in the
eye for very long.
   "We must find the man-hominid," Magnuson said firmly. "He is one of
our tribe now. Have you any idea where he is?"
   Red Circles gave the Kappan equivalent of a shrug. "Who can say
where one of the Forest People might hide?"
   "We must search for him."
   Red Circles shifted his feet uneasily, but his voice was stubborn. "I and
these men are busy, and the men who were with you here are now going
to have to come with me as well. We are going to get more Thought-
Water. Kaleta defiled the vat, and the chief priest tells me it must be
restocked at once. So we are going all the way upstream, to the Sacred
Pool. Once you asked many questions about the Water of Thought,
Magnuson. Now you are one of us, and you can learn all about it."
   This time it appeared that Red Circles was not going to knuckle under.
Still it was plain that he wanted no quarrel, that he was trying to persuade
Magnuson. Once Magnuson would have needed no persuading; he would
have made a great effort to discover the source of the Water of Thought.
Even now, the idea was tempting. This would be his last chance for any
such discovery, for tomorrow or the next day the Space Force would be
here, and he expected to be under arrest.
   But there was no time to spare for any purpose but the most important
one.
   "We go downstream," said Magnuson, putting his full authority into his
voice. "We must track down the man-hominid, and keep him with us. He
is alone and confused, and I can understand why he runs away. But he is
the proof of a very great magic, much more important even than the
Water of Thought; he is a man made from an animal!"
   All Magnuson's authority availed him nothing. "You go downstream, if
you want," Red Circles said. "But I am chief of all these warriors." He
turned, and shouted commandingly to his men: "We go up!"
   Boris was beginning to suspect that he just might, after all, be the
dynamic-leader type. He had now persuaded about twenty-five of the
younger hominid men to follow him downriver against the villages. The
two who had fought the Shining Monster with him had come back to the
tribal gathering-place unscathed, and had been a great help in recruiting,
with their tale of an easy dance through combat following Yellow
Monster's instructions. It was against all the Space Force rules, of course,
to exacerbate local warfare, but Boris could see no other way to go that
offered so good a chance of getting his pursuers off his neck and perhaps
even of rescuing Brenda. He was gambling that only a few villagers
would be at home, that those who were there would flee, and that
casualties on both sides would be at a minimum. He would gamble more
than that to help Brenda.
   "Run forward and make much noise when we come to the first village,"
Boris told his company as they were setting out. "And remember to look
for a female monster; she is my friend."
   His boys grunted cheerful assent; following a determined leader was
still a new and exciting game to them.
   When they got to the Warriors' Village they charged whooping
downhill, with Boris in the van, and took the place by surprise. As Boris
had hoped, there was not a warrior home. The women and children all
evacuated the huts with miraculous speed, and went screaming panic and
murder down the path toward the Workers' Village.
   Thankfully there was no real murder, or even injury; the hominids were
not culturally advanced enough to enjoy pillage and rapine. They shrieked
good-naturedly to urge the fleeing enemy on, and waved good-by with
clubs.
   "Remember, look for female monsters!" Boris led a hut-to-hut search,
aided by those of his irregulars who chose to help. It did not take long to
make sure that Brenda and Jane were elsewhere. Nor was there any sign
of Kaleta.
   All this was fun! The hominids were ready to follow Boris downhill
again.
   "We will frighten another village!" he shouted encouragingly, waving
them on. He had a hard time keeping up with them now, though he had
stopped to borrow a pair of some warrior's new moccasins, which were an
excellent fit, or at least felt like it after the sleeve-socks, which Boris now
joyfully discarded. Shoes were a higher invention than the wheel, and he
meant to insist on the point at the next scholarly meeting he attended.
   Boris and his small, leathery army swept into the Workers' Village to
find that panic had preceded them, and the huts and workshops were
already empty of people. From the direction of the quarry there came a
querulous hominid yipping; not words, but the frightened monkey-call of
the young, though here in deeper, adult voices.
   "It is the Dark People," said the hominid standing nearest Boris. In the
next instant he ran toward the quarry, yipping a response. The others all
cascaded after him.
   "Wait! Not yet!" Boris had not foreseen this. "We'll get them out of
there, but not yet!"
   He might as well have shouted to recall the wind. His army was gone.
But he could not blame them.
   Seemingly alone in a deserted village, he ran from hut to hut.
   "Brenda? Jane!"
   No one. No answer.
   In one hut he noticed a quivering mass of bedding, but pulling it aside
uncovered only an ancient and terrified villager.
   Boris took the downstream path again, this time alone. For the
thousandth time he scanned the empty greenish sky for any sign of
rescuing or searching copters. Nothing. There was no use expecting any
help beyond what he could give himself.
   As he neared the Temple Village he studied the banks of the stream
closely, and its shape. He was looking for the pool where Magnuson had
ordered him to throw in the second groundsuit, and the energy rifles. The
suit might well be full of mud by now, but Magnuson had not realized
that an energy rifle would not be fouled by submersion.
   He recognized the pool at once when he came to it, and waded out into
the dark water, searching the muddy bottom with arms and legs. The
current was not particularly strong here, and what he was looking for
could not be far away. Unless someone had beaten him to it.
   Boris went under water to examine the deepest part of the bottom.
When he came up for a breath, Morton was standing on the bank twenty
meters away, still wearing the battered suit, Number One. He was
watching Boris.
   "The river's not going to hide you," the suit's speaker said.
   "Are you still drugged, Morton?" Boris asked. And just then one of his
groping feet found the second groundsuit on the bottom of the river.
Neck-deep in water, he stepped back, moving his feet this way and that,
searching further.
   "Oh no," said Morton calmly. "It's worn off. I won't knock myself out
anymore. But you know too much about our little business now, I can't let
you stay alive. You and the others can be blamed on the Kappans."
   "Where's Brenda?" Boris asked, as his foot contacted one of the energy
rifles. His actions concealed by the muddy water, he scooped up the rifle
with his foot, into his hands. But Morton was still too far away.
   Morton smiled. In a clear pleasant voice he announced, in obscene
fantasy, just how he had disposed of Brenda. In the next instant Morton
rushed Boris, charging with resistless speed into the water. He came on so
quickly that Boris fired without raising the rifle above the surface.
   A needle-jet of steam leapt up, at a sharp angle to the surface, and the
groundsuit sounded, loudly, like a struck gong. Morton fell forward in a
great splash as Boris dove out of the way. The suited figure floated, face
down, hissing, and Boris could feel a wave of warmed water pass with it.
On the back of the cuirass, where the power lamp rode, a blackened place
the size of a saucer now showed; the suit's radio would be useless now,
even if a way could be found to get at it.
   Holding the rifle, Boris climbed again from the river to the path, and
put on again the moccasins he had left on the bank. For a little while,
before the suit started to sink and wedged in shallows, he and Morton kept
pace toward the Temple Village and the vast, quiet expanse of Great Lake
that lay beyond.
   When he reached the third village, he found that the wave of panic
sweeping before the supposed hominid onslaught had emptied it just like
the others. Again Boris walked among deserted dwellings, shouting
uselessly for Brenda and Jane.
   Pete Kaleta's head greeted him from atop a crude wooden pole newly
fixed in the ground just in front of the Temple. With shaky relief Boris
made sure that there was only one such pole. Brenda and Jane and
Magnuson still remained unaccounted for.
   Boris entered the Temple, and poked his head and his rifle into the
inner room. Four trembling priests stood there before the Water-vat,
clumsily holding spears more or less leveled.
   Boris had as yet been able to absorb next to nothing of the villagers'
language, but he tried.
   "Woman!" he said, or meant to say. "Woman. Me. Mine." He swept an
arm ground in a great gesture, asking where.
   At last one of the priests appeared to get the idea, and raised a pointing
arm.
                                  XII.
   Red Circles and his augmented raiding party were out of Magnuson's
sight now, on their way upstream. Magnuson, alone, was walking in the
opposite direction, going downhill, back toward the familiar territory
around the villages.
   He had now been living and working in and around those villages for
approximately a year. As he walked, he could see this rainy season's first
towering thunderheads in the eastern sky, and he recalled that last year's
rainy season had just been starting when he staged his disappearance.
   There were times when he wished he might have devoted his life to
some science as impersonal and plain as meteorology. But the Spirit of
Man had called him, and he had been given no real choice. He had been
forced to spend much of his life out of touch with the busy worlds of
galactic civilization, to bury himself at last in these remote hills on this
backwater planet. He had dedicated himself to his work, committed
crimes in its name, was now hunting for a man to kill him to fulfill the
demands of the ordeal. It would seem to most people a strange way to
serve the cause of Life. But it was not really strange when you saw it
clearly. Death was a necessary part of life. Failure had to die in order that
success might live.
    Prime-theme galactic civilization had much to learn, or re-learn, about
the need for a continuous weeding-out of its members. In his heart
Magnuson welcomed his approaching arrest and trial. Whatever the exact
charges might be, he meant to make his defense an indictment and a
lesson for civilization.
    His defense was going to be basically an explanation of his successful
work. He had raised an ape-like, gibbering thing to the rank of Man, and
in the end the courts would not be able to deny the living evidence of that
one hominid; sooner or later, the work of refining and perfecting
humanity would proceed, on every prime-theme planet, and that was all
that ultimately mattered.
    Sooner or later; ultimately; but his own successful defense was going
to depend on his one living man-hominid, and he had no guarantee that
that one creature was still alive.
    As soon as he came in sight of the Warriors' Village, Magnuson
paused, sensing something wrong ahead. The village was too quiet, it
looked too empty. There was no smoke of any kind.
    There was a crackling in a nearby bush. Magnuson turned alertly; it
was only a couple of old village women who had seen and recognized
him, and were now emerging from hiding. In excited voices, sounding
almost gleeful, they began a jumbled tale of great massacre and
destruction by a thousand raging, wild hominids. The raiding horde had
been led, they swore, by the very same yellow-haired, Earth-descended
man who had so magically escaped from the ordeal.
    Magnuson soothed the women as best he could, and tried to find out
some hard facts. That proved to be impossible, or nearly so. Then, despite
their dire warnings and refusals to go with him, he hurried into the
depopulated village. No corpses and no damage were visible; but hominid
droppings were visible in several places, testifying to a core of truth in the
women's wild story. Making Brazil a leader of the enemy forces was
certainly an imaginative touch. Of course it was possible that Brazil had
discovered that the village was empty and then had dared to pass through
it. Perhaps he had been fleeing from the animals.
    Approaching the pen, Magnuson discovered it undamaged, though as
Red Circles had said its door stood open and the one-handed hominid was
gone. Magnuson had believed Red Circles, but seeing this for himself was
still a blow. At least, he noted with relief, there were no signs of violence
in or around the pen.
   As quickly as he could, he searched the whole village, hut by hut,
calling gently. There was no hominid.
   The creature might possibly have gone back to the familiar laboratory-
pen, near the quarry. As soon as he had checked the last empty hut,
Magnuson hurried in that direction, toward the Workers' Village.
   From ahead of him, somewhere downstream, there came an odd sound
that he could not identify—as of a metal gong being struck sharply, once.
Magnuson paused, listening for a few seconds, but the noise was not
repeated. He hurried on.

   When the young men of The People ran off in a howling gang with
Yellow Monster, Food-Giver watched them out of sight, and then debated
with himself what he should do. He had said that he thought the attack on
the villages was unwise, but it looked like it was going to be made
anyway.
   At last, Food-Giver followed the attackers downstream. He was not
jealous—at least not consciously so—but he was very curious. Yellow
Monster said what he wanted done in a way that made the listener feel it
would be wrong to do anything else. Even though Yellow Monster rarely
gave food to anyone, still the young men were eager to follow him toward
the dangerous villages. There was a great power in Yellow Monster
somewhere.
   It was necessary to go slow when approaching the villages. Food-Giver
found himself a big club to take along, and he was ready at every step to
turn around and run for his life. When Yellow Monster and the young
hominids ran shouting into the first village, Food-Giver stayed back and
waited to see what would happen. Not much of anything seemed to
happen, which surprised him; at least there were no sounds of fighting.
   Food-Giver was still not convinced. He skirted the empty village
suspiciously. The young hominids and Yellow Monster had now got too
far ahead for him to see them, but his ears and his nose told him that they
were going on downstream.
   Remembering another raid of six generations ago, Food-Giver
visualized the location of the next village. He made himself go a little
faster; he wanted to know whatever was going to happen next, good or
bad.
   He was drawing near the next village when he heard a call like that of
wild hominid children in distress, but in deeper adult voices. It came from
ahead and to his right.
   "The Dark People," Food-Giver whispered aloud. He took a tight grip
on his club. He was alone in enemy territory, and afraid, but he could not
ignore that cry. He was a leader because nothing meant more to him than
helping his people, and now the Dark People were calling for help.
   Food-Giver had a memory, many generations old, of their place of
torture, a deep senseless hole dug into stone. He knew where it was, and
he moved toward it with slow caution.
   On a path ahead, he saw a couple of elderly villagers in kilts hurrying
through the woods in frightened silence, coming toward him. They had
not seen him, and it would be an easy matter to kill them. But any noise
might bring warriors, so Food-Giver hid and waited for the two old
people to pass. Then when they were out of sight he went carefully on
toward the quarry he remembered but had never seen with his own eyes.
   Very slowly, senses alert, he came out of the woods near the lip of the
quarry. Here he found much fresh hominid sign, and could recognize the
scent of one or two individuals. After considering the sign for a while, he
interpreted it to mean that the twenty-five young men, or most of them
anyway, had here turned north again in the general direction of home.
They were going scattered out through the woods, and taking with them
other hominids who could only be the Dark People from the pit.
   Food-Giver made a sound and gesture of relief. All this was good, very
good. The villagers had been robbed of their slaves. The People, instead
of suffering great loss on this expedition as Food-Giver had feared, would
have their numbers increased. The Dark People could be given to drink
from the Sacred Pool, and then thought would come into their eyes, and
speech to their tongues, and they would be real people at last. The tribe
had been strengthened. Yellow Monster and his strange powers had done
very well.
   Moving forward to peek down into the quarry-pit, which was
considerably deeper than he remembered it, Food-Giver saw three gray
figures huddled together far below him. He saw that they were not bound,
or confined inside a pen. They were alive, and free to climb out, but still
they stayed in the pit.
   "Hey there!" he shouted to them, forgetting caution for a moment. "Do
you want to be Dark People always?"
   But they only huddled together and stared at him, as if they wanted him
to go away.
   So. If they refused help, he would not try to force it on them. He would
go home, where he belonged. But he had left the quarry only a few paces
behind him when he caught a glimpse among the trees of a thing he did
not remember. A strange, big hut, not such as the villagers usually made
but built of the branchless bodies of many trees placed close together.
Curious as always, Food-Giver approached the structure. The area near it
smelled very little of villagers, but strongly of both monster and hominid.
That seemed to Food-Giver like a friendly combination, and he was
emboldened to go closer.
   There was a dark hole, like a cave, let into the cleverly arranged log-
pile. Inside, someone moved, making timid sounds.
   The freshest smell was hominid, so Food-Give dared to go to the door
and look inside. A one-handed male hominid was there, bedraggled and
frightened-looking. Food-Giver noted the recent small wounds that
marked the other's body, and stared at the old scar that ended the arm-
stump. It was astonishing how neatly the hand had been removed, and
how its owner had survived such a loss.
   Then Food-Giver remembered to be courteous. "Are you Dark?" he
asked. "Or do you think?"
   The eyes of the one-handed hominid were strange and wild, as if
thought were flickering up and down like firelight behind them. His
mouth worked uncertainly. "I… I… I…"
   "Maybe you drank once and no more from the Sacred Pool," said
Food-Giver. "That's not enough. You will come with me now and drink
some more." Food-Giver tried to talk the way Yellow Monster did, stating
positively what should be done. It seemed that great things could be
accomplished by using such a method. "Also you probably need food and
ordinary water."
   Something small squeaked and scuttled in a corner of the cabin. With
an unthinking flash of movement, Food-Giver knocked obstructions aside
and struck at the rat with a hunting thrust of his club. The sudden
movement and noise made the one-handed one scream as if he were being
attacked, and cower away into a corner.
   Food-Giver had just made certain of the crippled rat, when he heard
running footsteps outside the cabin. He turned sharply, but the breeze
brought only a fresh whiff of monster. Food-Giver waited expectantly.

   Walking quickly past the rim of the quarry, Magnuson peered down.
Sledges and ropes and other tools were scattered carelessly. There had
evidently been a hominid raid, the kilted overseers and artisans had fled,
the quarry hominids had been taken away. But three of them were still
down there in the pit. Perhaps because they knew no other place, perhaps
because fear of their masters still held them when their masters were
gone. Their upturned faces, as expressionless as those of cows, followed
Magnuson as he walked along the rim. I will not fail you, Magnuson
pledged silently, looking down at them. I will yet raise you up into the
sun.
   There came a sharp clatter and a thump from ahead of him, followed at
once by a hominid scream. Inside his laboratory! If the wild ones were in
there, and the one-handed man—
   Magnuson ran forward. He found the machine pistol ready in his hand.
   As Magnuson burst into the cabin he saw the one-handed hominid
huddled down in a corner, looking up at him beseechingly. Before
Magnuson could say or do anything, a big wild one lunged at him out of
the gloom.
   The automatic pistol hammered, the repeated concussion deafening in
the enclosed space. One-Hand screamed once more, and was silent,
cowering away from the noise. The wild one was hurled back across the
room, and torn nearly in half. A table had already been upset, lab
equipment broken, and a murderous club lay on the floor.
   There were no others. Shakily, Magnuson lowered the pistol. He had
come just barely in time, it seemed, but the new human life was safe.
   Something curious struck his eye, and he prodded with a toe at the
nerve-twitching gray hand that had almost reached him. Beside the hand
lay half the body of a rat. Curious.
   Boris, still walking in the direction in which the priest had pointed,
halted when he reached the edge of the clearing and saw the copter under
the trees on the other side.
   "Brenda?"
   "Boris?" And her blessed head appeared in one of the copter ports, to
be joined a second later by Jane's. "Boris, this thing won't fly, the controls
are all smashed. But whoever did it forgot the radio. I got a message off
half an hour ago, when the villagers all ran away. The colony took a
bearing on us, they're sending an armed copter. Oh, you look so ridiculous
in that little net. But you're alive…" And even before she got out of the
copter, Brenda began to sob.
   Boris kissed her, and gobbled half of an emergency ration that Jane
found in the copter and brought to him. He kissed both girls, ate the other
half of the ration, then crawled into the copter himself and found a spare
coverall and put it on.
   "Don't want to look ridiculous. Let's start hiking, ladies."
   Brenda was still limping a trifle, but ready to go. They had made about
three hundred meters east along the shore of Great Lake when the copter
from the colony arrived and picked them up.

   Seven days later, Boris was walking once more across the common of
the Temple Village, through pouring rain. The landing clearing nearby
had been enlarged, but was still full of copters. All three of the muddy
villages were swarming with Space Force uniforms. The cruiser had
arrived at last, and was in orbit above the greenish clouds.
   In the middle of the common, Boris passed a villager who stood still, as
if perhaps too bewildered to shelter himself from rain. The steady
downpour had washed the colored clay from his arms, but Boris knew
him. When Boris made a peace gesture, the war chief only looked the
more bewildered. After giving Boris a brief sullen stare he turned and
walked heavily away, a man whose normal world had been yanked out
from under him, never to return.
   Some of the Earth's old primitives had believed that a rain such as this
fell to mark the death of a great chief. Magnuson was not dead, not the
one for whom the heavens groaned and wept today; Magnuson sat alone
in his well-built hut, his face tired but showing an inner contentment.
   He looked up at his visitor without much surprise, as if perhaps Boris
had been in his thoughts. "Brazil. It wasn't personal enmity that made me
help them hunt you. You understand that?"
   "You mean Morton forced you?"
   Magnuson hesitated. "He would' have tried to force me. But I can't say
that he did."
   "You mean it was for the cause. The great purification of mankind."
   Magnuson folded his hands on the rude table before him. "I told you
once that none of us matter, much, as individuals."
   Boris shook his head slightly. "Anyway, I've already given my
statement to the Tribune. Have you heard it or read it?"
   "No. I've been ordered to stay in this hut. They'll charge me formally
when I've obtained counsel," Magnuson was sitting while Boris stood, but
still Boris got the impression that Magnuson was looking down at him.
"You know, my hominid is alive and well."
   "Your hominid?"
   "I think I may claim credit for him. There are Space Force people
examining him now. The day before the Space Force came, I succeeded in
teaching him a word or two of speech. So you see that the rite of passage
was effective."
   Boris, sure now that Magnuson did not yet know the truth about the
hominids and the Water, stood there feeling weary, and could discover in
himself no wish to destroy the smiling assurance before him. It would be
short-lived before the Tribune's coming wrath—or else it would
perpetuate itself by sliding completely into self-delusion.
   Magnuson said: "I was only just in time to save him from a wild one,
you know. I wonder what name he'll choose, when he starts to understand
about names."
   " 'Food-Giver' is a good name," said Boris. "Might call him that."
   "I don't believe I understand."
   "No, I don't believe you do." Boris had just come from viewing Food-
Giver's corpse. There had been none of his people nearby when he died,
no one to open the skull properly and in time, to drain and preserve the
observations of his generous life for future generations.
   The rain of the chiefs was falling.
    The People: grunting, flea-picking, much abused and cheerful. Nasty,
virtuous, and short. They were Boris's people too, now, in a real sense,
and he meant to do what he could for them in the future.
    But Boris could also remember Brenda being led into this village, to
this very hut, helpless in the hands of those who might have killed her in
their greed and lust. And he remembered Magnuson cutting the cord that
bound her hands, throwing the cord aside, cursing whatever bound human
beings, whatever stunted them or made them less than perfect.
    "Magnuson, I'll do what I can to help you. You've drunk the Water of
Thought several times. What you've done here you may have done under
its influence."
    "No, we both know that the effect soon passes. My actions here have
been sane and responsible. The credit or blame is mine."
    "The big charge will be manslaughter, or maybe even murder."
    "Why, I don't see any way they can base that. I didn't kill Jones, he was
quite willing to enter the ordeal. I didn't kill Kaleta. I've killed no one."
    Boris could not stay in the hut any longer, and walked out into the rain.
Behind him he could still hear the proud, dedicated voice: "In fact, no one
can now deny that I have created a new human life from…"

    Back from a trip to hominid territory, where he had introduced the
Tribune's representatives as friends, Boris found Brenda waiting for him
outside the colony's main gate. She was wearing a rain hood, which she
lifted obligingly so he could kiss her. Then she snuggled up against him.
    So young. Never been anywhere, really. Offworld once, she had told
him, on one quick trip. Such a small-town girl. In the last week he had
seen her hunger for children and home-making.
    Boris experienced a terrible sinking feeling, akin to what he had heard
about drowning. Visions of future changes and responsibilities rose before
him. But he was helpless, as if again in the grip of the Water of Thought.
    "Listen." He started to walk with Brenda in the rain. "I'm a planeteer.
I'm stationed here and there, and I'm moving around all the time. At least
that's the kind of work I've always done. I've never been married. I've
never wanted to settle down—before. I… am I going to have to struggle
through this whole speech before you tell me yes or no?"
    "You've never said no to me," she said.
THE END