Dirk nodded.

  “Pour in wine, vinegar, water, whatever you have. It will penetrate the cells of the wood and cause them to swell. The pressure is enormous: hundreds of kilos per square centimeter, depending on the wood. Stone has great compressive strength but not much tensile and it’s brittle. It cracks.”

  IV

  Dirk could not get the hole deep enough that night.

  He went over the far side of the plateau (the descent was actually easier on that side) when a gyrda from the village below came up with Master Aleksandr’s morning food and water. The sun stood squarely overhead when he finished pounding in the stake he had whittled from a limb of a dead tree half way down the mountain’s slope.

  “Near that little cairn of stones,” Master Aleksandr directed him weakly, “you’ll find a shallow dish with a little water in it. I saw the gyrda refill it this morning from the bottle he carried. Use that to pour on the peg. We’ll need what’s in the flask for ourselves. But be careful about getting it. Keep your eyes open.”

  Masters, as Dirk had leaned at the academy, did not usually bother to warn mere scholars unless the dangers or discomforts at hand were very great. Every nerve was alert as he approached the cairn. “I see the dish, Master Aleksandra, and an egg—a rock pigeon’s.”

  “The sun’s high now. Look in shade.”

  Not until the third time Dirk ran his eyes over the ground did he see it, and then he was astonished that he had not seen it at once. It was a lizard, legless or nearly so, whose Wack body was nearly two meters long though no thicker than a man’s wrist. Its absolute motionlessness as it lay in the shadow of a small ledge of rock had made him pass over it repeatedly.

  “I’ve had it under control ever since they put me up here, but I doubt if I could hold it if you were to step on it or kick a stone at it. With the simpler animals reflex action is hard to stop.”

  “I know,” Dirk said shortly. He was, after all, a Retreatant and not a freshman scholar. “Is it so dangerous, then? I’ve never seen one like it before.”

  “It’s a hamadryad. At least that’s the best identification we’ve been able to make from the archives. It wouldn’t be in your texts at the academy because it isn’t one of our animals; this is one of the few the gyrda seem to be responsible for.”

  “I don’t understand this,” Dirk said slowly as he trickled water from the hamadryad’s dish into the hole above the peg top. “It seems to be the sort of thing we were always told would be explained when we had made our Great Retreat. Weren’t all the animals from the Motherworld brought in the arcship? I’ve sometimes wondered if the instructors weren’t holding something back.”

  “There’s no secret. It’s just that there are so many things for an undergraduate to learn about our own world—Mars—that we try to discourage you from getting started on the endless succession of inquiries about the Motherworld until we’re certain we’re not wasting our time on someone who’ll spend the rest of his life planting maguey. You know at least that mankind did not originate on this planet, judging from what you’ve just said. Some of the boys who come to the academy from farms don’t even seem to realize that.”

  With sudden insight Dirk realized that Master Aleksandr was trying to spare them both at least part of the agony of suspense they must suffer during the hours of waiting for the moisture to penetrate the dense wood of the peg, but he did not care. The chance to hear a Master speak at length about the tangled paths of the lost race of Man had never before come to him. And if he failed his retreat by capture or death, it would never come again.

  · · · ·

  “I have heard it,” he said cautiously. “My father used to say too that if you looked into the sky at night you could see the Motherworld, but I thought it was just a fable, like saying you could hear the bees of summer when you put a hollowed out gourd to your ear on a winter evening.”

  “Could your father read, Dirk?”

  “He used to say he could, a little. I don’t really think so.”

  “Well, your great-grandfathers—all of them—were among the best educated men on the Motherworld. I can say that without knowing your family at all, because it’s true of every human being on Mars. Besides the language and literature they knew a good deal about every science and each of them was expert in at least two. Or they wouldn’t have been allowed to come. When the Mars stations were abandoned by the Motherworld they found themselves at the edge of starvation on a world where the maximum exertions of every member of the community were barely able to support life.”

  “But if they knew all those things…” Dirk began weakly.

  “Most of it wasn’t worth a handful of sand then. They couldn’t afford mathematics or astronomy or a lot of the other sciences that were of no immediate value in the production of food. Then there were a lot of disciplines that lost their utility when their equipment wore out, because there was no material for replacements except native iron and what could be salvaged from the things previously junked. And there was precious little energy to smelt and work either of them. They had nuclear physicists, but what good were they when Mars’s fissionables had turned to lead eons ago?” Master Aleksandr shook his head as though to clear it. “Dirk, can you give me a drink from your flask? I’m getting very dry.”

  Dirk tilted the flask up, noticing as he did it how drawn the older man’s face looked and that he took only one swallow of the water.

  Master Aleksandr began again, “That’s the Motherworld, that you saw last night. That blue star. The gyrda chained me up so I would have to watch it all night. I imagine they’ve done this to quite a few people who didn’t have the least idea of what it was they were supposed to be seeing.”

  “I still don’t understand,” Dirk said.

  “The life sciences remained. In fact, that’s us. Metallurgy sunk back to blacksmithing. but botany and zoology and biology—the whole study of the biosphere—were needed as never before, as well as geology for the location of water and what minerals there were. Fortunately, before the Motherworld abandoned us an attempt had been made to transfer a viable desert ecology from there. That’s how we got most of the plants we have, as well as the birds and mammals. But not all the Motherworld’s fauna were transferred as you seem to believe. A great many could not possibly have lived here, and a great many others, like the hamadryad, were just not wanted.”

  “You said the hamadryad was one of the gyrd’s animals. I don’t follow that; and why did they put it up here with you?”

  “As a watchdog. And for most of their prisoners—probably everyone they had before myself—he made an ideal guard. Both frightening and genuinely dangerous. He needs very little water and food, and he couldn’t leave the plateau even if he wanted to; he couldn’t make some of the climbs. Of course he has to crawl into a crevice shortly after the sun sets to keep from freezing, but I doubt if the other prisoners ever realized that.”

  “I didn’t, find it very frightening,” Dirk remarked.

  “If you had been a prisoner they’d have let you see him kill a wolf before they chained you up. Now look behind you.”

  Turning, Dirk saw the hamadryad some three meters behind him with half its body lifted from the ground and erect as a candle. Its neck had spread and flattened into a shape indescribably sinister. Its gaze was fixed not upon himself but on Master Aleksandr with an expression both attentive and, in an utterly alien fashion, intelligent.

  “They call them cobra de capello on the Motherworld,” Aleksandra said. ‘Snakes of the cape.’ The gyrda studied the old records and then rearranged the DNA of some harmless reptile to produce it. Clever of them, wasn’t it?

  “Now see if there’s a new crack in this rock. I think I just heard something.”

  V

  “The mountains are mice,” old Theophilus said ruminatively. “Yes. I believe I did tell your class something like that once. I meant to allude to mice as experimental animals, of course; the mountains have been injected with all the viruses and vaccines.”

  Dirk was scratching the spot on his arm which he had, on Master Theophilus’s explicit order, swabbed with Otho’s dye remover. It was beginning to itch.

  “Like the gyrda?” he asked.

  “Yes. The gyrda were devised on the Motherworld to be the permanent settlers of Mars while our forefathers were serving as investigators and observers. Couples who desperately needed money, as well as a few who felt they were advancing the human race, submitted to having their reproductive cells mutated. It seems strange to us who think only of the richness of the old Motherworld, Dirk, but there were many families there as poor as your own.”

  They were perhaps two kilometers from the academy, where Aleksandr (in defiance of the normal rule of Retreat) had arranged a night meeting between Dirk and Master Theophilus. To Dirk’s surprise his old teacher had brought an unrepentant Otho with him.

  “But they got along so well they want to force us to go back to the Motherworld, Sir? That’s what Master Aleksandr says. Don’t they know we’d do it anyway if we could?”

  “They want us to try a little harder,” Otho put in.

  “The wise men who composed the gyrda left out the heart,” Theophilus said slowly. “They are quick and clever with tools and more fit for Mars than men are, but they have no hearts. Did you know, Dirk, that Aleksandr’s name means ‘Defender of Men?’ And mine is ‘Dear to God;’ we are descended from the Russian and the Greek contingents originally, I suppose. That was the sort of thing that was forgotten the first time.”

  “This spot on my arm is burning,” Dirk complained suddenly.

  Otho said bluntly, “That liquid is a contact poison, ray lord. We give it to every retreatant. If you’d smeared yourself all over as I told you, it would have killed you.”

  “Our society is too poor to afford cheating in its upper ranks,” Theophilus said gently. “Do you understand?”

  “Yes, but I’m not sure I can accept as easily the idea of another attempt to fit humanity to Mars. You implied that in what you said a moment ago, you know, Sir.”

  “Would you accept it if the changed men were to be no less human than you are, Dirk?”

  · · · ·

  As the two of them were walking back to the academy Otho chuckled, “No less human than he is himself!” Master Theophilus reminded him tartly that a fool should not speak.

  Tarzan of the Grapes

  Shimmering in the heat, the long rows of vines stretched row on row uphill, so that the hill seemed to be a great, swelling wave in an ocean of grey-green. Prescott, the deputy, said, “You think he’s really in there? We’ll get him if he is.”

  Brown shook his head. “I don’t think he exists. Here or anywhere else. I think he’s a phantom of the public mind.”

  “You bastards write enough about him. We’ll clear out some of them anyway.” Without waiting for Brown to reply, Prescott picked up the riot gun leaning against the sheriff’s car and ducked into the aisle between two rows of trellises.

  To his back Brown said, “I interviewed the witnesses and reported what they told me.” He checked his camera before following.

  The trellises were seven feet high, five wired, strung on redwood posts. A five-foot space between rows was adequate for spraying and fertilization; and for the pickers who would soon harvest the crop. Brown picked some as he walked, purple-ripe and bursting with juice, and popped them into his mouth. To the sheriff, a big-bellied man who had lived all his life within twenty miles of this vineyard, he had said, “Once the harvest begins they’ll leave.”

  “Sure they will.” The sheriff’s leather belt was four inches wide, and he thrust his thumbs into it when he pontificated. Brown thought: No one should be so damn pompous and right too.

  “Sure they will. They’ll go back and brag their heads off about what a great time they had here, and next year we’ll have ten times more. Either we stop this now, the first season, or we’ll be fighting it the rest of our lives.” The sheriff had looked up at the thrashing helicopter as he spoke, as though just by looking he could tell if the pilot saw anything. Actually the pilot had been talking with Prescott on the radio in the car. Brown could hear their voices without being able to make out words. More plainly the sheriff’s thoughts had said: “They lay down in the shadows when they hear him coming, damn them. The only time he can see them is high noon.”

  Prescott was walking fast and Brown hurried to catch up, spitting seeds and resisting the temptation to pick more grapes. What was it Prescott had told him? “You’ve written enough about him.”

  He had done more than that. He had invented the figure; he and Culough and the teletype girl.

  Culough was his editor, and thinking back, Brown decided it was the publicity the town had gotten when the pickers were being unionized that had set him off. There had been organizers, professionals and volunteers, from the AFL-CIO and the Teamsters, and sound trucks, picnics, and whoop-de-doo. Coverage by AP, UPI, CBS, ABC, NBC, Time, and Life, as well as the Los Angeles papers. The circulation of their own had shot up, only to drop again when the thing was over—leaving Culough, perhaps, to dream of those days of glory. The idea of a hip contemplating his toes in the vineyards had been his, and as he had explained it, it had seemed easy and hardly criminal.

  “All you have to do,” (leveling a big finger at Brown), “is go into Haight-Ashbury or one of those places and hire some kid for a couple of days. These nuts are top news now. They grow pot on their own farms, and they’re practically sun worshipers. Why shouldn’t one decide to start camping out in the grapes?”

  “Wouldn’t it be better,” Brown had objected, “to have four or five? You know, kind of a love-in.”

  “Too much chance of somebody talking, and it would cost too much.” It was typical of Culough that before calling Brown in he had ripped covers from his collection of magazines and taped them to the walls of his office. There were an impressive number of them, with some of the most important represented two or even three times. Culough’s finger stabbed toward one featuring a handsome young man with wavy lines painted on his face. “Get me one who looks like that.”

  And Brown had, as nearly as he could. A UCLA student on vacation who possessed dirty bare feet, longish hair, sunglasses with perfectly circular lenses, and a cotton poncho dotted with three-fingers-together leopard spots. It had been the poncho, Brown thought, that had done it. That poncho had given everyone something to hang a story on.

  The student had made no trouble at all. He had accepted the deal as offered, had come for two days, and had appeared at the edges of the vineyards whenever it had seemed likely that he could startle someone by so doing. At the end of the two days Brown had three good interviews with local people who had “sighted” him, and the student had gone quietly back to San Diego. The story Brown wrote was headlined GRAPE MAN APPEARS HERE.

  The teletype operator, however, must have been influenced by the leopard-skin poncho. She had sent Brown’s piece out under a slightly different heading, and it had been picked up elsewhere under such titles as APE MAN APPEARS IN VINEYARDS.

  That had accomplished everything Culough wanted. And more.

  Ahead, Prescott stopped and raised his riot gun. Over his shoulder Brown could see an unkempt figure disappearing through some hole in the vines, but it was too late to get a picture. The riot gun roared, and a little puff of dust rose in the hot, clear air. It looked like a tiny cloud against the pitiless sky.

  Prescott spread the vines with his hands until he had a big enough hole to thrust his head through, and looked into the next aisle to see if the boy he had shot at was there. Apparently he was not, since he drew back in a moment with a grunt of disgust and began trying to raise the helicopter on his walkie-talkie. “I had one here, did you see him? Hello? Mike?”

  The odd thing about the “ape man” was that people continued to see him even after he had gone. At first Brown had been surprised at this, but the mysterious figure in leopard skin had become a handy catchall for any hitch-hiker or half-seen vine dresser. The publicity generated more reports, and Culough gave each a prominent spot.

  Still trying to contact the helicopter, now on the far side of the hill, Prescott jerked back the slide of his gun to jack a new shell into the chamber. The empty, red as a firecracker, plopped onto the sandy ground. It had a brass that caught the sun in hard points of light. “You might have killed him,” Brown said. He had tried to suppress the protest.

  Prescott was surly at having missed his shot. “Fleeing from a peace officer while committing an act of malicious trespass,” he said. “I got a right to fire.”

  “Why don’t you just arrest these people in town? My God, they panhandle on the street; they even buy yogurt and that kind of garbage at the A&P.” Brown had not been in a church since he was a child, but he found a quotation, ghost-like, in his mind: As against a robber have you come out, with swords and clubs. When I was daily with you in the temple, you did not stretch forth your hands against me. He could not have known what that meant when he had last heard it.

  “The worse ones don’t,” Prescott said, voicing an argument Brown had heard before. “They stay out here in the grapes. You don’t see that Tarzan guy in town, do you?”

  “He’s a myth, damn it,” Brown insisted wearily. The young people (in his own mind he did not know what to call them; very few were really hips, but then he was coming to realize that there were very few real hips) who had begun drifting into the area almost as soon as his first stories had been picked up spoke of the “ape man” as their leader, or at least their ideal; and unfortunately they spoke to the police and the press at times. Only a few claimed to have seen him, but they called him “Tarzan” or “Simba” (there was a fad for Swahili). By nonhips he was still reported often, and in one case was under accusation of statutory rape.