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THE THING IN THE ATTIC
By James Blish
Illustrated by Paul Orban
[Transcriber Note: This etext was produced from If Worlds of ScienceFiction July 1954. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence thatthe U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
[Sidenote: _Honath and his fellow arch-doubters did not believe in theGiants, and for this they were cast into Hell. And when survivaldepended upon unwavering faith in their beliefs, they saw that therewere Giants, after all...._]
_It is written that after the Giants came to Tellura from the far stars, they abode a while, and looked upon the surface of the land, and found it wanting, and of evil omen. Therefore did they make men to live always in the air and in the sunlight, and in the light of the stars, that he would be reminded of them. And the Giants abode yet a while, and taught men to speak, and to write, and to weave, and to do many things which are needful to do, of which the writings speak. And thereafter they departed to the far stars, saying, Take this world as your own, and though we shall return, fear not, for it is yours._
--THE BOOK OF LAWS
Honath the Pursemaker was hauled from the nets an hour before the restof the prisoners, as befitted his role as the arch-doubter of them all.It was not yet dawn, but his captors led him in great bounds through theendless, musky-perfumed orchid gardens, small dark shapes with crookedlegs, hunched shoulders, slim hairless tails carried, like his, inconcentric spirals wound clockwise. Behind them sprang Honath on the endof a long tether, timing his leaps by theirs, since any slip would hanghim summarily.
He would of course be on his way to the surface, some 250 feet below theorchid gardens, shortly after dawn in any event. But not even thearch-doubter of them all wanted to begin the trip--not even at themerciful snap-spine end of a tether--a moment before the law said, Go.
The looping, interwoven network of vines beneath them, each cable asthick through as a man's body, bellied out and down sharply as theleapers reached the edge of the fern-tree forest which surrounded thecopse of fan-palms. The whole party stopped before beginning the descentand looked eastward, across the dim bowl. The stars were paling more andmore rapidly; only the bright constellation of the Parrot could still bepicked out without doubt.
"A fine day," one of the guards said, conversationally. "Better to gobelow on a sunny day than in the rain, pursemaker."
Honath shuddered and said nothing. Of course it was always raining downbelow in Hell, that much could be seen by a child. Even on sunny days,the endless pinpoint rain of transpiration, from the hundred millionleaves of the eternal trees, hazed the forest air and soaked the blackbog forever.
He looked around in the brightening, misty morning. The eastern horizonwas black against the limb of the great red sun, which had already risenabout a third of its diameter; it was almost time for the small,blue-white, furiously hot consort to follow. All the way to that brink,as to every other horizon, the woven ocean of the treetops flowed gentlyin long, unbreaking waves, featureless as some smooth oil. Only nearbycould the eye break that ocean into its details, into the world as itwas: a great, many-tiered network, thickly overgrown with small ferns,with air-drinking orchids, with a thousand varieties of fungi sproutingwherever vine crossed vine and collected a little humus for them, withthe vivid parasites sucking sap from the vines, the trees, and even eachother. In the ponds of rain-water collected by the closely fittingleaves of the bromeliads tree-toads and peepers stopped down theirhoarse songs dubiously as the light grew and fell silent one by one. Inthe trees below the world, the tentative morning screeches of thelizard-birds--the souls of the damned, or the devils who hunted them, noone was quite sure which--took up the concert.
A small gust of wind whipped out of the hollow above the glade offan-palms, making the network under the party shift slightly, as if in aloom. Honath gave with it easily, automatically, but one of the smallervines toward which he had moved one furless hand hissed at him and wentpouring away into the darkness beneath--a chlorophyll-green snake, comeup out of the dripping aerial pathways in which it hunted in ancestralgloom, to greet the suns and dry its scales in the quiet morning.Farther below, an astonished monkey, routed out of its bed by thedisgusted serpent, sprang into another tree, reeling off ten mortalinsults, one after the other, while still in mid-leap. The snake, ofcourse, paid no attention, since it did not speak the language of men;but the party on the edge of the glade of fan-palms snickeredappreciatively.
"Bad language they favor below," another of the guards said. "A fitplace for you and your blasphemers, pursemaker. Come now."
The tether at Honath's neck twitched, and then his captors were soaringin zig-zag bounds down into the hollow toward the Judgment Seat. Hefollowed, since he had no choice, the tether threatening constantly tofoul his arms, legs or tail, and--worse, far worse--making his everymortifying movement ungraceful. Above, the Parrot's starry plumesflickered and faded into the general blue.
Toward the center of the saucer above the grove, the stitchedleaf-and-leather houses clustered thickly, bound to the vinesthemselves, or hanging from an occasional branch too high or too slenderto bear the vines. Many of these purses Honath knew well, not only asvisitor but as artisan. The finest of them, the inverted flowers whichopened automatically as the morning dew bathed them, yet which could beclosed tightly and safely around their occupants at dusk by a singledraw-string, were his own design as well as his own handiwork. They hadbeen widely admired and imitated.
The reputation that they had given him, too, had helped to bring him tothe end of the snap-spine tether. They had given weight to his wordsamong others--weight enough to make him, at last, the arch-doubter, theman who leads the young into blasphemy, the man who questions the Bookof Laws.
And they had probably helped to win him his passage on the Elevator toHell.
The purses were already opening as the party swung among them. Here andthere, sleepy faces blinked out from amid the exfoliating sections,criss-crossed by relaxing lengths of dew-soaked rawhide. Some of theawakening householders recognized Honath, of that he was sure, but nonecame out to follow the party--though the villagers should be beginningto drop from the hearts of their stitched flowers like ripe seed-pods bythis hour of any normal day.
A Judgment was at hand, and they knew it--and even those who had sleptthe night in one of Honath's finest houses would not speak for him now.Everyone knew, after all, that Honath did not believe in the Giants.
Honath could see the Judgment Seat itself now, a slung chair of wovencane crowned along the back with a row of gigantic mottled orchids.These had supposedly been transplanted there when the chair was made,but no one could remember how old they were; since there were noseasons, there was no particular reason why they should not have beenthere forever. The Seat itself was at the back of the arena and highabove it, but in the gathering light Honath could make out thewhite-furred face of the Tribal Spokesman, like a lone silver-and-blackpansy among the huge vivid blooms.
At the center of the arena proper was the Elevator itself. Honath hadseen it often enough, and had himself witnessed Judgments where it wascalled into use, but he could still hardly believe that he was almostsurely to be its next passenger. It consisted of nothing more than alarge basket, deep enough so that one would have to leap out of it, andrimmed with thorns to prevent one from leaping back in. Three hempenropes were tied to its rim, and were then cunningly interwound on asingle-drum windlass of wood, which could be turned by two men even whenthe basket was loaded.
T
he procedure was equally simple. The condemned man was forced into thebasket, and the basket lowered out of sight, until the slackening of theropes indicated that it had touched the surface. The victim climbedout--and if he did not, the basket remained below until he starved oruntil Hell otherwise took care of its own--and the windlass was rewound.
The sentences were for varying periods of time, according to theseverity of the crime, but in practical terms this formality was empty.Although the basket was dutifully lowered when the sentence had expired,no one had ever been known to get back into it. Of course, in a worldwithout seasons or moons, and hence without any but an arbitrary year,long periods of time are not easy to count accurately. The basket couldarrive thirty or forty days to one side or the other of the proper date.But this was only a technicality, however, for if keeping time wasdifficult in the attic world it was probably impossible in Hell.
Honath's guards tied the free end of his tether to a branch and settleddown around him. One