The Practice Effect (6 page)

It wasn’t an easy idea to get used to, but Dennis was coming to the conclusion that he had misjudged Bernald Brady.

The night after encountering the highway, Dennis thought about it as he stirred a pot of soup over his little stove. Perhaps he
had
been unfair to his old S.I.T. nemesis. During his first few days on this new world, he had complained a lot about the quality of his equipment, blaming Brady for his blisters, his chafed shoulders, and his tepid meals. But those problems had all abated with time. Obviously he had needed time to adapt. Brady and the equipment must have merely been a convenient set of scapegoats for his initial misery.

Now that he had apparently found the knack, the little stove seemed to work just fine. Its first fuel canister had been used up in a day. But the second had lasted much longer and heated his food better. All it seemed to have taken was a bit of practice. That, he confessed a bit immodestly, and a little mechanical aptitude.

While the soup cooked, Dennis examined the little camp-watch alarm with new respect. It had taken him days, but he had finally found out that the colors of the little lights on its screen corresponded roughly with the carnivority of the creatures nearby. The correlation had been made clear when he witnessed a pack of foxlike creatures stalking a covey of small birds and watched the counterparts on the screen. Maybe it had to do with body temperature, but somehow the alarm had distinguished the two separate groups clearly into red and yellow dots on the screen.

It bothered Dennis a little that it had taken him so long to notice all this. Perhaps he had spent too much of the journey playing with equations in his head.

Anyway, the trip would be over soon. All this day he had passed signs of quarrying in the surrounding hills. And the road had broadened somewhat. Soon, perhaps tomorrow, he knew he would, come upon the creatures who ruled this world.

The camp-watch hummed in his hands, and its little antenna suddenly swung about to point westward. The pale screen came alight and an alarm began to buzz softly.

Dennis cut off the sound and reached over to draw the needier from its holster. He turned off the stove. When its faint sigh died away, Dennis could hear only the soft, rustling wind in the branches.

The forest night was a thick maze of black shadows. Only a few wan stars winked overhead through a thickening overcast.

A small cluster of tiny dots appeared in the lower left corner of the camp-watch screen. They formed a twisting band, snaking slowly toward the center of the screen.

Finally he heard faint creakings, and soft snorting sounds in the distance.

The points on the screen sorted themselves into colors. Over a dozen large yellow dots moved along in a procession, apparently following the path of the highway.

Yellow was the color he had learned was assigned for herbivores. Interspersed among the yellow points were a large number that glowed pink, and even bright red. And in the center of the procession were two tiny green lights. Dennis had no idea what those meant.

Trailing some distance behind the end of the procession, there followed another small green pinpoint.

His camp was uphill from the road a bit. He laid the watch-alarm aside and moved carefully downslope. The night seemed to amplify the snap of every twig as he tried to move silently toward a better vantage point.

After a brief wait, a faint glow appeared to his left. It brightened, then became a painful, piercing white light, spearing through the trees by the road.

Headlights! Dennis blinked. Now, why does that surprise
me? Did I think the makers of a road like this one wouldn’t be able to illuminate it?

Hidden by the undergrowth, he squinted against the bright beam. Vague figures marched behind it, bipedal, with swinging arms.

The procession passed below his blind. He heard the low, chuffing snorts of beasts. Shading his eyes, he made out giant quadrupeds pulling hulking vehicles that slid soundlessly along the road. Each conveyance sent a bright beam spearing ahead of it into the gloom.

Behind each came a formation of striding bipeds. Dennis caught glimpses of heavy, coweled clothing and what seemed to be sharp, glinting weapons, held at high port.

But each time his night vision began to return, another giant sled came around the corner to the west, its bright beam dazzling him and sending him flat against the ground again. It was frustrating, but there didn’t seem to be any way to get a better look!

More of the swaggering, coweled figures passed, then more quadrupeds, pulling hulking, eerily silent wagons. Dennis tried to make out how they moved. He neither heard nor saw any turning wheels. Yet hovercraft would give out blasts of compressed air, wouldn’t they?

Antigravity? Nothing else seemed to fit. But if that was so, why were they using animal power?

Could these be descendants of some fallen civilization, patching their commerce together with rude fragments of their forefathers’ science? It seemed to fit what he observed.

The idea of antigravity excited Dennis. Might that be the difference in physical laws Brady had talked about during those last moments on Earth?

A last troop of the hooded “warriors” passed below. These rode rather than walked. Their mounts tossed thickly maned heads and nickered, seeming to him so much like shaggy ponies that Dennis mistrusted his observation. It would be too tempting to interpret what he saw in Terran terms.

He rubbed his eyes and stared. But silhouettes were all he could make out.

One animal among the riders carried a smaller figure, coweled in a cloak of faded white—standing out in the deep
gloom outside of the headlights. Something he saw in the smaller entity’s carriage told him that this one was a prisoner. It carried no shiny weapons, and its arms lay motionless on the animal’s neck. The hooded head slumped forward dejectedly.

As the riders passed below, the white-hooded prisoner’s head lifted, then started to turn as if to look up into the undergrowth where he was hiding! Dennis ducked down, feeling his throat suddenly go dry.

One of the dark silhouettes ahead turned around in its saddle and pulled on a tether. The prisoner’s mount stumbled forward, and the party passed below.

Dennis blinked and shook his head to clear it. For a moment, in the glare and confusion, he had experienced a queer illusion. It had seemed to him that the prisoner’s white cloak had opened—for a brief, timeless instant—and the starlight had shown him the sad, forlorn face of a beautiful girl.

For a long while the image lingered in his brain—so long, in fact, that Dennis hardly noticed the end of the procession.

He felt a bit lightheaded. Yeah, that must have been it. Too much excitement had gotten him seeing things.

Dennis watched the last glimmer of the caravan pass around the far bend to the east. He still knew next to nothing about the technology and culture of the locals. All he
had
learned was that the natives shared some of humanity’s less savory habits—such as the way they treated one another.

A moment later a tiny mutter of sound drifted up from the road below.

Dennis suddenly remembered the image on the camp-watch display. There had been one more tiny green dot, following the caravan from behind. In all the excitement he had forgotten about it!

He crept forward to get a better view. There were no
more bright, blinding lights.
Now
he might get a good look!

He slid quietly to within feet of the road itself. At first he saw nothing. Then a tiny noise made him look to the right.

A glint of glass and plastic reflected the faint glow of the departing procession. A tiny articulated arm waved in the dim starlight. On almost silent, spinning treads, the Sahara Tech exploration robot whizzed down the alien highway eastward … following Dennis’s instructions to the letter.

 … finding out about the natives.

Dennis barely stifled a shout.
Idiot machine!
He rushed out onto the highway, tripping over a tree root and rolling most of the way. He made it to his feet in time to see the robot, one of its arms waving as if in farewell, pass around the bend and out of sight.

Dennis cursed softly but soundly. That robot’s tapes doubtless carried all the information he needed. But he couldn’t chase it or call out without bringing himself to the attention of the caravan guards!

He was still muttering softly, standing there in the middle of the dark road, when something alive dropped onto his head from an overhanging branch. Dennis gasped in alarm as the thing wrapped itself tightly over his eyes, sending him stumbling, reeling into the trees.

“What was the big idea, scaring me half to death?” Dennis accused hoarsely. “I might have run into something and hurt both of us!”

The object of his ire watched him from a rock a few feet away, green eyes gleaming in the light from the camp stove. The pixolet yawned complacently, apparently of the opinion Dennis was making a big deal out of nothing.

“Damn all machines and natives! Just where have you
been
the past four days, anyway? Here I rescue you from a fate worse than boredom at the hands of Bernald Brady, and in return all I ask is a friend who knows the neighborhood.
What happens? That ‘friend’ up and leaves me all alone, until isolation eventually gets me so I’m talking to myself … or worse, to a stubby little flying pig who can’t understand a word I’m saying…!”

Dennis found he could hold his hands steady at last. He poured a cup of soup for himself. Blowing on it, he muttered as his temper slowly wound down. “Stupid, practical joking E.T.s … damned fickle aliens …”

He glanced over his cup at the diminutive native animal. Its tongue was hanging out. Its eyes met his.

Dennis let out a sigh of surrender. He poured some soup into the overturned pot cover. The pixolet hopped over and lapped at it daintily, looking up at him from time to time.

When both had finished, Dennis rinsed out the utensils and crawled back into his sleeping bag. He picked up the camp-alarm and worked on its settings. Pix leaped over beside him and watched.

Dennis tried to ignore it but couldn’t maintain his ire for long—not with it looking at him that way, purring, watching with apparent fascination the adjustments he made to the little machine.

Dennis shrugged and picked up the small creature. “What is it about you and machines? You sure can’t
use
them. See?” He shook its little paws. “No hands!”

With the stove turned off, the forest night settled in around. In a little island in the quiet, Dennis soon found himself telling the pixolet about the constellations and all the other things he had discovered.

And he realized it
was
good to have company again, even if it was an alien creature who didn’t understand a single word he said.

The next day the road began to descend into a broad river valley.

Riding on Dennis’s shoulder, the pixolet peeped and grabbed a cluster of berries from an overhanging branch. It munched on a few of the purple fruits, and juice ran down its jaws. When it offered some to Dennis, he politely declined.

Dennis was feeling pretty good. His old camping skills had obviously come back. His backpack was snug now that he had found the right knots. His boots—broken in now—felt like supple extensions of his own feet as he stepped along the resilient highway. He was making good time.

But he could tell the forest would end soon. He still faced the problem of what he would do when he found civilization.

What sort of creatures were the autochthones? Would they have the technology to help him rebuild his half of the zievatron?

More important, would they decide to arrange
his
pieces neatly, by size and color, like someone had already done to the zievatron?

Maybe it might be a good idea to spy on the natives, as a first step.

“Easily suggested,” Dennis mocked himself. If their facial features are a little different, I’ll just use some river mud to make fake antennae and eye stalks and be in business! I might have to remove my nose and lengthen my neck a bit, of course, but only a few inches, at most.

“I wonder if I’ll need scales.”

As he hiked along, a number of fantasy scenarios occurred to him.

I
know! I’ll keep my eye out for the country estate of the eccentric squire scientist
G’zvreep.
I’ll recognize it by the observatory dome protruding prominently from the west wing of his manor house
.

Right, Dennis.
When you knock, the kindly old native savant will answer the door himself, having sent the servants to bed while he scans the skies for comets. On seeing you he’ll flap his thorax in momentary revulsion at your two hideously flat eyes, your millions of tiny cranial tendrils. But when you raise your hand in the universal gesture of peace, he’ll hustle you inside and say, “Enter quickly! Thank Gixgax you came here first!
”

In a meadow by the road, Dennis found the remains of a campsite. Coals were still warm in the firepit.

Dennis put down his pack. He set up the campwatch on one large stone and the pixolet on another. “All right, bright eyes,” he said to the creature, “let’s see if you’re good for anything but company. You can keep a lookout while I do some serious detective work.”

Pix cocked its head quizzically, then yawned.

“Hmmph. Well, it just goes to show how little you know. I’ve found something already!” Dennis pointed to the ground. “Look. Footprints!”

Pixolet sniffed, apparently unimpressed. Dennis sighed. Where was an appreciative audience when you needed one?

There were many deep impressions in the ground—apparently made by the large draft animals—and smaller hoofprints like those an unshod pony might leave. The droppings, too, indicated that this world must indeed have close analogs to horses.

After finishing with the animals, he searched for a clear set of bipedal prints and soon realized that everyone in the caravan had worn shoes.

From the sharp outlines of the corrugated tread, it was apparent these people used boots not unlike his own!
Here
certainly was evidence of technology. The tread patterns were all
identical
 … as if some computer had come up with the
perfect design that was mass-produced thereafter. He hurried about looking at the prints until a thought occurred to him.