Cage
Author: A. Bertram Chandler
Date: 1958-01-01 08:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Sci-Fi Short
Description: (Written As By Bertram Chandler) Short Story Here is a challenge-to-the-Reader story, a stimulating puzzle for you to solve: How could you prove to a wholly alien life-form that you are a rational being? To the survivors of the wrecked spaceship Lode Star it was a challenge of a more vital sort - a riddle of life or death. I doubt if any reader will soon forget Mr. Chandler's pointed answer.

The Cage

BERTRAM CHANDLER

Imprisonment is always a humiliating experience, no matter how philosophical the prisoner. Imprisonment by one's own kind is bad enough but one can, at least, talk to one's captors, one can make one's wants understood; one can, on occasion, appeal to them man to man. Imprisonment is doubly humiliating when one's captors, in all honesty, treat one as a lower animal.

The party from the survey ship could, perhaps, be excused for failing to recognize the survivors from the interstellar liner Lode Star as rational beings. At least two hundred days had passed since their landing on the planet without a name - an unintentional landing made when Lode Star's Ehrenhaft generators, driven far in excess of their normal capacity by a breakdown of the electronic regulator, had flung her far from the regular shipping lanes to an unexplored region of space. Lode Star had landed safely enough; but shortly thereafter (troubles never come singly) her pile had got out of control and her captain had ordered his first mate to evacuate the passengers and those crew members not needed to cope with the emergency, and to get them as far from the ship as possible. Hawkins and his charges were well clear when there was a flare of released energy, a not very violent explosion. The survivors wanted to turn to watch, but Hawkins drove them on with curses and, at times, blows. Luckily they were up wind from the ship and so escaped the fall-out. When the fireworks seemed to be over, Hawkins, accompanied by Dr Boyle, the ship's surgeon, returned to the scene of the disaster. The two men, wary of radioactivity, were cautious and stayed a safe distance from the shallow, still smoking crater that marked where the ship had been. It was all too obvious to them that the captain, together with his officers and technicians, was now no more than an infinitesimal part of the incandescent cloud that had mushroomed up into the low overcast. Thereafter the fifty-odd men and women, the survivors of Lode Star, had degenerated. It hadn't been a fast process - Hawkins and Boyle, aided by a committee of the more responsible passengers, had fought a stout rearguard action. But it had been a hopeless sort of fight. The climate was against them, for a start. Hot it was, always in the neighbourhood of 85°

Fahrenheit. And it was wet - a thin, warm drizzle falling all the time. The air seemed to abound with the spores of fungi - luckily these did not attack living skin but throve on dead organic matter, on clothing. They throve to an only slightly lesser degree on metals and on the synthetic fabrics that many of the castaways wore.

Danger, outside danger, would have helped to maintain morale. But there were no dangerous animals. There were only little smooth-skinned things, not unlike frogs, that hopped through the sodden undergrowth, and, in the numerous rivers, fishlike creatures ranging in size from the shark to the tadpole, and all of them possessing the bellicosity of the latter. Food had been no problem after the first few hungry hours. Volunteers had tried a large, succulent fungus growing on the boles of the huge fern-like trees. They had pronounced it good. After a lapse of five hours they had neither died nor even complained of abdominal pains. That fungus was to become the staple diet of the castaways. In the weeks that followed other fungi had been found, and berries, and roots - all of them edible. They provided a welcome variety.

Fire - in spite of the all-pervading heat - was the blessing most missed by the castaways. With it they could have supplemented their diet by catching and cooking the little frog-things of the rain forest, the fishes of the streams. Some of the hardier spirits did eat these animals raw, but they were frowned upon by most of the other members of the community. Too, fire would have helped to drive back the darkness of the long nights, would, by its real warmth and light, have dispelled the illusion of cold produced by the ceaseless dripping of water from every leaf and frond. When they fled from the ship, most of the survivors had possessed pocket lighters - but the lighters had been lost when the pockets, together with the clothing surrounding them, had disintegrated. In any case, all attempts to start a fire in the days when there were still pocket lighters had failed there was not, Hawkins swore, a single dry spot on the whole accursed planet. Now the making of fire was quite impossible: even if there had been present an expert on the rubbing together of two dry sticks he could have found no material with which to work.

They made their permanent settlement on the crest of a low hill. (There were, so far as they could discover, no mountains.) It was less thickly wooded there than the surrounding plains, and the ground was less marshy underfoot. They succeeded in wrenching fronds from the fern-like trees and built for themselves crude shelters - more for the sake of privacy than for any comfort that they afforded. They clung, with a certain desperation, to the governmental forms of the worlds that they had left, and elected themselves a council. Boyle, the ship's surgeon, was their chief. Hawkins, rather to his surprise, was returned as a council member by a majority of only two votes - on thinking it over he realized that many of the passengers must still bear a grudge against the ship's executive staff for their present predicament.

The first council meeting was held in a hut - if so it could be called especially constructed for the purpose. The council members squatted in a rough circle. Boyle, the president, got slowly to his feet. Hawkins grinned wryly as he compared the surgeon's nudity with the pomposity that he seemed to have assumed with his elected rank, as he compared the man's dignity with the unkempt appearance presented by his uncut, uncombed grey hair, his uncombed and straggling grey beard.

`Ladies and gentlemen,' began Boyle.

Hawkins looked around him at the naked, pallid bodies, at the stringy, lustreless hair, the long, dirty fingernails of the men and the unpainted lips of the women. He thought, I don't suppose I look much like an officer and a gentleman myself.

' Ladies and gentlemen,' said Boyle, ' we have been, as you know, elected to represent the human community upon this planet. I suggest that at this, our first meeting, we discuss our chances of survival - not as individuals, but as a race -'

'I'd like to ask Mr. Hawkins what our chances are of being picked up,'

shouted one of the two women members, a dried-up, spinsterish creature with prominent ribs and vertebrae.

`Slim,' said Hawkins. 'As you know, no communication is possible with other ships or with planet stations when the Interstellar Drive is operating. When we snapped out of the Drive and came in for our landing we sent out a distress call - but we couldn't say where we were. Furthermore, we don't know that the call was received -'

'Miss Taylor,' said Boyle huffily, 'Mr Hawkins, I would remind you that I am the duly elected president of this council. There will be time for a general discussion later.

'As most of you may already have assumed, the age of this planet, biologically speaking, corresponds roughly with that of Earth during the Carboniferous Era. As we know, no species yet exists to challenge our supremacy. By the time such a species does emerge - something analogous to the giant lizards of Earth's Triassic Era -we should be well established-'

'We shall be dead!' called one of the men.

'We shall be dead,' agreed the doctor, ' but our descendants will be very much alive. We have to decide how to give them as good a start as possible. Language we shall bequeath to them -'

'Never mind the language, Doc,' called the other woman member. She was a small blonde, slim, with a hard face. 'It's just this question of descendants that I'm here to look after. I represent the women of childbearing age there are, as you must know, fifteen of us here. So far the girls have been very, very careful. We have reason to be. Can you, as a medical man, guarantee - bearing in mind that you have no drugs, no instruments - safe deliveries? Can you guarantee that our children will have a good chance of survival?'

Boyle dropped his pomposity like a worn-out garment.

'I'll be frank,' he said. 'I have not, as you, Miss Hart, have pointed out, either drugs or instruments. But I can assure you, Miss Hart, that your chances of a safe delivery are far better than they would have been on Earth during, say, the eighteenth century. And I'll tell you why. On this planet, so far as we know (and we have been here long enough now to find out the hard way), there exist no micro-organisms harmful to Man. Did such organisms exist, the bodies of those of us still surviving would be, by this time, mere masses of suppuration. Most of us, of course, would have died of septicaemia long ago. And that, I think, answers both your questions.'

'I haven't finished yet,' she said. 'Here's another point. There are fifty-three of us here, men and women. There are ten married couples - so we'll count them out. That leaves thirty-three people, of whom twenty are men. Twenty men to thirteen (aren't we girls always unlucky?) women. All of us aren't young - but we're all of us women. What sort of marriage set-up do we have ? Monogamy ? Polyandry ?'

'Monogamy, of course,' said a. tall, thin man sharply. He was the only one of those present who wore clothing - if it could be called that. The disintegrating fronds lashed around his waist with a strand of vine did little to serve any useful purpose.

'All right, then,' said the girl. ' Monogamy; I'd rather prefer it that way myself. But I warn you that if that's the way we play it there's going to be trouble. And in any murder involving passion and jealousy the woman is as liable to be a victim as either of the men - and I don't want that.'

'What do you propose, then, Miss Hart?' asked Boyle.

'Just this, Doc. When it comes to our mating we leave love out of it. If two men want to marry the same woman, then let them fight it out. The best man gets the girl - and keeps her.'

'Natural selection . . .' murmured the surgeon. 'I'm in favour - but we must put it to the vote.'

At the crest of the hill was a shallow depression, a natural arena. Round the rim sat the castaways - all but four of them. One of the four was Dr Boyle - he had discovered that his duties as president embraced those of a referee; it had been held that he was best competent to judge when one of the contestants was liable to suffer permanent damage. Another of the four was the girl Mary Hart. She had found a serrated twig with which to comb her long hair, had contrived a wreath of yellow flowers with which to crown the victor. Was it, wondered Hawkins as he sat with the other council members, a hankering after an Earthly wedding ceremony, or was it a harking back to something older and darker?

À pity that these blasted moulds got our watches,' said the fat man on Hawkins' right. 'If we had any means of telling the time we could have rounds, make a proper prize-fight of it.'

Hawkins nodded. He looked at the four in the centre of the arena - at the strutting, barbaric woman, at the pompous old man, at the two dark-bearded young men with their glistening white bodies. He knew them both - Fennet bad been a Senior Cadet of the ill-fated Lode Star; Clemens, at least seven years Fennet's senior, was a passenger, had been a prospector on the frontier worlds.

Ìf we had anything to bet with,' said the fat man happily, 'I'd lay it on Clemens. That cadet of yours hasn't a snowball's chance in hell. He's been brought up to fight clean - Clemens has been brought up to fight dirty.'

'Fennet's in better condition,' said Hawkins. 'He's been taking exercise, while Clemens has just been lying around sleeping and eating. Look at the paunch on him!'

'There's nothing wrong with good healthy flesh and muscle,' said the fat man, patting his own paunch.

`No gouging, no biting!' called the doctor. 'And may the best man win!'

He stepped back smartly, away from the contestants, stood with the Hart woman.

There was an air of embarrassment about the pair of them as they stood there, each with his fists hanging at his sides. Each seemed to be regretting that matters had come to such a pass.

`Go on!' screamed Mary Hart at last. 'Don't you want me? You'll live to a ripe old age here - and it'll be lonely with no woman!'

`They can always wait around until your daughters grow up, Mary!' shouted one of her friends.

Ìf I ever have any daughters!' she called. 'I shan't at this rate!'

`Go on!' shouted the crowd. Go on!'

Fennet made a start. He stepped forward almost diffidently, dabbed with his right fist at Clemens's unprotected face. It wasn't a hard blow, but it must have been painful. Clemens put his hand up to his nose, brought it away and stared at the bright blood staining it. He growled, lumbered forward with arms open to hug and crush. The cadet danced back, scoring twice more with his right.

'Why doesn't he hit him?' demanded the fat man. Ànd break every bone in his fist? They aren't wearing gloves, you know,'

said Hawkins.

Fennet decided to make a stand. He stood firm, his feet slightly apart, and brought his right into play once more. This time he left his opponent's face alone, went for his belly instead. Hawkins was surprised to see that the prospector was taking the blows with apparent equanimity - he must be, he decided, much tougher in actuality than in appearance. The cadet sidestepped smartly . . . and slipped on the wet grass. Clemens fell heavily on to his opponent; Hawkins could hear the whoosh as the air was forced from the lad's lungs. The prospector's thick arms encircled Fennet's body - and Fennet's knee came up viciously to Clemens's groin. The prospector squealed, but hung on grimly. One of his hands was around Fennet's throat now, and the other one, its fingers viciously hooked, was clawing for the cadet's eyes.

`No gouging!' Boyle was screaming. No gouging!'

He dropped down to his knees, caught Clemens's wrist with both his hands.

Something made Hawkins look up. It may have been a sound, although this is doubtful; the spectators were behaving like boxing fans at a prizefight. They could hardly be blamed - this was the first piece of real excitement that had come their way since the loss of the ship. It may have been a sound that made Hawkins look up, it may have been the sixth sense possessed by all good spacemen. What he saw made him cry out. Hovering above the arena was a helicopter. There was something about the design of it, a subtle oddness, that told Hawkins that this was no Earthly machine. From its smooth, shining belly dropped a net, seemingly of dull metal. It enveloped the struggling figures on the ground, trapped the doctor and Mary Hart.

Hawkins shouted again - a wordless cry. He jumped to his feet, ran to the assistance of his ensnared companions. The net seemed to be alive. It twisted itself around his wrists, bound his ankles. Others of the castaways rushed to aid Hawkins.

`Keep away!' he shouted. 'Scatter! '

The low drone of the helicopter's rotors rose in pitch. The machine lifted. In an incredibly short space of time the arena was to the First Mate's eyes no more than a pale green saucer in which little white ants scurried aimlessly. Then the flying machine was above and through the base of the low clouds, and there was nothing to be seen but drifting whiteness. When, at last, it made its descent Hawkins was not surprised to see the silvery tower of a great spaceship standing among the low trees on a level plateau.

The world to which they were taken would have been a marked improvement on the world they had left, had it not been for the mistaken kindness of their captors. The cage in which the three men were housed duplicated, with remarkable fidelity, the climatic condition of the planet upon which Lode Star had been lost. It was glassed in, and from sprinklers in its roof fell a steady drizzle of warm water. A couple of dispirited tree ferns provided little shelter from the depressing precipitation. Twice a day a hatch at the back of the cage, which was made of a sort of concrete, opened, and slabs of fungus remarkably similar to that on which they had been subsisting were thrown in. There was a hole in the floor of the cage; this the prisoners rightly assumed was for sanitary purposes. On either side of them were other cages. In one of them was Mary Hart alone. She could gesture to them, wave to them, and that was all. The cage on the other side held a beast built on the same general lines as a lobster, but with a strong resemblance to a kind of squid. Across the broad roadway they could see other cages, but not what they housed. Hawkins, Boyle, and Fennet sat on the damp floor and stared through the thick glass and the bars at the beings outside who stared at them. Ìf only they were humanoid,' sighed the doctor. 'If only they were the same shape as we are, we might make a start towards convincing them that we, too, are intelligent beings.'

`They aren't the same shape,' said Hawkins. 'And we, were the situations reversed, would take some convincing that three six-legged beer barrels were men and brothers . . . Try Pythagoras's Theorem again,' he said to the cadet.

Without enthusiasm the youth broke fronds from the nearest tree fern. He broke them into smaller pieces, then on the mossy floor laid them out in the design of a right-angled triangle with squares constructed on all three sides. The natives - a large one, one slightly smaller, and a little one regarded him incuriously with their flat, dull eyes. The large one put the tip of a tentacle into a pocket - the things wore clothing - and pulled out a brightly coloured packet, handed it to the little one. The little one tore off the wrapping, started stuffing pieces of some bright blue confection into the slot on its upper side that, obviously, served it as a mouth. Ì wish they were allowed to feed the animals,' sighed Hawkins. Ì'm sick of that damned fungus.'

`Let's recapitulate,' said the doctor. 'After all, we've nothing else to do. We were taken from our camp by the helicopter - six of us. We were taken to the survey ship - a vessel that seemed in no way superior to our own interstellar ships. You assure us, Hawkins, that the ship used the Ehrenhaft Drive or something so near to it as to be its twin brother . . .'

`Correct,' agreed Hawkins.

Òn the ship we're kept in separate cages. There's no ill treatment, we're fed and watered at frequent intervals. We land on this strange planet, but we see nothing of it. We're hustled out of cages like so many cattle into a covered van. We know that we're being driven somewhere, that's all. The van stops, the door opens and a couple of these animated beer barrels poke in poles with smaller editions of those fancy nets on the end of them. They catch Clemens and Miss Taylor, drag them out. We never see them again. The rest of us spend the night and the following day and night in individual cages. The next day we're taken to this . . . zoo . .

`Do you think they were vivisected ?' asked Fennet. 'I never liked Clemens, but . . .

Ì'm afraid they were,' said Boyle. Òur captors must have learned of the difference between the sexes by it. Unluckily there's no way of determining intelligence by vivisection-'

`The filthy brutes!' shouted the cadet.

Èasy, son,' counselled Hawkins. `You can't blame them, you know. We've vivisected animals a lot more like us than we are to these things.'

`The problem,' the doctor went on, ìs to convince these things -as you call them, Hawkins - that we are rational beings like themselves. How would they define a rational being? How would we define a rational being?'

`Somebody who knows Pythagoras's Theorem,' said the cadet sulkily.

'I read somewhere,' said Hawkins, that the history of Man is the history of the fire-making, tool-using animal . . .

`Then make fire,' suggested the doctor. `Make us some tools, and use them.'

`Don't be silly. You know that there's not an artifact among the bunch of us. No false teeth even - not even a metal filling. Even so . . .' He paused.

` When I was a youngster there was, among the cadets in the interstellar ships, a revival of the old arts and crafts. We considered ourselves in a direct line of descent from the old windjammer sailormen, so we learned how to splice rope and wire, how to make sennit and fancy knots and all the rest of it. Then one of us hit on the idea of basketmaking. We were in a passenger ship, and we used to make our baskets secretly, daub them with violent colours and then sell them to passengers as genuine souvenirs from the Lost Planet of Arcturus VI. There was a most distressing scene when the Old Man and the Mate found out . . .

'What are you driving at?' asked the doctor.

`Just this. We will demonstrate our manual dexterity by the weaving of baskets - I'll teach you how.'

Ìt might work . . .' said Boyle slowly. 'It might just work ... On the other hand, don't forget that certain birds and animals do the same sort of thing. On Earth there's the beaver, who builds quite cunning dams. There's the bower bird, who makes a bower for his mate as part of the courtship ritual .

. .

The Head Keeper must have known of creatures whose courting habits resembled those of the Terran bower bird. After three days of feverish basketmaking, which consumed all the bedding and stripped the tree ferns, Mary Hart was taken from her cage and put in with the three men. After she had got over her hysterical pleasure at having somebody to talk to again she was rather indignant.

It was good, thought Hawkins drowsily, to have Mary with them. A few more days of solitary confinement must surely have driven the girl crazy. Even so, having Mary in the same cage had its drawbacks. He had to keep a watchful eye on young Fennet. He even had to keep a watchful eye on Boyle - the old goat!

Mary screamed.

Hawkins jerked into complete wakefulness. He could see the pale form of Mary - on this world it was never completely dark at night - and, on the other side of the cage, the forms of Fennet and Boyle. He got hastily to his feet, stumbled to the girl's side.

`What is it?' he asked.

Ì ... I don't know . . . Something small, with sharp claws ... It ran over me

. . .

Òh,' said Hawkins, `that was only Joe.'

`Joe?' she demanded.

Ì don't know exactly what he - or she - is,' said the man. Ì think he's definitely he,' said the doctor.

`What is Joe?' she asked again.

`He must be the local equivalent to a mouse,' said the doctor, 'although he looks nothing like one. He comes up through the floor somewhere to look for scraps of food. We're trying to tame him -'

'You encourage the brute?' she screamed. 'I demand that you do something about him - at once! Poison him, or trap him. Now!'

`Tomorrow,' said Hawkins.

`Now!' she screamed.

`Tomorrow,' said Hawkins firmly.

The capture of Joe proved to be easy. Two flat baskets, hinged like the valves of an oyster shell, under the trap. There was bait inside — a large piece of the fungus. There was a cunningly arranged upright that would fall at the least tug at the bait. Hawkins, lying sleepless on his damp bed, heard the tiny click and thud that told him that the trap had been sprung. He heard Joe's indignant chitterings, heard the tiny claws scrabbling at the stout basketwork.

Mary Hart was asleep. He shook her.

`We've caught him,' he said.

`Then kill him,' she answered drowsily.

But Joe was not killed. The three men were rather attached to him. With the coming of daylight they transferred him to a cage that Hawkins had fashioned. Even the girl relented when she saw the harmless ball of multicoloured fur bouncing indignantly up and down in its prison. She insisted on feeding the little animal, exclaimed gleefully when the thin tentacles reached out and took the fragment of fungus from her fingers. For three days they made much of their pet. On the fourth day beings whom they took to be keepers entered the cage with their nets, immobilized the occupants, and carried off Joe and Hawkins.

Ì'm afraid it's hopeless,' Boyle said. 'He's gone the same way . . .

`They'll have him stuffed and mounted in some museum,' said Fennet glumly.

`No,' said the girl. 'They couldn't!'

`They could,' said the doctor.

Abruptly the hatch at the back of the cage opened. Before the three humans could retreat, a voice called, 'It's all right, come on out!'

Hawkins walked into the cage. He was shaved, and the beginnings of a healthy tan had darkened the pallor of his skin. He was wearing a pair of trunks fashioned from some bright red material.

'Come on out,' he said again. Òur hosts have apologized very sincerely, and they have more suitable accommodation prepared for us. Then, as soon as they have a ship ready, we're to go to pick up the other survivors.'

'Not so fast,' said Boyle. 'Put us in the picture, will you? What made them realize that we were rational beings?'

Hawkins' face darkened.

Ònly rational beings,' he said, put other beings in cages.'