Part 17 (1/2)
TUCK LEGS CLOSE TO BODY,.
LH = TORCH, RH = TORCH.
-and drew in his legs, sheathing his laser and taking a thermite torch in each hand. Waiting until the birds were nearly on him, he- IGNITE TORCHES, LH = SWEEP HORIZ.
ABOVE LEGS, RH = SWEEP HORIZ.
ABOVE TORSO AND HEAD.
-lit the torches and made them into a fast-moving s.h.i.+eld above him. On the TV screen, words began appearing, telling him whenever a bird got through and how much damage it did to his armor. Most of the birds seemed to be blinded or burned before they could hurt him, however. He kept at it grimly, even though the screen warned him that he himself was suffering light burns from the torches' heat.
As quickly as it had started, the attack was over, the surviving birds resuming their northward course. Elliot had sustained light damage to his armor, especially on the arms, and had first-degree burns on arms and chest. Both would be duly noted by the computer, and Elliot's defense and attack capabilities appropriately adjusted. All in all, though, it had been a very successful encounter.
Standing up, Elliot extinguished the remains of the torches and stowed them away, again taking up his laser. Looking around carefully, he set off again toward the hills.- The data flow finally ceased, and the Sirrachat paused to consider it, impressed in spite of himself. The Drymnu had ama.s.sed a truly fantastic store of information on Earth and its fragmented race, not only monitoring the various broadcast media but also managing to tap into the more private cable systems.
And all this without dropping even a hint of its own existence, as far as the Sirrachat could tell. ”You have done well,” he told the other.
The Drymnu didn't even bother trying to hide his pleasure at the compliment.
”Thank you,” he said. Then, more seriously, ”But now what of this race and its threat?”
”You have already mentioned the key to their behavior,” the Sirrachat began slowly, part of his mind still busy searching the newly acquired information.
”Namely, compet.i.tion. Fragmented races do not act together for their mutual good; indeed, they often cannot do so, any more than two animals can when there is one bit of food and both want it. Now, survival is often a matter of compet.i.tion, and any race not possessing the desire to challenge and win soon vanishes from the universe. Obviously, both you and I possess such a desire. But-and here is the point-our battles were with our own worlds; their creatures and environments.
Once we had mastered these, our inbred compet.i.tive spirits pushed us into s.p.a.ce and, ultimately, to the stars. I say 'pushed' very deliberately, because s.p.a.ce was the only major goal left to us, and a race without challenge soon withers away. But fragmented races are never without challenge, for they can always fight among their own members, something that is impossible for us to do. You see this happening below us at this very moment: compet.i.tion among single members for their own gains, compet.i.tion among huge groups of them for resources and honor, and everything in between. Is it any wonder the cultures of fragmented races are unstable?”
The Drymnu pondered. ”I understand what you say. But there is evidence of cooperation as well, at least to some extent. Those large groups of members have survived for years without collapsing back to single-member size. Their orbiting colony is fairly new, but its group seems even more cooperative, at least so far.
And much of the race's technological progress is stimulated by its internal conflict, as ours was by our desire to reach outward.”
”That technology is also designed for the internal compet.i.tion, however,” the Sirrachat pointed out. ”Eventually it will reach a level sufficient to destroy the race; and at that point it is only a matter of waiting for the triggering spark.”
”I do not doubt they will ultimately destroy themselves. But... is it not possible that the race may discover the stardrive before that happens and send some of its members outward? If even a handful survive, it could be a serious matter.”
”It will not happen,” the Sirrachat said emphatically. ”I will explain in a moment...” He paused, still searching the Earth data. The idea he was about to present to the Drymnu would undoubtedly strike the latter as so bizarre that it would be best to have an example ready... and seconds later, he found one. ”Please join me in observing this event, which is even now occurring,” he invited the Drymnu, indicating the proper channel, ”and I will explain the concept of games.”
The hills were not particularly high, but they were craggy, and Elliot had been forced to settle for a slow walk in order to avoid repeated falls. He was less worried about his own safety than that of his equipment, especially since his right arm-which held the laser-could not be used to help break a dangerous fall. Still, he wished he could hurry. Several brands of unfriendly creatures lived in these hills and he was hoping to get off the treacherous terrain before he ran into one.
That he hadn't already done so was merely an indication of Thornd.y.k.e's world- building skills. Inexperienced builders usually crowded their worlds with deadly animals and plants, only to discover that, all too often, they fell to attacking each other instead of the explorer. It was an effect that couldn't be postulated away; the Deathworld Game Committee required the ecology on every planet they accepted to be as sensible as the physics and chemistry. The best builders got around the problem by s.p.a.cing out their predators so they wouldn't run into each other. It was small comfort to the explorers, of course.
Elliot was traversing a flat but rock-strewn section when a large creature came around a pile of boulders. At first glimpse it seemed to be a large turtle, complete with leathery head and neck, short legs, and a large, multifaceted carapace. The second glance showed the differences: the long neck and razor teeth, the scorpion tail... and the surprising speed.
Elliot backed away as the creature came toward him, surprise freezing all but reflex responses. It was one step up from deja vu: he himself had invented this creature three years ago for one of his own death worlds! It could not be coincidence; the shape of the carapace was too distinctive, too unique to Elliot's megatort. Consciously or otherwise, Thornd.y.k.e had clearly borrowed it.
The creature was still coming. Automatically, Elliot fired a burst from his laser-and then immediately cursed himself for wasting power. A megatort couldn't be killed easily by laser fire; its skin and sh.e.l.l were too tough. As a matter of fact, it couldn't be killed easily by anything, as near as Elliot could recall. Still backing off, he racked his brain. After all, he'd created the d.a.m.n beast-he ought to know how to kill it.
The answer came, almost too late. s.n.a.t.c.hing a concussion grenade with his free hand- LH = CONC GRENADE; ARM 2 SEC;.
THROW 5 DEG R, 0 DEG VERT, 4 MS.
-he bounced it to just under the megatort's left side. With a deafening thunderclap it went off, rocking the creature onto its right side, where it balanced precariously, legs and tail thras.h.i.+ng furiously. Elliot didn't hang around to see what would happen next, but took off as fast as he safely could. The megatort would eventually right itself, and he had no intention of being in the neighborhood when it did so.He had gone another two hundred meters when a six-legged wolverine-sized animal sprang at him from a camouflaged burrow. A single shot from the laser killed it, but not before it had chewed a hole in his left gauntlet down to the steel mesh. Elliot paid more attention to the ground after that, which probably saved his life a few minutes later when he nearly stepped onto a paper-thin sheet of rock that bridged a narrow and well-camouflaged chasm. Spotting it in time, he inflated his balloons and floated across, deflating them as soon as he was on the other side of the gorge. It was too bad, he reflected, that he couldn't simply float to his target.
But trying would probably be fatal. He had seen at least two other flocks of birds since the group that had attacked him, and he didn't want to be off the ground if another group spotted him.
He emerged from the hills without further incident and found himself at the dark-blue area he had seen from the bubble. It was not, as he had supposed, a lake, but was a stretch of woods.
Elliot scowled, not liking it a bit. Forests were dangerous areas-lots of handy places for predators to lurk, and you could be attacked from any direction.
But there was little he could do about it. The band of blue-leaved trees extended to the east and west as far as he could see, and it was too wide to risk flying over.
Taking a deep breath, he typed in the proper commands, and the Orion Nomad went forward.
He wasn't a hundred meters into the woods when the first attack came, and it caught him flatflooted. Concentrating on the bushes and undergrowth around him, he didn't even notice the wide-meshed net hidden among the tree branches until it had fallen on him. The net, he noted in pa.s.sing, seemed to be made of thick, dark- hued vines crudely fastened together. He had no time for further observation, though, for the woods around him had suddenly come alive with screaming creatures.
Elliot acted instinctively- RH = ARMGUN; AIM THROUGH.
NET AT CLOSE ANIMAL: FIRE/.
SAME/ SAME/ SAME/ SAME.
-firing through the mesh. The creatures were no larger than chimpanzees, but they were armed with what looked like flint knives and knew how to use them.
Several got within range before he could shoot them, and without his armor he would have been thoroughly skewered.
They lost eight of their number to his laser before they seemed to realize they were losing and drew back from him. He killed three more and the rest fled, leaving him alone. Elliot let out his breath in a sigh of relief, feeling a slight shock as he noticed the living room around him. It was sometimes easy to forget that he wasn't really on an alien world. There was no time to waste, though-the arboreal creatures could regroup and come back at any time, and there were bound to be other nasties nearby. With his left hand he pulled out the remaining stub of a thermite torch... and hesitated. Something about the net seemed disturbingly familiar. s.h.i.+fting his gaze to the part of the TV screen that listed sensory data, he skimmed through it-and there it was: The net is coated with a very sticky substance.
Thornd.y.k.e had done it again: Elliot had used this same trick years ago. The sticky coating, ideal for trapping the creatures' victims, also happened to be highly flammable. Elliot had just come within an ace of incinerating himself.
Replacing the torch, he drew his hunting knife. One cut later, though, he realized this wasn't going to work. The knife sliced the vine, all right, but the tarry coating slowed it down drastically. It might take him an hour to cut himself free, and until then he was a sitting duck. Starting on the second vine, he kept a sharp eye on the surrounding woods and tried to think.
What kind of escape mechanism had he set up when he invented this net? He hadn't consciously made one, of course; he'd been the world-builder on that game, and getting out of the net had been everyone else's problem. But he must have had some ideas.
”Aha!” he yelled out loud, slapping the table that held his keyboard.
RH = HUNTING KNIFE, LH = HELIUM TANK;.
OPEN VALVE .2, SPRAY FOR 2 SEC.
ON KNIFE AND FRONT OF NET.
It did the trick. The expanding jet of helium froze the targeted vines into brittle, nonsticky rods and protected the knife from any of the other vines it happened to touch. A little experimentation showed him that he could get away with just cooling the knife, and within five minutes he was free of the net. He'd emptied one helium tank in the process, but the other still held enough to inflate his balloons at least once more. A very fair trade, he decided. Laser again in his right hand, and with one eye on the overhead branches, he continued on into the woods.
”I don't understand this at all,” the Drymnu said, clearly bewildered. ”Where is the world Doomheim that this simulation refers to? Is this journey part of the racial history, or is it a plan for the future?”
”It is neither,” the Sirrachat answered, still watching Elliot's progress on the Drymnu's monitoring equipment. ”This is what fragmented races call a game. It's a stylized form of compet.i.tion engaged in between two or more members of the race.
There is nothing corresponding to games in our own cultures, just as other forms of intraracial compet.i.tion are absent. Each game has an object or a goal and a set of rules which mimic, after a fas.h.i.+on, the laws of nature. In fact, the game is a sort of simplified universe, limited in both s.p.a.ce and time, where the members engage in combat of a specified mode.”
”To what end? Why create a new universe when a real one already exists?””There are three reasons that I know of. First, it allows the members to engage in a safe conflict, one which threatens the life and health of neither member. Recall that the race is caught between two conflicting goals: the goal of each member to gain for himself, even at the expense of others; and the goal of the race as a whole to survive. Games help to channel the members' compet.i.tive drives.”