“Him? Not him! He thinks a broken leg is the height of humor. That man would eat his own grandmother without salt.”
“Oh, come now! He’d use salt. Say, Jim? You saw what it said about teaming.”
“Yeah. . . what about it?” Jimmy’s eyes shifted away. Rod felt a moment’s irritation. He was making a suggestion as delicate as a proposal of marriage, an offer to put his own life in the same basket with Jimmy’s. The greatest risk in a solo test was that a fellow just had to sleep sometime . . . but a team could split it up and stand watch over each other.
Jimmy must know that Rod was better than he was, with any weapon or bare hands; the proposition was to his advantage. Yet here he was hesitating as if he thought Rod might handicap him. “What’s the matter, Jim?” Rod said bleakly. “Figure you’re safer going it alone?”
“Uh, no, not exactly.”
“You mean you’d rather not team with me?”
“No, no, I didn’t mean that!”
“Then what did you mean?”
“I meant Look, Rod, I surely do thank you. I won’t forget it. But that notice said something else, too.”
“What?”
“It said we could dump this darned course and still graduate. And I just happened to remember that I don’t need it for the retail clothing business.”
“Huh? I thought you had ambitions to become a wide-angled lawyer?’
“So exotic jurisprudence loses its brightest jewel, so what do I care? It will make my old man very happy to learn that I’ve decided to stick with the family business.”
“You mean you’re scared.”
“Well, that’s one way of putting it. Aren’t you?”
Rod took a deep breath. “Yes. I’m scared.”
“Good! Now let’s both give a classic demonstration of how to survive and stay alive by marching down to the Registrar’s office and bravely signing our names to withdrawal slips.”
“Uh, no. You go ahead.”
“You mean you’re sticking?”
“I guess so.”
“Look, Rod, have you looked over the statistics on last year’s classes?”
“No. And I don’t want to. So long.” Rod turned sharply and headed for the classroom door, leaving Jimmy to stare after him with a troubled look.
The lecture room was occupied by a dozen or so of the seminar’s students. Doctor Matson, the “Deacon,” was squatting tailor-fashion on one corner of his desk and holding forth informally. He was a small man and spare, with a leathery face, a patch over one eye, and most of three fingers missing from his left hand. On his chest were miniature ribbons, marking service in three famous first expeditions; one carried a tiny diamond cluster that showed him to be the last living member of that group.
Rod slipped into the second row. The Deacon’s eye flicked at him as he went on talking. “I don’t understand the complaints,” he said jovially. “The test conditions say ‘all weapons’ so you can protect yourself any way you like, from a slingshot to a cobalt bomb. I think final examination should be bare hands, not so much as a nail file. But the Board of Education doesn’t agree, so we do it this sissy way instead.” He shrugged and grinned.
“Uh, Doctor, I take it then that the Board knows that we are going to run into dangerous animals?”
“Eh? You surely will! The most dangerous animal known.”
“Doctor, if you mean that literally”
“Oh, I do, I do!”
“Then I take it that we are either being sent to Mithra and will have to watch out for snow apes, or we are going to stay on Terra and be dumped where we can expect leopards. Am I right?”
The Deacon shook his head despairingly. “My boy, you had better cancel and take this course over. Those dumb brutes aren’t dangerous.”
“But Jasper says, in Predators and Prey, that the two trickiest, most dangerous”
“Jasper’s maiden aunt! I’m talking about the real King of the Beasts, the only animal that is always dangerous, even when not hungry. The two-legged brute. Take a look around you!”
The instructor leaned forward. “I’ve said this nineteen dozen times but you still don’t believe it. Man is the one animal that can’t be tamed. He goes along for years as peaceful as a cow, when it suits him. Then when it suits him not to be, he makes a leopard look like a tabby cat. Which goes double for the female of the species. Take another look around you. All friends. We’ve been on group survival field tests together; we can depend on each other. So? Read about the Donner Party, or the First Venus Expedition. Anyhow, the test area will have several other classes in it, all strangers to you.” Doctor Matson fixed his eye on Rod. “I hate to see some of you take this test, I really do. Some of you are city dwellers by nature; I’m afraid I have not managed to get it through your heads that there are no policemen where you are going. Nor will I be around to give you a hand if you make some silly mistake.”