Boneheads

by Pauline Ashwell

Illustration by Bob Eggleton

When boldly going where no man has gone before, which—since Homo sapiens would not evolve for 90,000,000 years and the first member of the expedition had arrived on Indication One only three months ago—described most places in the northern half of the island, and particularly when this involves dense forest, common sense suggests marking the route.

Standing at the junction of two trails (one of which he must have traversed quite recently, without noticing the other) Jonathan Craile (M.D., F.W.C.P) acknowledged ruefully that common sense seemed to have deserted him.

The trails had been made, presumably, by rhynchosaurs—snouty, pigsized reptiles, the commonest large animals on the island. Their comings and goings had beaten the reddish earth as hard as cement.

The hunters who had sometimes acted as Craile’s guides in the wilder parts of the world—some still existed, even in 2089—might have been able to see traces of his moccasins. He could not.

Despite the tropical sunlight it was dark in the forest, which mostly consisted of conifers, with stands of palmlike “cycads” and the occasional tree-fern. The air was warm, still, and silent. Monkeys had yet to evolve, and such birds as were around squawked, when they felt like it, but did not sing.

Craile felt very much alone.

Well, he was alone. Very much so. The total human population of the Earth at this point of time—somewhere around the middle of the Cretaceous—numbered twenty-nine. Twenty-eight of them were either at base, halfway up Observatory Hill, or working near Lake Possible at the southern end of the island. The total area of Indication One was roughly thirteen miles by eight; this northern section took up at least half of the map, so its population density came to about one person per fifty square miles. Craile was the one.

You couldn’t get much more alone than that.

Furthermore, nobody knew where he was. Those members of the expedition currently at base believed him to have gone to Lake Possible, while those at the lake supposed, if they happened to think of him, that he was still at base. Several people who had been at the lake for a couple of weeks were due to return, and Craile had planned to wander in behind them. Nobody was likely to wonder why he should walk seven miles in the morning in order to walk seven miles back a few hours later. It was not as though he had anything more important to do.

The easiest route to and from the lake lay along the seashore. Journeys had to take account of the tides, which meant that, barring accidents, the returning group would reach the base by midafternoon. Craile estimated that it had taken him about four hours to get where he was, but he should be able to retrace his steps in considerably less. Even so, if he wanted to get back unnoticed it was high time to start.

Not that there was any actual rule against going off alone, without stating one’s intentions. Or if there was, no one had thought to mention it to him.

When Craile was hurriedly Displaced a couple of months after the rest of the expedition, he was told that he would be briefed when he arrived. This had meant, in practice, that he got to hear whatever happened to be on his informant’s mind at the time.

Several times the explanation had been inspired by some minor catastrophe, or the threat of one—as when Craile, seeing a number of large fronds spread out in a patch of shade, had wandered across to sit down. He learned, not a moment too soon, that they covered a pit full of poisonous slime. There were about twenty pits scattered around, each one filled with a careful selection of vegetation and then inoculated with one or more strains of bacteria, in order to produce a variety of chemicals; many of them actively poisonous, and none of them good for the health.

Pits and their contents belonged to the six members of the Plastics team. For the next week or so there was always one of them around whenever Craile was out of his hut. Hovering.

What annoyed him most was that they appeared to be genuinely worried, not that he might upset the production of monomers that they needed for their work, but that he might break one of his poor old legs. Or get a nasty rash on his poor old skin.

All right, he was fifty-three; more than twice the age of anyone else in the world at this moment (except for the chief engineer and general manager, Yaro Land, who was nearing forty). That didn’t mean he was incapable of looking after himself. Or, if given proper information, of avoiding hidden menaces or other items best left alone…

Such as the cushion-like balloons clustered here and there on the plateau around base camp. Naturally, they had caught his eye on his very first morning, because while they were made of transparent plastic, the lower half was coated with silver foil, giving the impression that the flora of Indication One ran to metallic buttercups two feet across.

He had gone to the nearest cluster and had begun to investigate the arrangement of whitish rods which surrounded each balloon, when an agitated young woman hauled him away. The inner surface of the balloons, he learned, was plated with solar cells, which were recharging batteries from the hand-lasers used for cutting and shaping wood. The rods were there to keep the balloons facing directly into the Sun. Not only had Craile upset the arrangement by poking about, he had ignored repeated yells of “Shadow!” and gone on cutting off sunlight from at least three.

Craile had been prepared for the peculiarities of life in the Cretaceous, as such, but not for those that were due to the Time Displacement process itself. Nobody in 2089 had bothered to warn him about its limitations. Winton Boatrace, who had invented it, was willing to maunder on indefinitely about how it worked—though he evidently didn’t expect to be understood—but had not thought to mention the point of real practical importance, which was that his blasted apparatus would only Displace just so much mass—somewhere between four and five tonnes. Then it stopped.

Live bodies, a miniaturized computer, a single rocket-gun, food for the first comers until they were organized to find their own… everything Displaced contributed to a phenomenon referred to as temporal strain in the essential guts of the machinery, and when that reached a certain level the thing did not work any longer. As simple as that.

Once understood, this accounted for a lot. For one thing it explained why he had been chosen as medical officer. Nothing to do with thirty years spent doctoring in places where modern technology had not yet arrived—or was in retreat. There were doctors in their thirties whose experience of bush life was perfectly adequate; but they tended to be 180-lb stalwarts. The very weediest topped 140 lbs, whereas Craile, whose growth had stopped when he was five foot one, had never weighed more than 90 lbs, even after the most self-indulgent leave.

Time Displacement was expensive in power; about Cr 5,000 per lb of mass Displaced. At first Craile thought that was why he had been selected.

It did occur to him, on the first day, that to put highly-trained scientists and craftsmen to dig holes with bone shovels, or weave basket-work traps to catch fish and lobsters for the camp’s dinner, was the falsest kind of economy. Even so it was several days before he grasped that more was involved than penny-pinching. Tools on Indication One were made of stone and bone and wood, because there was no mass-capacity available to Displace metal ones; and specialists of all kinds took turns hunting and gathering local foods, because the alternative was to go hungry.

The colonists on Indication One would have been more than human, Craile thought, if they had not wondered why 88 lbs of mass capacity had been used to Displace him, when there was so much else they could have used. They were young and healthy. If there were any local diseases they could catch, which was unlikely, they had a plentiful supply of Unimycin in self-refrigerating capsules. They had all been trained in the handling of injuries; not just first aid, but nursing, physiotherapy, the lot. They had a thermometer and a stethoscope and knew how to use them, and they had put together a useful kit from local materials, including a steam sterilizer (pottery), a supply of clean absorbent moss, wooden splints, and strips of leather with which to tie them in place. He knew a great many procedures that they didn’t, of course, but few if any were safe outside a modern hospital. So what use would he be?

In the last few weeks Craile had wondered that more and more frequently.

As explained to him by Dr. Boatrace, he had two functions: firstly, to deal with any illness or accident that required more than first aid, so that nobody else need leave their own work for the purpose; and secondly, to act as a spare pair of hands as and when required.

The final objective of the colony on Indication One was to obtain a supply of the rarer metals; not by digging for them—so far as was yet known, the island contained no ores at all—but by extracting them from sea water. A series of tunnel sections were to be constructed, lined with a variety of silico-organatoid mixtures, each tailored to accumulate a different metal. The tunnels were to be sunk in the channel between Indication One and the mainland.

That done, the whole colony would be re-Displaced 5,000 years ahead, to a period when the bed of the channel would have been raised above sea-level. There they would shovel the metal-containing sludge into one of the many caves along the shore. In 2089 that tract of land belonged to Cretaceous Minerals, Inc., who would set to work ninety million years later to dig the stuff up.

The whole scheme struck Craile as a farcical gamble, with about one chance in a thousand of succeeding. However there was no doubt that everyone else on Indication One took it very seriously indeed.

They had ten years in which to bring it off. Every time one of the potters (who in the absence of metals were expected to make much of the equipment), the engineers, or the plastics team (whose job was to produce the silico-organatoids) had to put his/her specialized work on hold because somebody else was calling for unskilled but absolutely necessary assistance, the whole enterprise suffered.

Craile was perfectly willing to hump loads, support partly completed structures, pass tools, and help in any way that he could. The trouble was, after his early mistakes (plus one or two incidents that were none of his doing but unfortunately occurred when he was close by—as when the spout diverting a small waterfall into the pool where dishes and cooking pots were put to get clean, just happened to collapse a minute or two after he had been inspecting its supports) everyone else on Indication One practically had hysterics if he came anywhere near their constructions.

Maybe they were right. Maybe he was some kind of a Jonah. Take this stupid expedition, undertaken with some confused idea of showing that he could be useful, given a chance.

Food problems on Indication One were the reverse of those Craile was accustomed to. Protein was abundant; there were quantities of fish in the streams as well as in the sea, a wide variety of shellfish, and the eggs of several marine reptiles which came ashore to lay. One of the pines produced large nuts which, cautiously tested, had proved edible. The young shoots of two species of fern and of a broader-leafed relative of the ginkgo had featured in early meals, after careful testing; but seeds of several fast-growing vegetables had been brought along and these, to general relief, now replaced the local greens as suppliers of fiber and vitamin C.

The nutrient in short supply was starch. Until recently it had been obtained from a nameless but abundant plant which grew on the banks of the many streams. This had bulbous stems a couple of inches thick, from which starch could be extracted by a simple but laborious series of operations; drying, grinding, washing out, and drying again. Flapjacks and crackers made from it would have won no prizes in a baking competition, but they were edible and sustaining and one got used to the taste.

Then more or less overnight all the stems shot up to a height of four feet and sprouted large conical heads of stone-hard seeds. In a few days these were stripped bare—by what creatures nobody knew, but small primitive nocturnal mammals were the favorite guess. The remaining stems were about as edible as bamboo.

Supplies of starch were on the point of giving out.

It occurred to Craile that a week or so earlier, while trailing after the Plastics team—they had admitted that he could hardly do any damage by carrying bundles of vegetation for them, provided they chose it themselves—he had noticed a kind of fern with creeping stems, some of them swollen to about the size of a small potato. Wasn’t there a species of fern somewhere—New Zealand?—which produced starchy rhizomes that the locals ate?

Unfortunately he did not remember just where he had seen the plant. Somewhere to the north of the camp, and close to a trail; but there were trails all over the place, and he had had no reason at the time to make a note of the landmarks.

However, Craile was fairly sure he could recreate the course of his wanderings; and if he turned out to be wrong there would be no harm done. Not wanting to add to the list of his mistakes, he decided not to mention it to anyone unless and until he had something edible to show. The terrain was rough, but hell, he was experienced enough in bush walking to look where he put his feet. Anyway, if he announced his intentions somebody would feel bound to drop whatever they were supposed to be doing and come along to take care of him.

At first it seemed everything was going well. He found a small clump of ferns with creeping stems that had four swollen lumps on them—not much bigger than his thumb, but it was a start.

After that, nothing. He walked along a number of trails which looked pretty much like the one he remembered, but the big clump he was looking for failed to appear. Repeatedly he saw what seemed to be the right kind of leaves, and plunged off the trail to examine the plants, but none of them showed the kind of growth he was looking for.

Doggedly Craile pursued one meandering path after another; he was now well away from the area he had visited with the Plastics group, but the blasted plants must grow in other places as well. Probably the one he had found was an outlier, and the main habitat of the species was farther away…

Finally, and with reluctance, he had decided to turn back. Then at the very first fork in the trail he did not know which way to go.

Base lay south, he was sure of that. He looked up. The Sun was directly overhead.

Observatory Hill was the highest point on the island. Slowly and deliberately, Craile turned completely around. The view in every direction was blocked by trees. Where he stood, the ground was flat; but fifty yards away in either direction it sloped gently upwards. He couldn’t see which ridge was the higher—both summits disappeared among the trees.

Unbelievably, after all his experience, he had gotten himself lost.

Of course, for the last twenty years his experience had been mostly of being put down by helicopter as close as possible to his destination, and then conducted by a guide for the rest of the way. He had got out of the habit of noting landmarks and marking his trail. It had not occurred to him to use any part of his minute baggage allowance to bring a compass along… Wasn’t there something about the moss growing on the south side? He looked quickly at the nearest tree. No moss. Plenty of lichens, all the way around.

It was high time to start using some of his alleged bush-craft, not to mention his common sense. Like recognizing that what he needed at the moment was a rest.

He sat down with his back to a tree.

leaned his head against the trunk, and carefully noted the pattern of branches that marked the position of the Sun. Then he took from his pouch the lunch Elsa had given him—four radishes, a couple of crackers, and a smoked fish.

Too late, he realized that he should have kept the radishes till last, to clear his palate of the lingering taste of the fish. He did have a water bottle, hollowed from a sapling stem—gourds had been planted, but were less than half grown—but it held only a few mouthfuls. He had drunk several times from streams crossed during his wanderings. Better keep what he had, for now, not knowing when he would next come to water that was fit to drink.

The Sun had crawled just perceptibly down the sky. It appeared that the opposite side of the valley lay more or less west. Which meant if he turned left along the valley bottom he would be going more or less south. He heaved himself to his feet and set off.

This time he faithfully followed the teaching of the Boy Scout Handbook, lining up his route from one tree to another, scratching arrows on the ground at every branch of the trail, and remembering to check his position by the Sun. The need to keep going in a straight line took him through patches of scratchy horsetails and thickets of some whiplike plant that lashed back at him when pushed aside, and finally into a messy and sour-smelling swamp… from which he emerged after most of an hour onto a slope of bare rock backed by a basalt cliff, above which loomed the distant outline of Observatory Hill.

It was a relief. Of course it was. On the other hand he was bloody tired and it was now mid-afternoon. It would take him two hours at least to get back to base, and the party from Lake Possible might well be there already, now. Whatever he did now, some interfering youngster was going to realize that he had deliberately tricked them and gone exploring by himself, which would make him the big winner at How Dumb Can You Get… unless he had something to show for it.

There were a good many fallen branches around, and towards the top of the slope they were dry. Craile assembled materials for a fire, built a small pyramid of twigs and crumbled bark, and focused the sunlight on it with his burning-glass (official issue—matches were reserved for emergencies on Indication One). He got a glow after a minute or so, fanned it to a flame, and fed it carefully.

It took much longer than he expected for the fire to burn down. When, finally, he had a good—fairly good—bed of red coals, he spread his four pathetic little lumps on the hot rock, raked ash over them with a stick, and piled the red coals on top.

Then, for lack of anything to do otherwise, he continued to crouch beside the fire. Presently a drop of sweat fell from his nose, and sizzled. Craile moved away a few feet and for the first time began to notice the clearing as something other than a good place to light a fire.

The area of rock was about the size of a soccer field and variegated by damp hummocks of moss, plus the occasional clump of horsetails growing out of a crack. The upper end was cut off sharply by the cliff, which was about twenty feet high. Elsewhere the rock was bordered by forest. This was much the same here as elsewhere, except that the trees appeared to be in poor condition. There were a good many fallen trunks and stumps with splintered tops, as though the quite moderate winds of Indication One had been too much for them.

Altogether, the place made a rather dismal impression; though that could be because he was strongly conscious that the swamp through which he had waded to get here lurked at the lower end of the slope.

The fire was a heap of gray ash, with charcoal poking through in places. Craile wondered how long it took to cook roots this way. Come to that, he didn’t know how long they had been baking; he had forgotten to note the position of the Sun when the process began.

He had started his fire feeling that as he could not get back early enough to avoid notice, but on the other hand nobody would actually be waiting for his return, time hardly mattered. However, he had only a vague idea of how long it would take to reach base. The amount of fuss would be doubled or trebled if he got back after dark. Not to mention the possibility of falling off, into or down some part of the landscape…

He raked one of the roots out of the fire and knocked the ash off it. Small enough to begin with, it had shrunk almost to nothing. He got out his knife—his most important possession, kept tethered to his belt by a leather thong—and prodded the thing. The tip of the smaller blade went into it easily enough.

Craile cut the root in half.

Color and texture were the same all the way through. Did that mean it was cooked? He cut off a piece, peeled away the remaining skin and blew on it till it felt cool enough to put in his mouth.

There were other dangers. By the middle of the Cretaceous, land plants had been eaten by land animals for about a hundred and fifty million years; quite enough time for the plants to evolve a few chemical protections. Cyanide, for instance. The lethal stuff had to be locked into some relatively harmless molecule, to stop it killing the parent cell, and most of it stayed that way until mixed with stomach acid; but the cooking process usually released enough to warn off anyone with a sense of smell. He sniffed heartily. No odor of bitter almonds here.

The other chief group of plant poisons, the toxic alkaloids, all tasted bitter. Craile believed—hoped—that quantities too small to register on the taste buds were also too small to be harmful. He licked the bit of root. No bitterness; in fact no taste at all. He put it cautiously into his mouth Chewed, it took on faint overtones of the fermented gruel fed to children in parts of Africa. Europeans tended to compare the flavor to that of wallpaper paste, though when and why they had tasted that was never explained.

He went on chewing. He would have to swallow the stuff some time, if this experiment was to be of any use, but there was no hurry about it.

What the hell—? His tongue, and the roof of his mouth were stinging furiously. It felt as though the mush he was chewing contained one of the stronger acids—but there was no sour taste.

Craile spat, vigorously; uncorked his water-bottle, washed his mouth, and spat again, repeating the process until he had drained the bottle. His tongue and palate continued to sting. Hurriedly he examined himself for other in effects; but he was not nauseated, or dizzy, his extremities were not numb, his vision was OK…

A memory surfaced, of having gone through this process before, thirty or forty years ago… and, yes, because of similar symptoms. The curator of a botanical garden somewhere—Singapore? Rio? Papua?—had given him a fruit like an outsize pinecone with green scales. One end was ripe and tasted like pineapple; the other… Visible differences should have warned him, but he went ahead and cut off a slice. After a couple of mouthfuls his mouth had felt as though he had been eating stinging nettles, raw.

The curator had explained, holding back laughter, that until it ripened the fruit was full of tiny needle-shaped crystals which penetrated the soft tissues of the mouth. In a couple of days they would dissolve; meanwhile there was nothing to be done. Except remember that only those segments of a ceriman that had separated from one another were good to eat.

And, dammit, he had been told often enough in New Guinea that taro roots must be cooked for a long time or they made the mouth sore. The cause was the same, according to the books; minute crystals of calcium oxalate. He had forgotten to check for that form of vegetable self-defense.

Craile raked the rest of the roots out of the fire. He was tempted to throw the shriveled little objects away and forget the whole thing. Instead, he wandered over to the nearest patch of forest until he found leaves large enough to wrap them in, then stowed them in his pouch.

He decided that before starting on the journey back he might as well relieve himself. He had stepped behind a tree before it occurred to him that right now, modesty was beside the point. He went ahead anyway, and was just lacing up his leather shorts when a curious rhythmic slapping began, somewhere beyond the far side of the tree.

About to step out of concealment, Cradle thought better of it and peered cautiously round the trunk instead.

Standing with its back to him, three or four yards away, was a dinosaur. It was bipedal and kept shifting from one hind leg to the other, stamping hard on the rock each time.

A troop of small bipedal dinosaurs roamed the plains around Lake Possible. They were herbivorous, and so timid Craile had never got close enough for a detailed view. This was not of the same species. For one thing they stood four feet high at the utmost stretch; whereas this one was leaning forward and even so its head was at least a foot higher than Craile’s. They were lean and birdlike; this one was stoutly built and looked three or four times as heavy. It had a thick triangular tail that slapped the rock in time with the stamping.

It was an article of faith among the colonists that no carnosaurs lived on Indication One. The island was simply not big enough to support a breeding population. If any had been caught there when the Tironian Sea surged into its present channel, they would have died out.

Ten minutes ago, he would have thought that a convincing argument.

Craile had looked at pictures of dinosaurs when he was seven years old, like most children, but they had mostly been of the large, dramatic kinds; Apatosaurus, Tyrannosaurus, Triceratops and other giants. Obviously there must have been smaller species, but he had no idea how to tell which kinds were liable to eat you; especially when viewing them from the rear. He shrank back behind the tree and did his best to breathe softly.

The stamping was abruptly supplemented by a kind of hissing scream. Very cautiously Craile edged one eye out from behind the tree trunk and saw that the clearing had been invaded by a second dinosaur.

This one was approaching from the far side, and Craile saw it head-on. It was bending forward from the hips, backbone and tail almost horizontal, the shorter forelimbs dangling not far above the ground.

His first impression was of warts; dozens of huge, pointed ones, all over the snout. Double rows of flatter knobs arched eyebrow-like over each eye, and above them the head sloped upwards to a great bony dome with a fringe of the pointed warts around its base. The small pig-like eyes looked out sideways and gave the impression almost of being shy, among all these excrescences.

The new arrival took perhaps ten slow paces forward into the clearing and came to a halt, turning its head so that one eye was fixed on the first one.

That individual repeated its hissing scream and bent forwards slowly until its trunk also was almost parallel with the ground. It continued to stamp; but now each time it lowered the raised foot it was planted a few inches farther up the slope. Presently it had edged out of Craile’s line of sight. He moved cautiously to the other side of the tree trunk, only to find his view blocked by one of the whippy bushes. Slipping back to his former vantage point he saw that the second creature had straightened up and swiveled round to keep the first in view. A minute later it scuttled up the slope until it was once again on a level with the first; which was once more standing tall.

There followed a kind of slow-motion dance. The object seemed to be to occupy the higher ground, without letting this become obvious. It was also necessary, apparently, to keep a certain distance—the minimum seemed to be thirty yards—between the participants. Maneuvering was complicated by the unevenness of the ground, which near the cliff was split into a jumble of blocks, and by the tendency when in motion to lose sight of the opponent. The latter was thus able to sneak a few steps closer, so that when the other, having arrived at a position higher up the slope, turned, it found itself off-side and had to withdraw.

This, at least, was Craile’s interpretation. It was not until the fascination began to wear off that he noticed the third dinosaur. It was lying quietly on its belly at the lower edge of the clearing and its green and brown mottling blended well with the clump of whiplike bushes immediately behind. The crown of its head was less domed than that of the other two. He concluded that it was probably a female and the peculiar contest in the clearing was designed to win its favor, though he couldn’t see how.

At that point one of the males—they had shuffled positions so often that he was not sure which—uttered a brief but loud croak and once again lowered its trunk until it was almost parallel with the ground; the domed top of its head directed towards its adversary.

Boneheads. The name floated into Craile’s mind, from what source he did not remember. Smallish—for dinosaurs—bipedal herbivores whose skulls were thickened on top by up to ten inches of said bone. The only explanation that paleontologists had come up with—

The second male also screamed and lowered itself into the battering-ram position; and on a count of three, they charged.

The sound as their heads collided was not particularly loud, but remarkably suggestive; a one-note tone poem to the mindless cruelties of the sexual arms race. Craile’s hands moved involuntarily to his temples.

The two boneheads rebounded from one another; then drew back, step by step, until they once again had room to get up speed. After which, without further ceremony, they charged again.

The paleontologists had got it right. The weird battle crisscrossed the clearing. The high ground—and thus the advantage in momentum—was more or less regularly swapped. The female lay still and made no sound, but her head pointed sometimes in one direction and sometimes in another; Craile had the impression that she was keeping a pretty sharp eye on successive impacts.

After a while the combatants seemed to have given up bothering about the slope and were charging one another more or less on the same level. Then in mid-career the one with its back to Craile stamped one foot onto the remains of the fire. Evidently the insulation of ash above and rock below had kept in a good deal of heat. The bonehead gave vent to a screech unlike any sound it had made before, and leaped sideways. The other came on at full speed, evidently unable to pull up, and Craile realized with sudden horror that it was headed straight for his tree.

He backed away at top speed.

Around the fifth or sixth step his foot came down on air instead of rock. After a brief, windmilling imbalance he found himself flat on his back in half an inch of water, over an unknown depth of mud. Before he had really taken this in, there came a thud, followed by creaking; the top of the cy-cad swayed into his line of vision, fronds swishing gently upwards, and came down on top of him.

The trunk fell to one side, but the mass of stiffened fronds pressed him down into the mud and inspired Craile with the urge to get out from under at any cost. He grappled and thrashed his way through them and got his head above the foliage, and a grip on the end of the tree trunk-only to find himself face to face with the dinosaur.

It was lying belly down along the cycad’s trunk. What actually met Craile’s eyes was the snout with its crowd of spiky knobs. Whether the sideways-facing eyes saw him he was not sure. They appeared to be open, but the creature did not react to his popping up in what might, or might not, be its field of view. Perhaps it was stunned. He had no idea whether the brains of reptiles were susceptible to that.

Whatever the reason for its quiescence, he felt that it would be safer to keep still. His knees appeared to have gone through the layer of mud and to be resting on rock; his first panicky idea that he might be pushed down and drowned in the stuff had evidently been overdramatic. He stayed where he was.

After about five minutes—having nothing else to do, Craile had been counting seconds—the bonehead suddenly pushed itself up from the tree trunk (causing Craile’s end of it to sink under him) and floundered to its feet. It turned ponderously, hissed, and waddled out of sight.

Craile hauled himself up on to the tree trunk, and froze. The gap where the cycad had stood framed something never seen before by man.

The bonehead that had stepped in the fire appeared to have won by default, and had evidently claimed the prize; or, considering their relative positions at the end of the battle, been claimed. Male and female formed a group balanced on five supports; two thick triangular tails, curled around one another; and three legs. The fourth—the pair were so twined together that Craile could not be sure to which of them it belonged—was bent sharply at the knee, raising the foot so that it rested on the partner’s hip.

They were remarkably still. Occasionally one uttered something like a muffled belch, which the other immediately echoed. Once, the whole group suddenly rotated around the entwined tails, and then was still again. Craile was beginning to wonder whether they planned to make a night of it when the one with the raised foot suddenly disengaged it, staggered a couple of steps away, and collapsed on all fours. The other immediately started up the slope at a rapid waddle, whereat the fallen one got its feet under it, rose, and set off even faster in pursuit.

Craile sighed deeply. Relief was tempered by frustration—he had lost any chance of getting back to base before dark.

He began crawling carefully along the fallen cycad. About two-thirds of the way along he reached the point where it rested on the edge of the low, rocky platform from which he had fallen. A couple of yards farther on it tilted under his weight and he fell forward over the section of trunk where the bonehead had struck. The bark, and a layer of wood beneath it, had burst open, leaving a splinter-edged depression. Putting a hand into it while pushing himself up, Craile found himself groping in slimy pulp. He swore wearily, wiped his hand on a relatively mud-free part of his tunic, and rolled off the trunk.

The cycad seesawed back to its former portion. Craile sidled cautiously between the ball of torn-up roots and the whiplike branches of a bush beside them; took a look around without seeing any lurking dinosaurs, and emerged into the clearing.

He found with annoyance that his legs shook. He was thirsty, his back and shins were coated with mud, and to reach base he had to walk four or five miles uphill. When he got there he would be faced with a barrage of questions and the answers would display him as a fool.

Maybe he could use his encounter with the boneheads as a distraction?

Ten to one they would think he was making it up. No. Tell them to mind their own business, why not? If he chose to come back after nightfall with mud all over his clothes, what had that got to do with anyone else?

With the wet legs of his trousers flapping against his shins he set out on the long walk home.

Fortunately the rhynchosaurs—or possibly the boneheads themselves—apparently did a good deal of trekking between the boneheads’ fighting-ground and Observation Hill. There was a well-beaten track, which presently joined another that Craile thought he recognized. After a mile or so this was confirmed; he came to a waterfall which he had definitely seen before. He knelt and drank, refilled his water bottle, and was about to step under the fall when he realized that the mud on his clothes had begun to dry up and flake away. He took them off, therefore, before immersing himself thankfully in the pool at the base of the fall.

Clean, and partly revived, he picked off as much mud as he could from his trousers, climbed into them, and began on his tunic.

The back was one huge splotch of mud, flaking a little round the edges, but mostly still wet. He rubbed it over a patch of horsetails and got a fair amount of it off. The front…

What the hell was that whitish goo? He rubbed a little of it between his fingers. It was thick and sticky, like starch paste.

Starch!

He had a sudden flash of memory; New Guinea; a demonstration laid on for tourists, of how to make flour from sago palms in the traditional way. Hadn’t there been something in. the pamphlet they were handing out about the other species of trees which could be used in a similar way? And weren’t some of those trees cycads? He seemed to remember that they had been mostly a last resort, when food ran short; but so what? Food—starchy food—was short here and now.

Was the stuff really starch? He didn’t see what else it could be. Better Displace a sample back to 2089 for lab testing, but—

Oh, hell. The fallen trunk was at least a mile back along the way he had come.

Of all the things Craile did not want to do, wasting the effort that had got him this far, and adding the same again, doubled, to the four miles of trudging that already lay between him and base—and supper and bed—was, at this moment, top.

In forty minutes or less the daylight would be gone.

Why not go back for a sample tomorrow? Come to that, there were probably specimens of that type of cycad much closer to base…

Unfortunately all cycads looked pretty much the same to him. Some had enormous cones which spilled pollen all over the place, and some didn’t; but he had an idea that that was a matter of gender, or possibly of maturity; not species. No, he would have to go back to the boneheads’ arena and find the one that had been knocked down, but tomorrow would do.

Wouldn’t it… ?

With something like a groan, Craile turned and started back along the way he had come.

He had marked it clearly enough and was making good time when a sudden and prolonged thrashing began in the undergrowth to one side. What with, on the one hand, the possibility that he had found a source of starch, and on the other his fatigue, he had more or less forgotten that this was bonehead country… The noise stopped. He could see no disturbance among the branches, probably he had just heard a large rhynchosaur settling down for the might. Not that it was a good idea to fall over one of those in the dark; they could give you a nasty bite. In fact—

No. He was not going to give up, trudge home and come back tomorrow. To hell with common sense.

He went on, treading carefully; even so he arrived at the clearing sooner than he expected. Craile was aware of a creeping sensation around his backbone as he crossed the naked rock; but no boneheads appeared. He found the fallen cycad and dug into the splintery mess where the bone-head had struck. The goo turned out to be the result of the impact; in the less damaged area nearby the center of the trunk was filled with a much firmer pith, about the consistency of raw potato. He dug out a section with his knife, weeded out a few splinters, and bit a piece off.

It was tasteless, but not too bad. He chewed it cautiously. Yes, surely, starch. He moved the bolus to the back of his mouth…

Was there, or was there not a faint bitterness there? He took a cautious sip from his water-bottle and chewed some more… Definitely bitter. Probably an alkaloid of some sort. He spat it out hurriedly, rinsed his mouth, and spat again.

Hell and damnation. He sat down heavily on the trunk, which sank a little under his weight. The stuff was useless, after all. Beaten by the evolutionary arms-race. Cycads 1, Craile 0… All that effort wasted. He had a strong impulse to sit where he was and try taking root himself.

Something crept into his line of sight. A shadow. The Sun was preparing to go down.

Reluctantly Craile started to rise, or tried to. His legs seemed to have seized up, and the tree-trunk to have gotten lower. After a couple of tries he managed to rock forward on to his feet, whereupon the ball, bristling with roots, rose and got him under the chin. He staggered backwards and sat down again.

Wiping mud from his neck with a handy frond, Craile began to feel that nature was out to get him. A broken root had poked him in the larynx; just a bit longer and sharper and he could be dead. He swallowed painfully, and became aware of renewed bitterness in his mouth. Bits of pith must have lodged in his cheek or somewhere and the alkaloid was still dissolving in his saliva…

This time there was no sudden revelation; just a series of facts that took a couple of minutes to assemble themselves.

Alkaloids were soluble in water; some more so, some less, but all to some extent.

A number of foodstuffs were naturally toxic—cassava, for instance, especially the high-yielding strains—but were rendered safely edible by soaking in water.

To make sago, the starch had to be washed out of the pith.

Craile took a deep breath; let it out. He got out his knife again, excavated about half a pound of cycad pith and wrapped it in the leaf that had held the fern roots. Wash out the starch of this sample; Displace some for laboratory testing; if necessary wash the remainder again and retest. Or the lab could Displace a do-it-yourself test kit. That would be better. Test every batch on the spot and make sure it was safe to eat…

Damn it, if the people of remote tropical villages could learn to eat cycad starch and survive, so could those on Indication One.

He put the leaf-wrapped parcel in his pouch. Once again, but with entirely different feelings, he started on the journey home.

Editor’s Note: This story has the same background as “Wings of a Bat,” published in Analog in May 1966.

Content

Boneheads
by Pauline Ashwell