The full tune had another six hours to run.
In six hours Lad-nar would almost certainly get hungry.
Kettridge ran the whole thing through his mind, sifting the facts, gauging the information, calculating the outcome. It didn’t look good. Not good at all.
He knew more about Lad-nar than the creature could have told him, though, and that at least was a factor in his favor. He knew about its religion, its taboos, its—and here he felt his throat go dry again—eating habits, its level of intelligence and culture. The being had kept nothing back, and Kettridge had some astonishingly accurate data to draw upon.
Not quite what you signed up for, is it, Ben? Startled by his own mental speech, he answered himself wearily, No, not at all.
Kettridge wondered what Lad-nar would think were he to tell the Blestonian he wasn’t a blue-plate special, but a washed-out, run-down representative of a civilization that didn’t give one hoot about Lad-,nar or his religion.
He’ll probably chew me up and swallow me, thought Kettridge. A more bitterly ironic thought followed: which is exactly what he’ll do anyhow. It would take a powerful weapon to stop him.
It seemed so strange. Two days before he had been aboard the study-ship Jeremy Bentham, one year out of Capital City, and now he was the main course at a Blestonian aborigine’s feast.
The laughter wouldn’t come.
It wouldn’t come because Kettridge was old and tired, and knew how right it was that he should die here, with all hope cut off. Lad-nar was simply following his natural instincts. He was protecting himself. He was surviving.
Which is more than you’ve been doing for the last ten years, Ben, he told himself.
Benjamin Kettridge had long since stopped surviving. He knew it as clearly as he knew he would die here on this hot and steaming world far from the sight of men.
Think about it, Ben. Think it over. Now that it’s finished and you tumble out of things at sixty-six years of age. Think about the waste and the crying and the bit of conviction that could have saved you. Think about it all.
Then the story unfurled on a fleeting banner. It rolled out for Ben Kettridge there in a twilight universe. In the course of a few minutes he had found life in that shadowy mind-world preferable to his entire previous existence.
He saw himself again as a prominent scientist, engaged with others of his kind on a project of great consequence to mankind. He recalled his own secret misgivings as he had boldly embarked on the experiment.
He heard again the sonorous overtones and the pith and substance of his talk with Fennimore. He heard it more clearly than the blast and rush of the thunder outside…
“Charles, I don’t think we should do it this way. If something were to happen—”
“Ben, nothing whatever can possibly happen—unless we become careless. The compound is safe, and you know it. First we demonstrate its applicability. Then we let the dunderheads scream about it. After they know its worth, they’ll be the first to acclaim us.”
“But you don’t seem to understand, Fenimore. There are too many random. factors in the formulae. There’s a fundamental flaw in them. If I could only put my finger on it—”
“Get this, Ben. I don’t like to pull seniority on you, but I have no choice. I’m not a harsh man, but this is a dream I’ve had for twenty years, and no unjustified timidity on your part is going to put it off. We test the compound Thursday!”
And Fenimore’s dream had overnight turned into a nightmare of twenty-five thousand dead, and hospitals filled to overflowing with screaming patients.
The nightmare had reached out thready tentacles and dragged in Kettridge, too. In a manner of days a reputation built on years of dedicated work had been reduced to rubble. But he had not escaped the inquests. What little reputation he had left had saved him—and a few others—from the gas chamber. But life was at an end for him.
Ten years of struggling for mere survival—no one would hire him even for the most menial of jobs—had sunk Kettridge lower and lower. There was still a common decency about him that prevented utter disintegration, just as there was an inner desire to continue living.
Kettridge never became—as did some of the others who escaped—a flophouse derelict or a suicide. He just became—anonymous.
His fortunes ebbed until there was nothing left except slashed wrists or the bottle.
Kettridge had been too old by then for either. And always there had been the knowledge that he could have stopped the project had he voiced his doubts instead of brooding in silence.
Finally the study-ship post had saved him. Ben Kettridge, using another name, had signed on for three years. He had actually welcomed the cramp and the squalor of shipboard. Studying and cataloging under the stars had enabled him to regain his self-respect and to keep a firm grip on his sanity.
Ben Kettridge had become an alien ecologist. And now, one year out from Capital City, his sanity was threatened again.
He wanted to scream desperately. His throat muscles drew up and tightened, and his mouth, inside the flexible hood, opened until the corners stretched in pain.
The pictures had stopped. He had withdrawn in terror from the shadowed mind-world and was back in a stone prison with a hungry aborigine for keeper.
Lad-nar stirred.
The huge furred body twisted, sighed softly, and sank back into sleep again. Kettridge wondered momentarily if the strength of his thoughts had disturbed the beast.
What a fantastic creature, thought Kettridge, It lives on a world where the heat will fry a human and shivers in fear at lightning storms.
A strange compassion came over Kettridge. How very much like a native of Earth this alien creature was. Governed by its stomach and will to survive, and dominated by a religion founded in fear and nurtured on terror! Lightning the beast thought of as a Screamer from the Skies. The occasionally glimpsed sun was the Great Warmer.
Kettridge pondered on the simplicity and primitive common sense of Lad-nar’s religion.
When the storms gathered, when they finally built up sufficient potential to generate the lightning and thunder, Lad-nar knew that the cold would set in. Cold was anathema to him. He knew that the cold sapped him of strength, and that the lightning struck him down.
So he stole a cat litter and hid himself for weeks—until the gigantic storms abated. The high body heat- of the creature dictated that it must have a great deal of food to keep it alive when the temperature went down. When a cat litter wasn’t available, the logical alternative was to kill and eat an alien ecologist.
This was no stupid being, Kettridge reminded himself.
Its religion was a sound combination of animal wisdom and native observation. The lightning killed. Don’t go abroad in the storms. The storms brought cold. Get food and stay alive.
It was indeed strange how a terrifying situation could bring a man to a realization of himself.
Here is a chance, he thought. The words came unbidden.
Just four words. Here is a chance. An opportunity not only to survive—something he had long since stopped doing consciously—but a chance to redeem himself, if only in his own mind. Before him was an aborigine, a member of a dying race, a cowering creature of the caves. Before him was a creature afraid to walk in the storms for fear of the lightning, shackled by a primitive religion and doomed never to see the sky.
In that split moment Ben Kettridge devised a plan to save Lad-nar’s soul.
There are times when men sum up their lives, take accounting, and find themselves wanting. Lad-nar suddenly became a symbol of all the people who had been lost in the Mass Death.
In the mind of an old and tired man, many things are possible.
I must get out of here! Ben Kettridge told himself, over and over. But more than that, he knew that he must save the poor hulk before him. And in saving the creature he would save himself. Lad-nar had no idea what a star was. Well, Ben Kettridge would tell him. Here was a chance!
Kettridge moved up flat against the wall, his back straining with his effort to sink into the stone. Watching the Blestonian come to wakefulness was an ordeal of pure horror.
The huge body tossed and heaved as it rose. It sat erect from the thin, pinched waist and raised the massive wedge-shaped chest, the hideous head, the powerful neck and arms. A thin trickle of moisture dripped from a corner of its fanged mouth. It sat up and thought: Lad-nar hungers.
“Oh, God in Heaven, please let me have time! Please allow me this one little thing!”