The Marginal Man Read online

  The Marginal Man

  Chad Oliver

  First published under the title Guardian Spirit in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, April 1958.

  Published in 3 to the Highest Power, edited 1968 by William F. Nolan.

  I

  The small gray metallic sphere drifted down through the night sky of Pollux V twenty-nine light-years from Earth. The eerie pinkish glow of the two moons glinted softly on the floating sphere against its backdrop of silver stars. Already, invisibly far out in space, the ion drive of the mother ship from Earth’s CAS fleet had flared into life again, carrying the great ship back into the lonely darkness between the worlds.

  The sphere was alone.

  It dropped gently through the atmosphere on its antigravs toward the dark surface of the planet below. It made no sound, drifting through the strange moonlight as insubstantially as a ghost from some forgotten world. It hovered above the branches of a stand of trees for a moment, shifted course slightly, and settled in a field of grass and shrubs. It barely disturbed the grass at first and then, as the antigravs shut off, it crushed into the ground with its true weight.

  A circular port slid open and two men stepped out. The light from inside the sphere beamed through the port and mixed with the rose of the moonlight. The two men were clearly visible and made no effort to conceal themselves.

  Even physically, the two men were a contrast and their first actions on the unknown world merely underlined the differences between them. Arthur Canady, tall and lean and dour, leaned back against the side of the sphere and lit his pipe with hardly a glance at the new world around him. Frank Landis scurried around like a newly released puppy, his stocky body scuttling back and forth between dimly glimpsed rocks and shrubs and night-blooming flowers, his sandy hair like a feverish halo over his open, eager face.

  “Look at this, Art,” he said, retrieving a delicate white flower that looked like an orchid. “How about that? Isn’t it something?”

  Arthur Canady puffed on his pipe solemnly. “I knew a man once who ate flowers,” he said.

  “Why’d he do that?” Frank asked, falling into the trap as usual.

  “To get to the other side,” Arthur Canady explained patiently.

  Frank Landis looked at him blankly. “Sometimes I just don’t get you, Art.”

  “I’m not always contagious, I guess.”

  “I mean, what the hell. Here we are, the first civilized men ever to set foot on a new world—it’s an historic moment—and you’re not even interested.”

  “I wouldn’t say that,” Canady said, uncoiling himself from the side of the sphere. “It’s just that botany is a little out of my line. For instance, unless you’re too set on making a little speech about the Mission from Earth and the Great Terran Father, I suspect that there’s something important going on over there right now that we ought to see.” He pointed toward the west.

  Frank looked and saw nothing. “What’s over there?”

  “Among other things, if our survey map is accurate, there’s a good-sized stream. On the banks of that stream, the natives have a camp—a big one. And they’re having a ceremony of some sort.”

  “What makes you think so?”

  “See that glow over there, through those trees? Unless you happen to believe in a horde of giant lightning bugs, that means a series of large fires. And if you’ll turn up your hearing aid a bit you can hear what sounds like a chant of some kind. Tired hunters aren’t very apt to be just practicing their harmony around the old campfire, so I assume there is some type of ceremony going on. And I think we ought to be there.”

  “Now?” Frank asked.

  “Why not?”

  Frank stared at his companion. He had never worked with Canady before and knew him only by his reputation. Dammit, no matter how good an anthropologist he might be, the man wasn’t comfortable.

  “You’re not afraid of a few hundred natives, are you?” Canady asked, smiling.

  “Of course not! I’m sure you know what you’re doing. It’s just that—well, we just got here—seems like rushing it a bit.. .”

  Canady tapped his pipe out against his boot, carefully smothering the hot ashes with dirt. He had rather suspected that Frank, for all his too-frequent sermons about his love for primitive peoples, preferred to deal with natives from a position of massive strength. Well, he had a point there and this was no time to start a silly argument. “Don’t worry, Frank. We’ll wait until tomorrow and run through the customary contact routines. I’m just going to sneak over there and have a look through the glasses. You can stay here if you like.”

  He got his glasses out of the sphere, locating them under Frank’s demonstration steam engine, and stuck a pistol in his belt. Then, without another word, he struck off to the west toward the sound of the chanting. He would really have preferred to go alone, to savor this new world without the bubble-bath of Frank’s somewhat shrill enthusiasms, but he hadn’t gone fifty yards before Frank panted up behind him and fell into step.

  “This is really something,” Frank exclaimed. “I feel like Robinson Crusoe!”

  Canady toyed with a vision of a suitable desert island but held his tongue. His long legs covered the ground with an easy, effortless stride. He felt rather than saw the lovely moons in the star-sprinkled sky, felt the alien wind in his lungs, felt the strange and wonderful sounds and smells and impressions that tugged oddly at his heart.

  He entered the darkness beneath the trees, silent as a shadow, and slipped toward the orange glow of the firelight. The chanting was closer now; it had a weird and haunting atonality to it, a subtle rhythm that was hard to catch—

  Canady quickened his steps, all thoughts of Frank forgotten. There was a sadness in him, and a nameless hunger.

  Twenty-nine light-years from the planet Earth it had begun again.

  Hidden in a clump of thorny bushes on a low hill overlooking the stream-cut valley, Arthur Canady held the glasses to his eyes and stared down upon a scene of wild magnificence, a scene that filled him with wonder and the sense of a life beyond his knowledge, a life glimpsed far away, a life he could never enter.

  It was something that the survey charts and the planted microphones had not prepared him for. He was a man who was seldom surprised but he was surprised now. It was the difference between a faded photograph and the reality, the difference between a set of statistics and the miracle of human beings. All the expected culture elements were there, but the intensity of the thing was astonishing. And there was something more…

  The stream coursed through the moonlit valley, pink and silver beneath the moons. Tremendous fires blazed along the river banks, hissing and crackling with the rich juices of fresh sap, shooting spectacular showers of sparks high into the air. The orange glow of the flames bathed the rows of tepee-like skin tents in lambent, living light.

  There must have been close to a thousand men and women camped by the river, which was an amazing number of people for a hunting culture. Every last person was taking part in the ceremony: dancing, preparing food, singing. They were a tall, robust people; they moved proudly with their heads held high. They were dressed in a wild and barbaric splendor: fur robes and feathers and intricately painted designs on their graceful bodies.

  The chanting was continuous. It was a joyful, happy kind of music, serving as a chorus behind the whirling forms of the dancers. Most primitive music, Canady had always felt, was just that: primitive and incredibly monotonous. But this was something else: a lively, complex wave of counterpoint and rhythm that set a man’s blood racing in his veins. And the dancing was no mere shuffling of feet in a circle; it was abandoned and yet controlled, graceful as a ballet but with a rough sexuality to it that was strangely innocent, strangely pure.

  The happiness and the joy were tangible things; you could feel them in the air. It was a time of rejoicing, a time of release, a time of thanksgiving. And yet there was a dark undercurrent to it, a shadow that moved in and out among the firelit dancers like a whisper of remorse…

  In the precise center of the camp one fire blazed higher than all the others. A constant stream of men fed fresh wood to it, tossing mighty logs into the flames. It was a hot, roaring fire, a pivot around which all else revolved. It drew the eye like a magnet.

  The two men from Earth lay silent, watching. Both of them knew that they had a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity and they took full advantage of it. Tomorrow their work would begin, the work that would spell the end of the life they were watching, but for now it was only something to see, something to remember when the old days were gone.

  The dancing and the chanting continued. It went on for hours, rising in intensity all the time. The dances grew wilder, the chanting rose to a climax that was almost unendurable. The fires blazed and the moons arced across the night sky, shaming the distant light of the stars.

  When it happened, it happened with a startling abruptness.

  The chanting stopped, as though cut off with a switch. The dancers stopped in mid-step. The natives moved into a silent circle around the central fire. A hush fell over the night, a hush of expectancy…

  One man stepped out from the others, framed in the leaping flames. He was naked, free of ornament of any kind. He raised his right hand and then his left. He bowed to the four directions. He looked up, out into the night and the moons and the stars. His face was radiant with a supreme peace.

  Calmly, without hesitation, he walked into the roaring fire.

  He climbed up the searing logs, his hair already aflame.
He lay down on his back on a bed of fire. He did not move. He did not cry out. His body disappeared in a mass of flame, even the bones lost in the red-hot coals that fed the fire.

  The fire blazed higher, crackling and hissing.

  It was done.

  The natives turned silently and filed back to their tents by twos and threes. No one looked back at the funeral pyre. Within minutes there was not a human being to be seen anywhere. The stream wound through the valley, ghding smoothly in the fading light. The fires blazed for a remarkably short time, then died away into glowing coals. The great fire that had eaten a fife was the last to go, flaring and sparking as though reluctant to give up its moment of splendor, but it finally faded and collapsed into a pile of smoking embers.

  The night stole in again, covering the tents with darkness.

  The two men from Earth eased themselves out of the concealing bushes and walked back under the stars to their waiting sphere. Even Frank had nothing to say.

  Canady felt the strange world around him, felt it as a palpable presence, and was filled with an excitement that had no name. He felt that he stood on the edge of marvels, of wonders that dwelt in an abyss of dreams.

  One thing he knew: this was no ordinary hunting culture, no matter what the survey charts showed.

  He slept badly, impatient for the morning sun.

  II

  The sun was a red glory in the sky and by its harsh light the world of Pollux V lost much of its ethereal quality and resolved itself into a matter-of-fact land of rolling plains, distant mountains, and stands of tall trees that followed the river valleys. After a breakfast of concentrated coffee and powdered eggs, Canady found it difficult to recapture his mood of the night before. What he had seen had been unprecedented, but perhaps he had attached too much importance to it.

  Still, it was odd. The man who had walked into the flames had seemed to do so of his own free will; he had not been forced. He had not been a sacrifice in the usual sense of the word, and in any event human sacrifices were normally a luxury restricted to higher types of culture with larger populations. The man had wanted to go into those flames. Why? And why had his death been the occasion for such rejoicing on the part of the rest of the people? There had certainly been more than one band present; people must have come in from miles around to share in the festivities…

  Canady shook his head. It was folly to speculate on such things until you knew enough about the culture to make sense of them. He put the incident from his mind and settled into routine.

  And routine it was. The first contact between Earth and a primitive culture was always a dramatic event but the procedure was cut and dried. The scientists of Earth’s Cultural Aid Service had worked out a plan for every known type of culture and all the field men had to do was to follow the proper plan in simple ABC fashion. AH the plans, based on centuries of experience on Earth and on the nearer planetary systems, were designed to do two basic things: show the people that the newcomers were friendly, and show them that they were too powerful to be attacked. It was a neat example of the age-old technique of putting a big smile on your face and carrying a sharp knife in your toga.

  While Frank set up his equipment in the sphere, Canady took a high-powered rifle and set out across the plains toward a small herd of grazing animals. The animals (called yedoma in the local native dialect) were large beasts that looked like the American moose, save that the horns on the males were short and stubby affairs like those of domestic cattle. The economic life of the natives—as best the CAS could gather from photographic and microphonic survey—was based on the herds of yedoma that roamed the plains; yedoma meat, fresh or dried, was the food staple, yedoma skins were used for tents and clothing, yedoma sinew was used for thread. It was a neat parallel to the reliance of the ancient Plains Indians upon the buffalo, and it offered an exceptionally easy situation for cultural manipulation.

  Canady kept the wind in his face and it was a simple matter to get close enough to the herd for a shot. The animals had had no experience with a weapon that killed at long range and were aware of no danger. Canady dropped a yedoma calf with one shot and could easily have killed half the herd if there had been any point in it. He dragged the calf back to the sphere and lifted it inside.

  They were ready.

  Frank Landis took the controls and lifted the sphere into the morning sky with the effortless ease of a man to whom all things mechanical were second nature. There was little sensation of movement within the sphere as it floated over the plain toward the native camp.

  Canady sat quietly, smoking his pipe. It was crowded inside the sphere, crowded with portable steam engines and sacks of seeds and repeating firearms and that greatest of all invasion threats, crates of sewing machines. He thought of the wild and free scene the night before, the tents and the fires and the dancing, and he thought of it as a way of life already gone, destroyed by the bland deadliness of sacks of seeds and crates of sewing machines. The old regret saddened him, and he was unable to comfort himself by the neat-sounding official phrases that cloaked the operation of the Cultural Aid Service.

  In theory, they were helping the natives. The fact that the natives had asked for no help was not mentioned. The speeches at the United Nations were fairly dripping with high-sounding phrases about underdeveloped areas, primitive misery, and the moral obligation of the strong to help the weak. There was much oratory about starving children and the glorious benefits of civilization.

  Behind the scenes, oddly enough, much of the talk was along the same lines. All men wear cultural blinkers which condition them to curiously inevitable chains of reasoning. Given certain premises, certain conclusions follow as certainly as fish swallow worms. The goals and aspirations of a man’s own culture just naturally seem right for all other cultures as well, and surely you are doing the other fellow a service by passing on the joys that you yourself have known…

  And then, of course, there was the fact that primitive areas make poor markets for an industrial civilization. The development of the ion drive had made trade commercially sound, and Earth’s factories were not geared to mass-produce arrow points. If you want to sell a man a tri-di set, it helps to have electricity first. If you want to sell a man a tractor, it is nice if agriculture has already been invented. If you’re thinking in terms of consumers, a large and prosperous population is better than a small and poverty-stricken one.

  The human mind is infinitely capable of rationalization; it can justify anything from crusades to slavery on the basis of Good, Pure, and Noble Motives.

  Canady had never considered himself a romantic man. He was a product of his culture and he had to live in it. He had found a job that interested him, a job that offered good pay and prestige, and he did his job honestly. But he had never been able to convince himself that he was a knight in shining armor by reciting a string of platitudes. He was too wise a man to believe that he could change the universe by a one-man fight against injustice, so he simply did what men have always done—he did the best he could to ease some of the pain along the way.

  Right now, as the sphere floated over the treetops, he was not unduly proud of himself. Even the argument that he was gaining valuable data for his science failed to reassure him, and it was a mark of his honesty that he did not even consider the argument that if he didn’t do the job somebody else would.

  Frank looked up from the controls, his blue eyes disturbed. He was not an insensitive man and many of the same thoughts had been bothering him. Frank, however, could always sell himself on the rightness of what he was doing. It was not dishonesty on his part; his brain just worked that way.

  “Seems kind of a shame,” he said. “I guess they like their life pretty well the way it is.”

  “Maybe not,” Canady said, helping him out. “After all, Frank, that’s an argument that might have kept us all in the caves.”

  “That’s right.” Frank’s eyes brightened. “Hell, if you don’t believe in progress, what can you believe in?”

  Canady could think of several answers to that one but he just shrugged as though the problem were insoluble. The blind faith in progress—which normally, if you tried to pin it down to anything approaching preciseness, meant increased technological complexity —was so deeply ingrained in Earth’s cultures that it had become an automatic response. Even children believed in progress. How could you not believe in progress?