Cycle of Fire Read online

  The rain he was expecting had not arrived, however, when he noticed that something seemed to have attracted Dar’s attention. Kruger knew his companion could hear, though he was still unsure of the location of his ears, so he began to listen himself. At first nothing but the usual forest sounds were detectable — leaves and branches moving in the wind, the scurrying of thousands of tiny living things, the occasional drip of water from leaves, which never seemed to cease no matter how long a time had passed since it had rained — but Dar changed course a trifle; certainly he must hear something. They had gone another half-mile before it began to register on Kruger’s ears.

  When it finally did he stopped with an exclamation. Dar Lang Ahn swiveled one eye back toward him and stopped too. He knew as little of human facial expressions as Kruger knew of his, but even so he recognized the change of skin color that the sound produced in the boy’s features.

  “What?” Dar uttered the sound they had come to agree upon as a general interrogative.

  “I think we’d better stay away from that.”

  “What?” It was a repetition of the former question, not the more specific interrogative which would have suggested understanding of Kruger’s words.

  “It sounds like …” The boy stopped; there were simply no available words. He fell back on signs. Unfortunately his first gesture was back in the direction from which they had come, and Dar took it to mean that Kruger had encountered this thing, whatever it was, before they had met. He was right but he did not grasp his companion’s extreme reluctance to meet it again. After a few moments’ silent regard of the boy’s signals he gave it up and started on his way once more.

  “Stop!” This was another word on which they had managed to agree, and Dar obeyed, wondering. They were far from the lava field; was it possible that this creature knew something about jungle that Dar himself didn’t? The sound was strange to the native, of course; that was why he wanted to investigate it. Was the giant actually afraid of it? If so, some thought was indicated. If whatever was making this sound could harm Kruger it was more than likely to be able to do as much to Dar. On the other hand perhaps it was merely a matter of dislike. In that case Dar would be passing up a chance for knowledge which might prove worthwhile material for a book. The question seemed to lie, then, between a risk of losing what books he had and one of failing to improve them. The risk of life involved meant nothing, of course, but both the other points were serious.

  Perhaps he could get a better measure of the risk by seeing how far Kruger was prepared to go to keep them from this phenomenon. With this thought in mind Dar Lang Ahn deliberately turned once more and again started walking toward the irregular, dull, “Plop, plop, plop,” that was now coming clearly through the trees.

  Kruger was in a quandary. He had never dreamed of having to impress his opinions on Dar by force; he was not sure what the result of trying it would be. In any case he did not want to do anything that might give rise to enmity or even any more distrust than could be helped. In the circumstances he did the only thing that was left. Dar, rolling an eye back toward the human being, saw him start to follow and proceeded on his way assured that there was no real danger. He increased his speed, so far as the undergrowth rendered that possible. In a few minutes the vegetation cleared enough so that real walking could take the place of the laborious pushing aside of branches and vines. To Dar, this was a help; to Kruger, a confirmation of a fact that the increasing sound had already proved.

  “Dar! Stop!” The native obeyed, wondering what had happened to change the situation; then he watched in surprise while Kruger forged past him and took up the lead. With his own equivalent of a shrug, he followed. The human being was going more slowly than he would have liked but perhaps there was a reason for it.

  There was. In another hundred yards the undergrowth vanished, and at almost the same point the trees stopped. In front of them lay a bare, smooth-surfaced clearing nearly fifty yards across.

  To Dar, this was simply a spot in which travel was easy; he would almost certainly have plunged on into the open, eager to get across and resume his journey toward the source of the mysterious sound. However, he was stopped. For the first time in their relationship Kruger not only touched him but blocked his path firmly with an arm more than strong enough to do the job. Dar looked at his companion in surprise, then his eyes traveled on about the clearing. His efforts to force his way past his big companion ceased and both eyes focused on the center of the open space.

  The source of the sound was there. The clearing, for the most part, seemed to be floored with some smooth, hard material, but the center was in a constant state of motion — a great cauldron of liquid, sticky mud, heaving upward every few seconds to give birth to a great bubble which burst with the “plop” they had been hearing and released a cloud of vapor that drifted lazily away.

  Kruger let his companion look for a minute or two; then, repeating his word to “Stop!” he went back on their trail a few paces. Rocks are not ordinarily easy to find on a jungle floor, but they were still close enough to the big flow for occasional outcrops of lava to be present. He found one of these, with a good deal of effort knocked off a fair-sized corner, brought it back, and tossed it out onto the apparently hard surface. The crust of dried mud gave, and the lava boulder vanished with a splash.

  “I don’t like these places,” Kruger said firmly, indifferent to the fact that Dar could not understand him. “I went through one myself a few months ago and when I got out by working back up the tree root that had stopped my sinking — and incidentally knocked me out for quite a while — I found my name carved on the tree with several remarks about what a nice young fellow I’d been. I don’t blame them for leaving me; they have every reason to suppose I’m still sinking. Living through it once, though, doesn’t mean I’m going to try it again; my space suit is a long, long walk from here!”

  Dar said nothing but promised himself to heed the advice of his friend as long as they were anywhere near the big fellow’s native volcanic region. This was certainly something for the book!

  III. PEDAGOGY

  THE MUD GEYSER, and several others, had been left miles behind, but an occasional lava outcrop still kept Dar following Kruger’s lead. The direction of travel was still to the northeast — the boy had made no attempt to change that — but in some subtle fashion the relationship between the two had changed.

  For one thing the inevitable mistrust that they had felt at the beginning was just as inevitably fading. Another change, less logical in origin, was due to the almost comical misunderstanding which had resulted in Dar’s firm conviction that Kruger was a native of the little-known volcanic areas of Abyormen, while Kruger himself was just as sure that Dar Lang Ahn did not belong on the planet at all. As a result Dar was constantly looking to Kruger for advice. If he shot a new type of animal — new, that is, to him — he would wait for the boy’s verdict before eating it. Naturally quite a lot of perfectly good meat was wasted, since Kruger was in no hurry to risk his health and life testing new types of food.

  At last, however, Dar killed a creature of the same type as the one the human being had tried when they first entered the jungle. The pilot did not even ask questions about this one; he borrowed the knife and set to work. Kruger looked at his portion with some distaste when it finally came.

  He did not like raw meat, though it had certainly not harmed him the other time. On that occasion he had not suggested stopping to make a fire, since Dar was the moral leader of the association and his idea of a meal was apparently to eat on the spot whatever could not be carried and nibble at the rest as he went along. Now, however, with matters waiting on Kruger’s advice and opinions, he chose to cook his meal.

  He had salvaged all the material from his space suit which seemed likely to be of use and which was not too awkward to carry. While a fire-lighter is in no sense normal space-suit equipment, he had improvised one from the tiny sun-battery and a coil and condenser from the radio. He used it now,
to the utter fascination of Dar Lang Ahn. Satisfied that its spark was still good he went looking for dry fuel.

  This is not too common in a rain forest, but Kruger had had plenty of practice locating it before he had reached the lava field. Dar, utterly ignorant of what he wanted, simply followed and watched, munching his own share of the meat as he did so. He was interested in a detached sort of way, feeling that possibly whatever was going on might be worth recording but that he wouldn’t bet on it.

  The detached attitude vanished as he felt the first wave of heat from Kruger’s fire. He dropped his meat and sprang to the place where his crossbow was lying, snatching up the weapon as though his life depended on his speed. He made no sound, and Kruger, whose attention was focused on building up his fire, did not see what was going on. A struggle that quite literally involved his own life went on behind his back completely without his knowledge.

  Dar had actually started to cock his bow when he stopped, one eye on his work and one on the preoccupied human being. For long moments he thought, wavering from one viewpoint to its opposite. Fire was the prime horror of Dar Lang Ahn’s life; he had grown up with a terror of it. His people never used it, but lightning or accidental concentration of Arren’s rays sometimes caused a blaze. The Teachers and the books had agreed in their endless admonitions to avoid it. It was the end of all life — was the end that would be taken by his own life, naturally, but that was not due for several years yet. Since reaching the edge of the lava field and thereby coming once more within reach of ample food and water, Dar had put his expectation of premature death out of his mind and it was quite a shock to have it brought back so suddenly.

  Still, the giant did not seem to have Dar Lang Ahn in mind. Perhaps the fire was merely a part of Kruger’s personal and private business, having nothing to do with Dar at all. After all, that would be a rather likely need for someone native to the neighborhood of a volcano. With this thought in his mind Dar relaxed enough to put the crossbow down, though he did not wander very far from the place where he laid it.

  He continued to watch the human being, though his attitude bore no resemblance to the lackadaisical one he had shown while the firewood was being gathered. Mentally he was taking notes; the Teachers at the Ice Ramparts would be wanting to put this in a book, beyond all question.

  The strange creature had first built his fire up until it was burning quite strongly, then he permitted it to die down until the flames had practically disappeared. A great deal of heat was still being radiated, however, and when it had reached what appeared to be a satisfactory state Kruger startled his companion still more by deliberately exposing his meat to it.

  Dar knew that the boy was hungry; he had already formed a fairly exact idea of how much food a human being needed. Why the strange being should proceed to ruin his meal, then, was a mystery of the first order.

  When Kruger completed his weird ritual by consuming the meat and then proceeded to extinguish the fire, Dar had long passed his capacity for further surprise. Seeing that the matter was finished he simply rose to his feet and resumed the journey, a sorely puzzled being.

  As a matter of fact the notion that the ceremony was over was decidedly erroneous, though it was an error shared by both Dar and Kruger. The latter received the first intimations of the mistake within an hour after completing the meal, and shortly after the first twinges he was rolling helplessly on the ground. Dar, who had seen such symptoms among his own people but could imagine no cause for them this time, could think of nothing to do that might be helpful. Intermittently for more than an hour the cramps continued, giving Kruger just time between attacks to wonder whether he had made his final error in judgment. Eventually his outraged stomach returned the cause of the disturbance and, after a few more admonitory twinges, left him in peace. It was some time, however, before he was really able to give his mind to the problem of why meat which was perfectly wholesome raw should change in such a drastic manner when cooked. Could the smoke given off by the fire have anything to do with it? Perhaps something like the creosote that preserved smoked meat at home — but it would take a well-equipped organic chemistry lab to graduate any of his hypotheses to the theory class. The observed fact was enough for him now — slightly too much, in fact.

  The rains had ceased at the usual time after the reappearance of Theer in the south and the temperature was rising again. Each time the red star made another of its odd loops through the sky Kruger wondered whether he would be able to stand the next one. Long months ago he had realized that he could not, at least in the midlatitudes where he had been at the time. On that part of the planet the loops were entirely above the horizon — Theer never set at all. It did, however, vary enormously in apparent size; it was merely Kruger’s misfortune that its greatest apparent diameter, and with it the highest temperature of this sweat-box of a planet, occurred while it was at nearly the farthest north point of its loop. The misfortune lay in the fact that, from where he had been left, the loop itself was in the southern half of the sky and to get any part of it below the horizon was obviously best accomplished by going north. There had been, of course, the question of whether he could go far enough north; his knowledge of the geography of this world was confined to his memory of what he had seen during the landing orbit. That wasn’t much. Still, there had seemed to be nothing to do but take the chance.

  He was still not far enough north to be completely out of the red sun’s reach, but there seemed a good chance that he might make it. It was now above the horizon for about eight days of its eighteen-day period, if Kruger’s watch could still be trusted. He would have been quite happy if the question of Alcyone, which Dar Lang Ahn called Arren, were not forcing itself more and more prominently into his mind. It was all very well to turn a red dwarf sun from a permanent nuisance into an intermittent one, but the advantages tended to disappear when at the same time a blue giant changed from a periodic trouble into a constant fixture. With this matter steadily in the front of his mind Kruger was doing his utmost to get such concepts as temperature into their common language so that he could find out from his companion whether or not there was a spot on the planet which a human being would consider comfortable.

  Dar’s language was, very slowly, becoming less of a nightmare. As a result a picture was gradually building up in Kruger’s mind of the goal that lay ahead of them.

  Apparently Dar also wanted a cool place. That information was received by Kruger with unconcealed glee. A catch might lie in what constituted Dar’s concept of “cool,” but at least he seemed willing to apply the opposite adjectives to their present environment, which was an encouraging sign. Another was the pilot’s persistent attempt to describe something which seemed, in the face of all probabilities, to be ice.

  Kruger found this theory completely beyond belief at first and kept pestering his companion for a more careful description. However, Dar stuck to his terminology, and finally it occurred to his listener that perhaps the space ship which had brought Dar to Abyormen might be their goal. That should certainly have ice available, at least artificially.

  There was the matter of the ocean in their path, whose existence he had gathered earlier. As the boy was not yet sure whether an actual ocean or simply a large lake was involved, he asked whether it would be possible to walk around it. The emphasis which Dar placed on his attempt to express the impossibility of such a move convinced him that “ocean” must be the right word.

  It was only at this point that Kruger thought of the possibility of maps. Granting that he had no artistic talent, he should still be able to make a sufficiently good plan of their route together from the lava field to their present position for Dar to grasp what he was trying to do; that would get the word “map” across, and from there on the drawing problem would be Dar Lang Ahn’s.

  This meant interrupting their journey while the map was drawn, but the effort was an unqualified success. Not only did Dar understand the word and the request that followed its transmission, but he proved to
be an excellent cartographer — a natural result of years in the air, since he tended to think of a map as an aerial picture anyway. He made sketch after sketch, clarifying the entire route they were to follow and displaying tremendous knowledge of the planet as a whole.

  They were to proceed on their present northeast course until they reached the sea. That was not the closest way to the coast, but it brought them to a point at which a chain of islands stretched across to another continental mass. Getting across the ocean, they would head back along the coast to the left. Kruger assumed that this would be west, but actually it was east; he was already much closer than he realized to Abyormen’s north pole, and would pass it before reaching the coast. Dar did not indicate this on his map. They would travel along the new coast for a considerable distance and then head inland. Their journey appeared to terminate shortly thereafter. Dar indicated a vast area with a satisfied air, said, “Ice!” and sat back as though he had completed a great work. Kruger did not feel quite so happy. He indicated the area the other had just drawn.

  “You mean — it’s somewhere in this region? Here? or here?”

  “Right here.” Dar indicated the point at which he had already terminated their course line.

  “But what do you mean by the ice all over this place? You can’t have ships covering half the planet.”

  “I don’t understand ‘ships.’ Ice is all over.”

  “I still don’t get it.”

  Dar had had enough language trouble by this time not to feel particularly exasperated at Kruger’s slowness; he proceeded to draw more maps. These were circular, and it quickly became evident that they were views of the whole planet from different directions. His ability to draw such charts was strictly in accord with Kruger’s ideas about his origin, so the boy did not feel any surprise from this source. The details did bother him, however.