nonchalant but not knowing what expression these creatures would take nonchalance for. The gorillas watched him stupidly, blinking their lids and yawning. When he was thirty feet away, he turned and ran.
It looked good. They might have brute strength, but he was the one with the brains, the cleverness. He could outwit them every time now that he had gotten a head start. He was thinking all sorts of glorious thoughts like that when one of the monsters went leaping past him, covering three times the ground Salsbury could manage in a single stride. Fifty feet along the path, it stopped and turned to face him, grinning so that its broad yellow teeth gleamed in the thin moonlight.
Salsbury turned and started back, came face to face with the second beast. It was grinning too.
He turned, jumped from the path into the ferns and rocks, ran a short distance and stopped to look back. The first gorilla was loping easily after him.
He felt like a mouse in cats' territory.
Desperately, he looked around for something to use as a weapon, wishing he had managed to recover his gun from the clearing before making his break. The bombs in the rucksack were useless, because he couldn't detonate them, and because a nuclear explosion would mean his death as well as theirs. A fist fight was out of the question. One blow to the jaw or chest of those monstrosities, and he would shatter every bone in his hand. He bent over and found some two and three pound rocks. He hefted one in each hand, threw them. One bounced off the beast's chest, the other off its shoulder.
It came on, oblivious of his attack.
He tossed six other stones before it was on top of him. It batted his last missile out of his hands, struck a blow alongside his head that sent him sprawling.
Victor started to get up, doggedly plotting more resistance, clutching at rocks to throw even as he used his hands to support himself. But before he was even properly on his feet, the jumbo slapped him again with a back of the hand blow across the seat of his pants and sent him crashing forward onto the ground again.
He laid still for a while, then got his feet under him, stood, feeling like a man three hundred and ten years old, turned in time to collect another paw in the chest that sent him down hard. Furious, he grabbed a rock, rolled, and threw it with all his strength. It bounced off the massive skull with a loud and hollow
At last, he got the point. He wasn't supposed to try to get away or to fight back. As long as he attempted either of these, he was a target for their blows, nothing more. He sat still and did not reach for anything to throw. A few minutes later, the gorilla nodded its head appreciatively, satisfied Salsbury had learned his lesson.
The other beast came up beside Salsbury's self-appointed keeper. They grumbled back and forth in low, guttural voices. When they made their mysterious decision, the keeper lifted Salsbury, slung the man beneath its hairy arm as if he were a babe, and loped back the path, back to the clearing where the other gorilla collected the gas pellet gun. Then, moving with a swift, jarring steadiness, they went down the trail into the new valley, where the trees once again grew thick over their heads, the floor beneath them smoother and less cluttered.
Half an hour later, they came out of the trees into a clearing before an impressive face of sheer rock that formed an unscalable wall of this side of the valley. Far overhead, the moon was half-hidden by the thrusting cliff top which looked, in silhouette, like a broken tooth. There was a fire going at the base of the wall, the flames spitting four feet or more into the cool night air. In the orange-red glow of the fire, Salsbury could see the gorilla settlement strung out along the cliff and built up the side of it, utilizing the caves as well as crude mud and wood buildings constructed to use the cliff as their fourth wall. He raised his appraisal of the gorillas. They were not merely beasts, but in the first intriguing stages of civilization. In this time line, perhaps man had not developed intelligence, while creatures of this sort had. Not
Then he was impressed with a thought that seemed absurd yet realistic, and surveyed his captors again. He had been calling them gorillas because, in the darkness and from the manner in which they acted and moved, that was the most appropriate comparison he could make. Now in the light of the campfire, he could see that he had been wrong; these were not men, surely, but neither were they apes. They did not, after all, have truly simian features. Their faces were broad, heavy, with none of the typical monkey sharpness. As he looked at them, he fancied there really were more human genes in them than animal. They were most likely a freak of evolution. In his world, his probability, they had not come along. Or, if they had, their line of intelligence was defeated by Cro- Magnon man, and they had become extinct. Here, they were going to flourish one day, possibly even reach the point of a highly technical civilization.
Salsbury's keeper dropped him in front of the fire with the same brutish carelessness he had used earlier. He called out to a sentry located ten feet above the ground in a dark nook of stone. The guard came down in a single leap that would have shattered a man's ankles, bounded to them and jabbered with the two with Salsbury. He took his turn staring at the man, prodding him with stubby fingers, breathing in his face and pitting his skin (or so it seemed to Salsbury) with his halitosis. When he was finished, he grunted some more with the other two. Then the keeper picked Victor up again, and they continued their hairy, smelly odyssey.
He had the passing thought that, if this were an odyssey, it was proceeding all wrong. The hero was not winning.
With Salsbury firmly under his arm, the gorilla swung onto the cliff and began going up, using only its toes and free hand, hooking those blunt fingers over stones so sharp they should have jammed through his palm and out the back of his hand. The climb was totally impossible. That was quite evident. They continued up. Sixty feet off the ground, with Salsbury's head hanging down and pounding with an overflow of blood, they swung into the mouth of a cave where a smaller fire burned, just a few tongues of flames and a pile of hot coals which seemed as much ceremonial as practical.
Keeper, as Victor had come to think of the creature, hooted into the blackness and started back the tunnel, moving more cautiously here because he had to bend some to keep from cracking that magnificent skull against the stumps of broken stalactites. Before they had gone a dozen feet, another light appeared farther back in answer to Keeper's call. In the burgeoning glow, Salsbury saw another half-man lighting a pile of twigs and logs with the end of a torch that, obviously, was always kept lit.
They moved out of the entrance passageway into the heart of the cave-a room fully thirty-five feet wide and fifty long-where ten more half-men were sitting and lying on piles of grass and leaves. The creatures were in various stages of alertness, and they seemed, as a lot, to be in a grumpy mood after being so rudely wakened. They hooted and snarled at Keeper, threw handsful of bedding materials at him. But when they caught sight of Salsbury, they came to sitting positions, their heavy-lidded eyes wide with interest, their paws wiping sleep matter away so they could get a better look.
Victor was the curiosity, the find of the week? of the century, perhaps. They could not have much in the way of entertainments in such a beginning society. Salsbury was the equivalent of a circus. If they could have built a zoo, he would have been their star attraction and advertised for miles around. And when he died? Why, they would stuff his body and mount it to be stashed in the equivalent of the ape men's Smithsonian. He knew now how a freak must feel; how it must be to be radically different; not just different in color or the slant of one's eyes which is, alone, enough for some men to stare twice, but so different that the mind boggles a little to contemplate your existence.
Their minds were boggling.
He was deposited on a stone ledge two feet off the floor to one side of the cave. There was no sense in making a try for the entrance to the cave, for the freedom of the night. If Keeper did not pounce on him before he was a third of the way to fresh air, another of the half-men would. He sat and endured the bad breath and prodding. They chattered and jabbered, hooted and yelped at him, then waited expectantly, as if they thought he might reply. He spoke a bit in English, but this did not satisfy them. They only frowned, which was a truly frightening and awesome expression to behold on those craggy faces, and began muttering among themselves again. He imagined they thought him too stupid to speak intelligently.
Some minutes later, female half-men entered the room, their great sagging breasts matted with a softer coating of hair than that which adorned the chests of their huskier menfolk. They moved with a refined gracefulness which Salsbury had glimpsed in the males, bearing bowls of a steaming gray-green gruel. These monsters, he knew, would require large quantities of food to sustain their mammoth bodies and to allow them the speed and versatility of movement they enjoyed. They now were ready to eat
