Nansen strode. “Left about ten degrees,” came Brent’s voice, faint beneath the thunders. Nansen tuned up his amplifier. The well brawled. The formless blobs of blindness floated before him.
But his mind was clearing. Out of the racket he sifted words: “Right just a tad. . . . Watch out, you’ve got a boulder in your path. . . . No, Tim’s veered off. Bear left about fifteen degrees. . . .”
He’s the hero — Brent. He clings to his sanity and forces his judgment to function, while the lights flash, flash, flash.
Could there be something else, some inductive effect on our brains from the computers everywhere around, making us this vulnerable, Tim the most? I don’t know. I hope we’ll live to know.
Nansen tripped and fell. Pain jabbed through knees and hands. He picked himself up, he groped onward. Heat washed around him and smote through his helmet.
“Sir,” amidst the tumult, “he’s climbing onto the bank. You’d better turn back.”
“No.”
“But you might go over, yourself, into the stream —”
“Guide me, Mr. Brent.”
“Sir. Left, ten degrees. No, a little more right. Careful, there’s a heap of junk ahead. . . . Better go on all fours.”
Nansen obeyed. The heat in the rock baked through clothing and gloves.
Dimly in the roar: “You’re nearly to him. He’s on the rim, staring down. You could knock him over, if he doesn’t fall on his own account first.”
Nansen opened his eyes. He saw the lava up which he crawled. And two boots, ankles, shins — He surged to his feet. “Come back with me, Cleland,” he said into the noise and the scorching.
The enthralled man made no answer. He swayed where he stood above moltenness. Again the lights attacked Nansen.
He laid hold. Cleland moaned. He struggled. Nansen got a lock on his arms, a knee in the small of his back. He wrenched him around.
The lights were behind them. Nansen saw only stone, the forest that was merely befuddling, Brent and the Tahirians at its edge. Emil and Fernando stood stiff — suddenly realizing what had almost happened? Nansen frog-marched Cleland down the bank and across the waste.
“Hey!” Brent shouted. “We did it! By God, we did it!”
Cleland slumped. “Wha — wha’s uh matter?” he wailed. “I was — I don’t know —”
Nansen released him but kept an arm around his waist. “You’ll be all right. Come along. And never look back to where you were.”
“Cap’n — Cap’n, was I crazy or, or what — ?”
“It will be all right, I say. We simply met another thing we did not know.”
CHAPTER 26
Besides his research notes, which he entered in the general database, Sundaram kept a journal. At first it was for himself, later he shared it with Yu. In it he set down subjective impressions, tentative ideas, ruminations, remarks, speculations, the raw stuff of knowledge.
“Now that we and the Tahirians have developed the basic structure of Cambiante” — the common language, with the parleurs its means of expression —”and are rapidly increasing and refining its vocabulary, we can try to explain what we are to each other,” he wrote one day. “This may well prove the most difficult task of all, perhaps not entirely possible, but we must try, for it is the ultimate purpose of Envoy’s journey.
“Herewith a fragmentary rendition of what I believe our collocutors have been attempting to tell us.
“Their species evolved to cope with the changeable, often harsh, occasionally murderous environments on this planet. Omnivorous but largely vegetarian, they lived in groups with a dominance hierarchy. However, alpha, beta, etc. obtained their ranks not directly by strength and aggressiveness, but by contribution to the group. Thus, in a jungle the primitive alpha might be the strongest fighter against predators, while in a desert en might be the best water finder. This appears to have helped drive the evolution of higher intelligence. The primal psychology persists, cooperative, with solitary individuals rare, usually pathological cases. The normal, optimal ordering of a Tahirian society appears to be an interaction between what I may very roughly call clans, the ultimate units, as families are the ultimate human units.