Collected fiction, p.488
Collected Fiction, page 488
HE STOPPED, and Raft breathed deeply.
He’d heard too, but he didn’t want to admit it. Superstition is apt to be psychologically dangerous in the jungle, and Raft knew that Curupuri was a widespread belief among the Indios. He’d encountered it ten years ago, when he was younger and more impressionable. And yet, he thought, it’s the only possible god for the Amazon Basin.
For Curupuri was the Unknown. He was the blind, ravening, terrible life-force that the Indios think is the spirit of the jungle. A savage, primeval Pan, lairing in the darkness. But nothing so concrete as Pan.
Curupuri moved along the Amazon as vast and inchoate and yet as tangible as life itself. Here in the jungle one realizes, after a while, that a god of life can be far more terrible than a god of death. The Amazonas is too alive. Too enormous for the mind to comprehend, a great green living thing sprawled across a continent, blind, senseless, ravenously alive.
Yes, Raft could under stand why the Indios had personified Curupuri. He could almost see him as they did, a monstrous shapeless creature, neither beast nor man, stirring enormously in the breathing fertility of the jungle.
“The devil with it,” Raft said, and drew deeply on his cigarette. It was one of his last cigarettes. He moved to Craddock’s side and stared out the window, drawing smoke gratefully into his lungs and savoring the second-hand taste of civilization.
That was all they’d had for a year—second-hand civilization. It wasn’t too bad. Madagascar had been worse. But there was quite a contrast between the sleek modern architecture of the home base, the Mallard Pathological Institute overlooking the Hudson, and this plastic-walled collection of shacks, staffed by a few Institute men and some native helpers.
Three white men Raft, Craddock, and Bill Merriday, were here. Merriday was plodding, but a good research pathologist, and the three of them had worked well together.
Now the work was ready to be wound up, and presently Raft knew he’d be in New York again, rushing by air-taxi from roof night-club to club, cramming the excitement of civilization into as short a time as possible. Then a little later, he realized, he’d be feeling a familiar itch again, and would be heading for Tasmania or Ceylon or—somewhere. There were always new jobs to be tackled.
The drums were still throbbing faintly, far off in the dark. After a while Raft left Craddock in the lighted lab and wandered outside, down to the river, trying not to listen to the distant pulse of sound . . .
A full moon rode up from the Atlantic, brightening the great pleasure-city of Rio, swinging up the Amazon to the backlands, a huge yellow disc against a starry backdrop. But across the Jutahy was the jungle, black towering walls of it, creeping and swarming with a vitality that was incredible even to a scientist. It was the fecund womb of the world.
Hot countries mean growth, but in the Amazonas is growth gone wild. Its rich alluvial soil, washed down for ages along the rivers, is literally alive; the ground beneath your feet moves and stirs with vitality. There is something unhealthy about such abnormal rioting life, unhealthy as the flaming Brazilian orchids that batten on rottenness and blaze in the green gloom like goblin corpse-lights . . .
Raft thought of Craddock. Odd! That inexplicable mixture of incredulity and fear—that Raft thought he sensed in the Welshman was puzzling. There was something else, too. He frowned, trying to analyze a vague shadow, and at length nodded, satisfied. Craddock was repelled by the drums but he was also drawn, attracted by them in some strange way. Well, Craddock had lived in this part of the forest for a long time. He was nearly Indio in many ways.
Something moving out on the surface of the river, sheet-silver under the moon, roused Raft from uncomfortable thoughts. In a moment he could see the outlines of a small boat, and two heads silhouetted against the silvery water. The men were pulling in toward shore and the hospital’s lighted window.
“Luiz!” Raft called sharply. “Manoel! Depressa! We’ve got visitors.”
A FEEBLE hail came across the water, and he saw the two outlines slump down, as if the last efforts of exhaustion had brought them to the landing. Then came excitement—the boys running with lights and shouts, everybody who could walk swarming to the doors and windows to watch. Raft helped beach the boat and superintended as the two almost unconscious men were carried up to the hospital.
One of them, he saw, wore an aviator’s helmet and clothing; he was beyond speech. The other, a slender, bearded man, rather startlingly graceful even in this extremity, lurched toward the door.
“Senhor, senhor,” he murmured, in a soft voice.
Craddock came out to help. He stopped dead still on the threshold, though crowding bodies hid the two arrivals from sight Raft saw a look of absolute panic come over the Welshman’s face. Then Craddock turned and retreated, and there was the nervous clinking of a bottle.
Bill Merriday’s stolid, intent features were comfortingly normal by contrast. But as Merriday, bending over the aviator, was stripping off the man’s shirt, he suddenly paused.
“I’ll be hanged,” he said. “I know this chap, Brian. Thomas, wait a minute. I’ll have it. Da something . . . Da Fonseca, that’s it! I told you about that mapping expedition that flew in a couple of months ago, when you were in the jungle. Da Fonseca was piloting.”
“Crack-up,” Raft said. “What about the other man?”
Merriday glanced over his shoulder.
“I never saw him before.”
The thermometer read eighty-six, far below normal.
“Shock and exhaustion,” Raft surmised. “We’ll run a stat C.B.C., just in case. Look at his eyes.” He pulled back a lid. The pupils were pin-points.
“I’ll take a look at the other man,” Merriday said, turning. Raft scowled down at da Fonseca, a little uncomfortable, though he could not have said exactly why. Something seemed to have entered the room with the two men, and it was nothing that could be felt tangibly. But it could be sensed.
Frowning, Raft watched Luiz milk a specimen from the patient’s finger. The overhead light fell yellow and unsteady on da Fonseca, upon a glitter of sudden brilliance from something that hung on a chain about his neck. Raft had thought it a religious medal, but now he saw that it was a tiny mirror, no larger than a half-dollar. He picked it up.
The glass was convex, lenticular, and made of a dark, bluish material less like glass than plastic. Raft glimpsed the cloudy, shapeless motion of shadows beneath its surface.
A little shock went through him. The mirror did not reflect his face, though he was staring directly into it. Instead he saw turbulent motion, though there was no such motion in the room. He thought of storm-clouds boiling and driving before a gale. He had the curious, inexplicable feeling of something familiar, an impression, an inchoate mental pattern.
Thomas da Fonseca. He caught the extraordinary impression, for a flashing, brilliant moment, that he was looking into da Fonseca’s eyes. The—the personality of the man was there, suddenly. It was as though the two men were briefly en rapport.
Yet all Raft saw was the driving, cloudy motion in the mirror.
Then the storm-swirl rifted and was driven apart. From the tiny lens in his hand a vibration ran up the nerves of his arm, striking into his brain. He stared down.
Now that the clouds had cleared away, it was not a mirror, but a portrait. A portrait? Then a living portrait, for the face within it moved . . .
A mirror, after all, then. But no—for that was certainly not his own face that looked back at him out of the small oval.
It was a girl’s face, seen against a background of incredible richness and strangeness that vanished as he looked, because she leaned forward as if into the very mirror itself, her head blotting out the remarkable background. And it was no painted picture. She moved, she saw—Raft. He drew his breath in sharply.
THERE was never such a face before. He had no time to see her very clearly, for the whole unbelievable glimpse was gone in an instant. But he would have known her out of a thousand faces if they ever met again.
The look of delicate gayety and wickedness in the small, prim curve of her mouth, the enormous translucent eyes, colored like aquamarines, that looked, for a moment, into his very solemnly above the sweet, malicious, smiling mouth.
There could be no other face like it in the world.
Then the mists rolled between them as they stared. Raft remembered later that he shook the lens passionately in a childish attempt to call her back, shook it as if his own hands could part those clouds again and let him see that brilliantly alive little face, so gay and solemn, so wicked and so sweet.
But she was gone. It had all happened almost between one breath and the next, and he was left standing there staring down at the lens and remembering the tantalizing—oddness—of that face.
An oddness seen too briefly to understand except as something curiously wrong about the girl who had looked into his eyes for one fraction of a second. Her hair had been—odd.
The eyes themselves were almost round, but subtly slanted at the corners, and with a blackness ringing them that was not wholly the black of thick lashes, for a prolonged dark streak had run up from their outer corners a little way, accentuating thieir slant, and giving a faint Egyptian exoticism to the round, soft, dainty face with its rounded chin. So soft—he remembered that impression clearly. Incredibly soft, she had looked, and fastidious.
And wrong. Racially wrong.
The mirror was blank again, and filled with the trembling fogs. But, very briefly, it had opened upon another world.
CHAPTER II
Drumbeat of Death
LUIZ was staring at Raft in surprise. “S’nhor?” Luiz said.
“What?” Raft answered.
“Did you speak?”
“No.” Raft let the lens fall back onto Fonseca’s bare chest.
Merriday was at his side. “The other man won’t let me look at him,” he said worriedly, “He’s stubborn.”
“I’ll talk to him,” Raft said. He went out, trying not to think about that lens, that lovely, impossible face. Subjective, of course, not objective. Hallucination—or self-hypnosis, with the light reflecting in the mirror as a focal point. But he didn’t believe that, really.
The bearded man was in Raft’s office, examining a row of bottles on a shelf—fetal specimens. He turned and bowed, a faint mockery in his eyes. Raft was impressed; this was no ordinary backwoods wanderer. There was a courtliness about him, and a smooth-knit, muscular grace that gave the impression of fine breeding in Doth manners and lineage. He had also an air of hardly concealed excitement and a certain hauteur in his poise which Raft did not like.
“Saludades, s’nhor,” he said, his too-bright eyes dazzling in the light. Fever, perhaps, behind that brilliant stare. His voice was deep, and he spoke with an odd, plaintive undertone that held a distant familiarity. “I am in your debt.”
His Portuguese was faulty, but one didn’t notice that. Raft had a feeling of gaucherie, entirely new to him.
“You can pay it right now,” he said brusquely. “We don’t want the station contaminated, and you may have caught something up-river. Take off your shirt and let’s have a look at you.”
“I am not ill, doutor.”
“You recover fast, then. You were ready to pass out when you came into the hospital.”
The black eyes flashed wickedly. Then the man shrugged and slipped out of the ragged shirt. Raft was a little startled at the smooth power in his sleek body, the muscles rippling under a skin like brown satin, but rippling very smoothly, so that until he moved you hardly realized they were there.
“I am Paulo da Costa Pereira,” said the man. He seemed faintly amused. “I am a garimpeiro.”
“A diamond-hunter, eh?” Raft slipped a thermometer between Pereira’s lips. “Didn’t know they had diamonds around here. I should think you’d be in the Rio Francisco country.”
There was no response. Raft used his stethoscope, shook his head and tried again. He checked his findings by Pereira’s pulse, but that didn’t help much. The man’s heart wasn’t beating, nor did he apparently have a pulse.
“What the devil!” Raft said, staring. He took out the thermometer and licked dry lips. Da Fonseca’s temperature had been below normal but Pereira’s was so far above normal that the mercury pushed the glass above 108°, the highest the glass tube could register.
Pereira was wiping his mouth delicately. “I am hungry, s’nhor,” he said. “Could you give me some food?”
“I’ll give you a glucose injection,” Raft said, hesitating a little. “Or—I’m not sure. Your metabolisms haywire. At the rate you’re burning up body-fuel, you’ll be ill.”
“I have always been this way. I am healthy enough.”
“Not if your heart isn’t beating,” Raft said grimly. “I suppose you know that you’re—you’re impossible? I mean, by rights you shouldn’t be alive.”
Pereira smiled.
“Perhaps you don’t hear my heartbeat. I assure you that its beating.”
“If it’s that faint, it can’t be pumping any blood down your aorta,” Raft said. “Something’s plenty wrong with you. Lie down on that couch. We’ll need ice-packs to bring your temperature down.”
Pereira shrugged and obeyed. “I am hungry.”
“We’ll take care of that. I’ll need some of your blood, too.”
“No.”
Raft swore, his temper and nerves flaring.
“You’re sick. Or don’t you know it?”
“Very well,” Pereira murmured. “But be quick. I dislike being—handled.”
WITH an effort Raft restrained an angry retort. He drew the necessary blood into a test-tube and capped it.
“Dan!” he called. There was no answer. Where the devil was Craddock?
He summoned Luiz and handed him the test-tube. “Give this to Doutor Craddock. I want a stat C.B.C.” He turned back to Pereira. “What’s the matter with you? Lie back.”
But the diamond-hunter was sitting up, his face alive and alight with a wild, excited elation. The jet eyes were enormous. For a second Raft watched that stare. Then the glow went out of Pereira’s eyes and he lay back, smiling to himself.
Raft busied himself with ice-bags. “What happened up-river?”
“I don’t know,” Pereira said, still smiling. “Da Fonseca blundered into my camp one night. I suppose his plane crashed. He couldn’t talk much.”
“Where you alone?”
“Yes, I was alone.”
That was odd, but Raft let it pass. He had other things on his mind—the insane impossibility of a living man whose heart did not beat. Ice-cubes clinked.
“You a Brazilian? You don’t talk the lingo too well.”
The feverishly brilliant eyes narrowed.
“I have been in the jungle a long time,” the man said. “Speaking other tongues. When you do not use a language, you lose it.” He nodded toward the bottles on the wall. “Yours, doctor?”
“Yes. Fetal specimens. Embryonic studies. Interested?”
“I know too little to be interested. The jungle is my—my province. Though the sources of life—”
He paused.
Raft waited, but he did not go on. The strange eyes closed.
Raft found that his fingers were shaking as he screwed the tops on the ice-bags.
“That thing da Fonseca wears around his neck,” he said, quite softly. “What is it?”
“I had not noticed,” Pereira murmured. “I have had a difficult day. If I might rest, it would be nice.”
Raft grimaced. He stared down at that cryptic, inhuman figure, remembering the odd malformation of the clavicle he had felt during his examination, remembering other things. Some impulse made him say,
“One last question. What’s your race? Your ancestors weren’t Portuguese?”
Pereira opened his eyes and showed his teeth in an impatient smile that was near to a snarl.
“Ancestors!” he said irritably. “Forget my ancestors for tonight, doutor. I have come a long way through the jungle, if you must know it. A long, long way, past many interesting sights. Wild beasts, and ruins, and wild men, and the drums were beating all the way.” His voice lowered. “I passed your ancestors chattering and scratching themselves in the trees,” he said in a purring murmur. “And I passed my ancestors, too.” The voice trailed off in an indescribably complacent sound. After a moment of deep silence, he said, “I would like to sleep. May I be alone?”
Raft set his teeth. Delirium, of course. That accounted for the senseless rambling. But that imperious dismissal was intrinsic in the man himself.
Now he gathered his rags about him as if they had been ermine. He seemed to fall asleep almost instantly. From his recumbent form there breathed out a tremendous vitality that set Raft’s nerves jangling.
He turned away. A heartbeat so faint that it was imperceptible? Ridiculous. Some new disease, more likely, though its symptoms were contradictory. Pereira seemed in perfect health, and yet he obviously couldn’t be.
There might be another answer. A mutation? One of those curious, specialized human beings that appear occasionally in the race? Raft moved his mouth impatiently. He went back to check on the aviator, conscious of a queer, rustling alertness permeating the hospital, as though the coming of the two men had roused the place from sleep to wakefulness.
THERE was no change in da Fonseca, and Merriday was busy with stimulants. Raft grunted approval and went in search of Craddock.
Halfway down the hall he stopped at the sound of a familiar voice. The diamond-hunter’s low, smooth tones, urgent now, and commanding.
“I return this to you. I have come very far to do it, s’nhor.”
And Dan Craddock replying in a stumbling whisper that held amazement and fear.
“But you weren’t there! There was nothing there, except—”
“We came later,” Pereira said. “By the sun and the waters we guessed. Then at last we had the answer.”
