A. bertram Chandler- The Cage

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The Cage

BERTRAM CHANDLER

Imprisonment is always a humiliating experience, no matter how philosophical the prisoner.

Imprisonment by one's own kind is bad enough - but one can, at least, talk to one's captors, one can

make one's wants understood; one can, on occasion, appeal to them man to man.

Imprisonment is doubly humiliating when one's captors, in all honesty, treat one as a lower animal.

The party from the survey ship could, perhaps, be excused for failing to recognize the survivors from

the interstellar liner Lode Star as rational beings. At least two hundred days had passed since their

landing on the planet without a name - an unintentional landing made when Lode Star's Ehrenhaft

generators, driven far in excess of their normal capacity by a breakdown of the electronic regulator, had

flung her far from the regular shipping lanes to an unexplored region of space. Lode Star had landed

safely enough; but shortly thereafter (troubles never come singly) her pile had got out of control and her

captain had ordered his first mate to evacuate the passengers and those crew members not needed to

cope with the emergency, and to get them as far from the ship as possible.

Hawkins and his charges were well clear when there was a flare of released energy, a not very

violent explosion. The survivors wanted to turn to watch, but Hawkins drove them on with curses and, at

times, blows. Luckily they were up wind from the ship and so escaped the fall-out.

When the fireworks seemed to be over, Hawkins, accompanied by Dr Boyle, the ship's surgeon,

returned to the scene of the disaster. The two men, wary of radioactivity, were cautious and stayed a safe

distance from the shallow, still smoking crater that marked where the ship had been. It was all too

obvious to them that the captain, together with his officers and technicians, was now no more than an

infinitesimal part of the incandescent cloud that had mushroomed up into the low overcast.

Thereafter the fifty-odd men and women, the survivors of Lode Star, had degenerated. It hadn't

been a fast process - Hawkins and Boyle, aided by a committee of the more responsible passengers, had

fought a stout rearguard action. But it had been a hopeless sort of fight. The climate was against them, for

a start. Hot it was, always in the neighbourhood of 85° Fahrenheit. And it was wet - a thin, warm drizzle

falling all the time. The air seemed to abound with the spores of fungi - luckily these did not attack living

skin but throve on dead organic matter, on clothing. They throve to an only slightly lesser degree on

metals and on the synthetic fabrics that many of the castaways wore.

Danger, outside danger, would have helped to maintain morale. But there were no dangerous

animals. There were only little smooth-skinned things, not unlike frogs, that hopped through the sodden

undergrowth, and, in the numerous rivers, fishlike creatures ranging in size from the shark to the tadpole,

and all of them possessing the bellicosity of the latter.

Food had been no problem after the first few hungry hours. Volunteers had tried a large, succulent

fungus growing on the boles of the huge fern-like trees. They had pronounced it good. After a lapse of

five hours they had neither died nor even complained of abdominal pains. That fungus was to become the

staple diet of the castaways. In the weeks that followed other fungi had been found, and berries, and

roots - all of them edible. They provided a welcome variety.

Fire - in spite of the all-pervading heat - was the blessing most missed by the castaways. With it they

could have supplemented their diet by catching and cooking the little frog-things of the rain forest, the

fishes of the streams. Some of the hardier spirits did eat these animals raw, but they were frowned upon

by most of the other members of the community. Too, fire would have helped to drive back the darkness

of the long nights, would, by its real warmth and light, have dispelled the illusion of cold produced by the

ceaseless dripping of water from every leaf and frond.

When they fled from the ship, most of the survivors had possessed pocket lighters - but the lighters

had been lost when the pockets, together with the clothing surrounding them, had disintegrated. In any

case, all attempts to start a fire in the days when there were still pocket lighters had failed - there was not,

Hawkins swore, a single dry spot on the whole accursed planet. Now the making of fire was quite

impossible: even if there had been present an expert on the rubbing together of two dry sticks he could

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