17
Jed looked quickly at Cal when he told him how the colonists had spooked, bolted in panic. As if he expected disbelief.
"Maybe that seems funny to you," he commented. "After taking so much we'd spook like crazy animals and hightail for the woods over not making footprints."
"Pretty fundamental thing," Cal said with a shrug. "Animals are aware of spoor long before they are aware of tools. It hit deep down into fundamental being, a thing like that."
Jed looked relieved. Hussein and Van Tassel exchanged glances, as if confirming their belief that an E would understand their problems. Cal appreciated the confidence expressed in that glance, but did not feel it was justified. It was now pretty obvious that this was some alien co-ordinate system, never before encountered by man. But how to get hold of it? How to reconcile with it? Coexist with it?
Never before encountered by man? What if the myths of early man be true? And too authentic the legends of his being a pawn to the will of the gods? Could there have been some factual basis for the gods? And not, as was supposed, rationalizations dreamed up by man to account for the control of phenomena at a level beyond his own power to control?
"It's been bad since then," Jed continued. "Seems like once they got the wind up, the whole thing hit them all over again. Like cattle in a stampede, they didn't have a lick of sense. They didn't even stay together. They scattered in all directions, hid out in the bushes from each other.
"You could hunt for 'em, call for 'em, yell your lungs out. You could pass within ten feet of one of 'em, callin', pleadin', and they wouldn't say a word. Just stand there and watch you like a hunted animal, not even breathin' lest you discover them.
"After a couple of days, some of us kind of pulled ourselves together—me and Martha, Ahmed and Dirk here. Maybe a dozen of us now have got together again. Funny thing though, even so, all we want is to hide. Can't get over hidin', somehow. That's why you didn't see us from the air. We was hidin' from you.