Hard-Luck Diggings: The Early Jack Vance, Volume One (22 page)

“Strange happenings for this earth; strange events for Austria!”

The men stared at the white tangle of bodies, none pushing
too close, and now with the waning of urgency their mood became uneasy. Old Alois, the baker, crossed himself and, furtively examining the sky, muttered about the Apocalypse. Franz, the village atheist, had his reputation to maintain. “Demons,” he asserted, “presumably would not succumb so easily to dog-bite and bullet; these must be refugees from the Russian zone, victims of torture and experimentation.” Heinrich, the village Communist, angrily pointed out how much closer lay the big American lager
near Innsbruck; this was the effect of Coca-Cola
and comic books upon decent Austrians.

“Nonsense,” snapped another. “Never an Austrian born of woman had such heads, such eyes, such skin. These things are something else. Salamanders!”

“Zombies,” muttered another. “Corpses, raised from the dead.”

Alois held up his hand. “Hist!”

Into the ravine came the pad and rustle of aimless steps, the forlorn cries of the troglodytes.

The men crouched back into the shadows; along the ridge appeared silhouettes, crooked, lumpy shapes feeling their way forward, recoiling from the shafts of sunlight.

Guns cracked and spat; once more the dogs were loosed. They bounded up the side of the ravine and disappeared.

Panting up the slope, the men came to the base of a great overhanging cliff, and here they stopped short. The base of the cliff was broken open. Vague pale-eyed shapes wadded the gap, swaying, shuddering, resisting, moving forward inch by inch, step by step.

“Dynamite!” cried the men. “Dynamite, gasoline, fire!”

These measures were never put into effect. The commandant of the French occupation garrison arrived with three platoons. He contemplated the fissure, the oyster-pale faces, the oyster-shell eyes and threw up his hands. He dictated a rapid message for the Innsbruck headquarters, then required the villagers to put away their guns and depart the scene.

The villagers sullenly retired; the French soldiers, brave in their sky-blue shorts, gingerly took up positions; and with a hasty enclosure of barbed wire and rails restrained the troglodytes to an area immediately in front of the fissure.

The April 18 edition of the
Innsbruck Kurier
included a skeptical paragraph: “A strange tribe of mountainside hermits, living in a Kreuzberg cave near Tedratz, was reported today. Local inhabitants profess the deepest mystification.
The Tedratz constabulary, assisted by units of the French garrison, is investigating.”

A rather less cautious account found its way into the channels of the wire services: “Innsbruck, April 19. A strange tribe has appeared from the recesses of the Kreuzberg near Innsbruck in
the Tyrol. They are said to be hairless, blind, and to speak an incomprehensible language.

“According to unconfirmed reports, the troglodytes were attacked by terrified inhabitants of nearby Tedratz, and after bitter resistance were driven back into their caves.

“French occupation troops have sealed off the entire Kreuzertal. A spokesman for Colonel Courtin refuses
either to confirm or deny that the troglodytes have appeared
.”

Bureau chiefs at the wire services looked long and carefully at the story. Why should French occupation troops interfere in what appeared on the face a purely civil disturbance? A secret colony of war criminals? Unlikely. What then? Mysterious race of troglodytes? Clearly hokum. What then? The story might develop, or it might go limp. In any case, on the late afternoon of April 19, a convoy of four cars started up the Kreuzertal, carrying reporters, photographers, and a member of the U.N. Minorities Commission, who by chance happened to be in
Innsbruck.

The road to Tedratz wound among grassy meadows, story-book
forests, in and out of little Alpine villages, with the massive snow-capped knob of the Kreuzberg gradually pushing higher into the sky.

At Tedratz, the party alighted and started up the now notorious trail, to be brought short almost at once at a barricade manned by French soldiers. Upon display of credentials
the reporters and photographers were allowed to pass; the U.N. commissioner had nothing to show, and the NCO in charge of the barricade politely turned him back.

“But I am an official of the United Nations!” cried the outraged commissioner.

“That may well be,” assented the NCO. “However, you are not a journalist, and my orders are uncompromising.” And the angry commissioner was asked to wait in Tedratz until word would
be taken to Colonel Courtin at the camp.

The commissioner seized on the word. “‘Camp’? How is this? I thought there was only a cave, a hole in the mountainside?”

The NCO shrugged. “Monsieur le Commissionnaire
is free to conjecture as he sees best.”

A private was told off
as a guide; the reporters and photographers started up the trail, with the long, yellow afternoon light slanting down through the firs.

It was a jocular group; repartee and wise cracks
were freely exchanged. Presently the party became winded, as the trail was steep and they were all out of condition. They stopped by the
wayside shrine to rest. “How much farther?” asked a photographer.

The soldier pointed through the firs toward a tall buttress of granite.
“Only a little bit; then you shall see.”

Once more they set out and almost immediately passed a platoon of soldiers stringing barbed wire from tree to tree.

“This will be the third extension,” remarked their guide over his shoulder. “Every day they come pushing up out of the rock. It is—” he selected a word “—
formidable
.”

The jocularity and wise cracks
died; the journalists peered through the firs, aware of the sudden coolness of the evening.

They came to the camp, and were taken to Colonel Courtin, a small man full of excitable motion. He swung his arm. “There, my friends, is what you came to see; look your fill, since it is through your eyes that the world must see.”

For three minutes they stared, muttering to one another, while Courtin teetered on his toes.

“How many are there?” came an awed question.

“Twenty thousand by latest estimate, and they issue ever
faster. All from that little hole.” He jumped up on tiptoe, and pointed. “It is incredible; where do they fit? And still they come, like the objects a magician removes from his hat.”

“But—do they eat?”

Courtin held out his hands. “Is it for me to ask? I furnish no food; I have none; my budget will not allow it. I am a man of compassion. If you will observe, I have hung the tarpaulins to prevent the sunlight.”

“With that skin, they’d be pretty sensitive, eh?”

“Sensitive!” Courtin rolled up his eyes. “The sunlight burns them like fire.”

“Funny that they’re not more interested in what goes on.”

“They are dazed, my friend. Dazed and blinded and completely confused.”

“But—what
are
they?”

“That, my friend, is a question I am without resource to answer.”

The journalists regained a measure of composure, and swept the enclosure with studiously impassive glances calculated to suggest
, we have seen so many strange sights that now nothing can surprise us.
“I suppose they’re men,” said one.

“But of course. What else?”

“What else indeed? But where do they come from? Lost Atlantis? The land of Oz?”

“Now then,” said Colonel Courtin, “you make jokes. It is a serious business, my friends; where will it end?”

“That’s the big question, Colonel. Whose baby is it?”

“I do not understand.”

“Who takes responsibility for them? France?”

“No, no,” cried Colonel Courtin. “You must not credit me with such a statement.”

“Austria, then?”

Colonel Courtin shrugged. “The Austrians are a poor people. Perhaps—of course I speculate—your great country will once again share of its plenitude.”

“Perhaps, perhaps not. The one man of the crowd who might have had something to say is down in Tedratz—the chap from the Minorities Commission.”

The story pushed everything from the front pages, and grew bigger day by day.

From the U.P. wire:

Innsbruck
, April 23 (UP): The Kreuzberg miracle continues to confound the world. Today a record number of troglodytes pushed through the gap, bringing the total surface population up to forty-six thousand…

From the syndicated column,
Science Today
by Ralph Dunstaple, for April 28:

The scientific world seethes with the troglodyte controversy. According to the theory most frequently voiced, the trogs
are descended from cavemen of the glacial eras, driven underground by the advancing wall
of ice. Other conjectures, more or less scientific, refer to the lost tribes of Israel, the fourth dimension, Armageddon, and
Nazi experiments.

Linguistic experts meanwhile report progress in their efforts to understand the language of the trogs. Dr. Allen K. Mendelson of the Princeton Institute of Advanced Research, spokesman for the group, classifies the trog speech as “one of the agglutinatives, with the slightest possible kinship to the Basque tongue—so faint as to be highly speculative, and it is only fair to say that there is considerable disagreement among us on this point. The trogs, incidentally, have no words for ‘sun’, ‘moon’, ‘fight’, ‘bird’, ‘animal’,
and a host of other concepts we take for granted. ‘Food’ and ‘fungus’,
however, are the same word.

From the
New York Herald Tribune:

TROGS HUMAN, CLAIM SAVANTS;

INTERBREEDING POSSIBLE

by Mollie Lemmon

Milan
, April 30: Trogs are physiologically identical with surface humanity, and sexual intercourse between man and trog might well be fertile. Such was the opinion of a group of doctors and geneticists at an informal poll I
conducted yesterday at the Milan Genetical Clinic, where a group of trogs are undergoing examination.