Critical Threshold Read Online Free PDF Page A

About ten came close; there might have been sixty or seventy more watching from a distance, including all the children.
    They just stared. And waited. They were thin, almost cadaverous, with the skin sticking close to their bones. Their cheeks were hollow, their eyes seemingly deep-set, large and shadowed. The garments they wore were unimaginably tattered, reduced to mere rags. And yet they retained the echoes of careful mass production. They were the remnants of garments brought to Dendra by the original colonists.
    Over one hundred and fifty years before.
    The original colonists had made a start. They had cleared land here—we were several thousand feet above sea level, and the trees were spaced out here, but even so a good deal of work must have gone into the preparation of the fields. They had built a village, or begun to build one. On the slope of another hill, beyond a shallow saddle, we could see where they had begun to build more houses, had begun to clear more land—a not inconsiderable tract of it. But they had failed, there. The forest had reclaimed the region, and there was a wall extending across the saddle now, cutting off the settlement from the land that had been allowed to go wild. The wall, it seemed, ran all the way round the tiny parcel of land which was all that remained of the original plan.
    In a hundred and fifty years, they could have extended over a hundred hills, mile by mile, month by month. They’d had all the time in the world.
    But they hadn’t used it.
    Instead, the forest had driven them back, enclosed them, reduced them.
    Was this really all that was left? I wondered. Less than a hundred people, in decaying houses, scraping a living of appalling poverty from a handful of fields slowly turning wild?
    I looked again at the small knot of people, patiently staring at the great metal edifice that had fallen from their sky. They were starving.
    But why? Even if the corn had failed, even if the hens had all died, the potatoes been blighted, if everything they had brought had failed, there was plenty that was edible in the forest. Meat, fruits, roots—and perennially available, for there was no winter here. They couldn’t starve.
    And the houses which were falling down, roofs caving in, pitted walls, missing doors. Why? Were they helpless?
    There was only one possible answer to that. They were helpless. Helpless, it seemed, to do anything but survive. And perhaps they were failing in that, too. Their faces seemed vacuous, hideous with the absence of any real sign of life or thought.
    Like children, Pete had said. And some of them were. Moronic, he had said, and as to that, they all were. Or so it seemed. A population robbed of intelligence, robbed of knowledge, robbed of humanity.
    â€œI’m going out,” said Nathan. Nobody leapt up to volunteer to go with him.
    Others were coming up the hill, now, to join the boldest. First they came in ones, and then the movement took hold of them all, and they came in a ragged crowd. A few more appeared from the houses in the huddled group.
    â€œIs that all of them?” whispered Linda.
    â€œAll except the halt and the lame,” I answered.
    A couple of minutes passed while Nathan went through the safety lock. He appeared outside, glancing back apprehensively at the ship’s eye, through which we watched him.
    He walked toward the crowd. Many of them shrank back fearfully.
    We weren’t wired for sound. We couldn’t hear what he said to them, nor what they replied. But they did reply. They spoke. But whatever they said didn’t seem to make much sense to Nathan.
    He was trying to locate a leader or a spokesman, someone who could answer questions. We watched him looking round, trying to find someone. But there was no such person. They all talked. At him rather than to him.
    An absurd scenario unfolded in my mind. Once, it had been accepted as rational, almost inevitable. A colony on an alien planet forgets all