Towers frowned. “If the food were really abundant, there would be a—” He hesitated as the picture dawned on him.
“Yes,” said Klossig. “Now you see it. The result would an unprecedented situation—a planetary mob.”
“But there couldn’t be that much food!” Towers regretted the comment as soon as he’d made it, but Klossig merely nodded in understanding.
“The trouble,” said Klossig, “is that we automatically take for granted a maladaptation of humanoid to environment. Of course, there isn’t so much food that fruit cascades continuously from the trees, and small animals present themselves eagerly to be eaten. That’s the way it would have to be for us, who can eat only certain rare parts of the environment. Here, it’s different.”
Klossig and Towers were almost at the top of the stairs. Klossig paused to break from the log wall beside the steps a large chunk of thick corky bark. He looked at it with a peculiar exasperated expression, and handed it to Towers.
Towers scowled, and studied it. The bark was heavier that it appeared, dark gray, and apparently homogeneous. He sniffed it, and noticed no scent. He squeezed it, and it yielded slightly to his pressure, than recovered elastically as he loosened his grip. He glanced curiously at Klossig.
Klossig nodded sourly. “That chunk of bark represents nothing but inert matter to you and me. The natives find it highly nutritious, if not tasty.” Klossig pointed the length of the wall, and Towers looked at the mass of thick gray bark that covered the big logs. “Think of that,” said Klossig, “not as ‘bark,’ but as so much steak or root crops. There are whole forests of those trees down there. You and I can’t eat them. But the natives here can. They have a digestion that can cope with just about every plant and animal they come up against. They are adapted.”
Klossig and Towers climbed to the top of the wall, where there was a flat walk about fifteen feet across, with a parapet not quite waist high at the edge.
Klossig walked to the parapet, and pointed down. “And here,” he said, “is the result of that adaptation.”
Towers looked down, through rows of spike-bar barriers, so that his gaze traveled down the wall to the sheer cliff on which the wall was built, and down the cliff, where thin clouds drifted by, to the dense forest, small and hazy down below.
On the cliff face, something moved. Towers looked closely, and suddenly realized that a small humanlike figure was climbing the cliff. There was another motion, and Towers saw another figure, to one side, and lower down.
The firing he had heard earlier was louder now, and the wind brought a sharp smell of gunpowder. Towers looked up.
Projecting out from the wall on log struts and braces, a covered wooden platform hung far out over the edge of the cliff, connected to the top of the wall by a swaying catwalk across which two Centran soldiers carried a load of ammunition cans. On the platform lay several Centran soldiers, aiming at the wall.
Towers glanced down. One of the little figures he’d seen earlier suddenly jerked, lost its grip, dropped down the face of the cliff, struck it and bounded back, to fall, tumbling over and over, and dwindling in apparent size, till it was lost from view against the hazy forest far below.
Towers glanced at the outthrust platform, where the soldiers had ceased fire. Suddenly one of them pointed. They shifted their position a trifle, and opened fire.
Klossig said, “Population pressure, Towers. On the top of high buttes such as these, there are often forests of old gnarled trees, lichen, moss, and other things useless to most races, but a family or two of these humanoids could live up here.”
“And what would they do when the others climbed up?”
“Throw them off. Or get thrown off themselves. What else could they do?”
Towers looked down at the forest far below. “What’s it like down there?”
“Alternate paradise and hell. When a plague goes through, it cuts the population to the bone. Then, till the population builds up again, there’s overflowing abundance for all. But then, the population does build up. There’s food for a thousand people to subsist on, but there are twelve hundred people there. The result is chaos, slaughter, and cannibalism. Whoever doesn’t shove his neighbor to the wall gets shoved to the wall himself. Think what it’s like down there to make a climb up that cliff seen attractive by comparison.”
Towers glanced down at the cliff face. “What happens if one of them does get up here?”
“Hell on wheels,” said Klossig. “They’re savages—as who wouldn’t be in that spot?—but that doesn’t help us any. They attack on sight.”
“What if you meet them down below?”
“Same thing. They see us. Wham! They attack us.”
“Are they dangerous to well-armed troops?”
“Not in a cleared space, no. In the forests, they’re dangerous enough. We’ve had a number of clashes with them under both conditions, and it was no fun, I can tell you that.”
“What’s it like?”
“Men, women, and children take part in the attack. There’s no warning. There’s no organization. They may use their bare hands, sticks, or rocks. If they get you—then you’re dead. There’s no mercy. If you get them, that’s just a temporary expedient. It doesn’t mean much. There are others to step right into the place of those you’ve killed. All you accomplish by killing them is to relieve the population pressure a trifle.”
Towers said, “From the way they act, how do we know they’re humanoids? That presupposes some brains on their part.”
“They’re humanoids, all right,” said Klossig. “We’ve tested individual captives, and they have brains enough to qualify—as individuals, that is.”
“Yes,” said Towers slowly. “I see. You aren’t up against them as individuals.”
“Exactly,” said Klossig. “That’s the whole thing. We are up against them as a mob. We can’t make peace with them. There’s no organization to deal with. It’s just one huge mob. Now, what do we do?”
Towers looked out at the forested land mass stretching into the distance.
Klossig said, “The purpose of the Integral Union is to unite all human and humanoid races in an interstellar organization for mutual benefit and defense. That’s our reason for existence, and the justification for our actions. If we don’t do it, somebody else may, and not for mutual benefit, either. Now, here we are, up against it. Either we solve this problem, or at the same time we lose a rich planet, and fail a humanoid race that’s caught in a truly vicious trap.”
From somewhere in the distance, Towers heard a shot. Dimly, the thought went through his mind that the platform thrust out from the wall here was badly located. The outer edge of the wall itself, like the walls of ancient cities back on Earth, did not run a perfectly straight line, but was set out at intervals to allow a view of adjacent sections of the wall. The outthrust platform should have been built twenty feet or so farther to the left, to allow a view of the corner made by the edge of this set-out part of the wall. This thought passed through Towers’ mind as the thought may occur to a man that a picture is a trifle off-center. He would have forgotten it, but at that moment he heard the shout from somewhere along the wall, glanced around, and chanced to look down at the corner of the parapet.
A large hand, covered with coarse reddish-yellow hairs, gripped the edge of the parapet.
What happened next took place almost too fast to follow. A second hand joined the first at the edge of the parapet. Towers reached for his gun, and at the same time shouted a warning to Klossig. The two hands atop the wall tensed, and abruptly a head of wiry tangled hair above two frenzied eyes thrust up into view. Towers had the impression of a mouth full of bared teeth, a shout with an almost physical impact, a fluid blur of motion, and he was knocked back against the parapet.
For an instant, Towers was at the edge of the parapet, a little less than waist-high. Then something hit him and heaved his legs roughly up and over. A shout of triumph followed him into empty space, and then he was falling, too far out to have any chance to catch the wall.
An instant later, something smashed into the back of his left shoulder like a sack of cement. He flung his arms out, felt himself whirl, then wall and sky pivoted to show him nothing but the cliff and the sheer drop through the cloud to the forest below.
His left arm was around something solid.
Towers gripped with convulsive strength, his heart pounded, and a second later, he saw that he had hit one of the log struts that supported the outthrust platform.