Big Book of Science Fiction (12 page)

To pass a creature laid out for
magical ceremony was doom indubitable, but Antonio acted from pure desperation.
He recited charms which were stark paganism and would involve a heavy penance
when next he went to confession. He performed other actions, equally
deplorable; when he went on, the deer was quite spoiled for neat demonstration
of the skeletal, circulatory, muscular and especially the nervous system and
brain-structure of genus
cervus,
species
dama,
specimen and adult
doe. Antonio had piled over the deer all the brush within reach, had poured
over it the kerosene he had for his night-lantern, and had set fire to the heap
with incantations that made it a wholly impious sacrifice to quite nonexistent
heathen demons.

Salazar, trotting back to the front
of the flock after checking on Antonio and the rear-guard, wrinkled his nose
and sneezed as he went past the blaze again. Antonio tottered on after him. But
Antonio’s impiety had done no good. The tawny shape bounded back into sight
among the boulders on the hillside, It leaped with infinite grace for
impossible distances. Naturally! No animal can be as powerful as a machine, and
the counterfeit mountain lion was a machine vastly better than men could make.

The Qul-En now zestfully regarded
the flock of sheep. It looked upon Salazar and Antonio with no less interest.
The Qul-En explorer was an anatomist and organic chemist rather than a
zoologist proper, but it guessed that the dog was probably a scavenger and that
the man had some symbiotic relationship to the flock.

Salazar, the dog, was done a
grave injustice in that estimate. Even Antonio was given less than he deserved.
Now he was gray with horror. The blood in his veins turned to ice as he saw the
false mountain lion bounding back upon the hillside. No normal wild creature
would display itself so openly. Antonio considered himself both doomed and
damned; stark despair filled him. But with shaking hands and no hope at all, he
carved a deep cross on the point of a bullet for his ancient rifle. Licking his
lips, he made similar incisions on other bullets in reserve.

The Qul-En vehicle halted. The
flock had been counted; now to select specimens and get to work. There were six
new animal types to be dissected for the nervous organ yielding the looked-for
hormone. Four kinds of sheep—male and female, and adult and immature of each
kind—the biped, and the dog. Then a swift survey to estimate the probable total
number of such animals, available, and—

Antonio saw that the devil
mountain lion was still. He got down on one knee, fervently crossed himself and
fed a cross-marked bullet into the chamber of his rifle. He lined up the sights
on the unearthly creature. The lion-facsimile watched him interestedly; the
sight of a rifle meant nothing to the Qul-En, naturally. But the kneeling
posture of the man was strange. It was part, perhaps, of the pattern of conduct
which had led him to start that oxidation process about the deer-specimen.

Antonio fired. His hands trembled
and the rifle shook; nothing happened. He fired again and again, gasping in his
fear. And he missed every time.

The cross-marked bullets crashed
into red earth and splashed from naked rock all about the Qul-En vehicle. When
sparks spat from a flint pebble, the pilot of the mountain lion realized that
there was actual danger here. It could have slaughtered man and dog and sheep
by the quiver of a tentacle, but that would have ruined them as specimens. To
avoid spoiling specimens it intended to take later, the Qul-En put the
mountain-lion shape into a single, magnificent leap. It soared more than a
hundred feet up-hill and over the crest at its top; then it was gone.

Salazar ran barking after the
thing at which Antonio had fired, sniffed at the place from which it had taken
off. There was no animal smell there at all. He sneezed, and then trotted down
again. Antonio lay flat on the ground, his eyes hidden, babbling. He had seen
irrefutable proof that the shape of the mountain lion was actually a fiend from
hell.

~ * ~

Behind
the hill-crest, the Qul-En moved away. It had not given up its plan of
selecting specimens from the flock, of course, nor of anatomizing the man and
dog. It was genuinely interested, too, in the biped’s novel method of defense.
It dictated its own version of the problems raised, on a tight beam to the
wavering, color-changing flame. Why did not the biped prey on the sheep if it
could kill them? What was the symbiotic relationship of the dog to the man and
the sheep? The three varieties of animal associated freely. The Qul-En dictated
absorbed speculations, then it hunted for other specimens. It found a lobo
wolf, and killed it, verified that this creature also could be a source of
hormones. It slaughtered a chipmunk and made a cursory examination. Its
ray-beam had pretty well destroyed the creature’s brain-tissue, but by analogy
of structure this should be a source also.

In conclusion, the Qul-En made a
note via the wavering pinpoint of flame that the existence of a hormone-bearing
nervous system, centralized in a single mass of hormone-bearing nerve-tissue
inside a bony structure, seemed universal among the animals of this planet.
Therefore it would merely examine the four other types of large animal it had.
discovered, and take off to present its findings to the Center of its race.
With a modification of the ray-beam to kill specimens without destroying the
desired hormone, the Qul-En could unquestionably secure as much as the race
could possibly need. Concentrations of the local civilized race in cities
should make large-scale collection of the hormone practical unless that
civilized race was an exception to the general nervous structure of all animals
so far observed.

This was dictated to the
pin-point flame, and the flame faithfully wavered and changed color to make the
record. But the tape did not record it; a rather large beetle had jammed the
tape-reel. It was squashed in the process, but it effectively messed up the
recording apparatus. Even before the tape stopped moving, though, the record
had become defective; tiny spiders had spun webs, earwigs got themselves
caught. The flame, actually, throbed and pulsed restlessly in a cobwebby
coating of gossamer and tiny insects. Silverfish were established in the
plastic lining of the Qul-En ship; beetles multiplied enormously in the
air-refresher chemical; moth-larvae already gorged themselves on the
nest-material of the intrepid explorer outside. Ants were busy on the
food-stores. Mites crawled into the ship to prey on their larger fellows, and a
praying-mantis or so had entered to eat their smaller ones. There was an
infinite number of infinitesimal flying things dancing in the dark; large
spiders busily spun webs to snare them, and flies of various sorts were
attracted by odors coming out of the ventilator-opening, and centipedes rippled
sinuously inside—

Night fell upon the world. The
pseudo-mountain lion roamed the wild, keeping in touch with the tide of baa-ing
sheep now headed for the lowlands. It captured a field-mouse and verified the
amazing variety of planetary forms containing brain-tissue rich in hormones.
But the sheep-flock could not be driven at night. When stars came out, to move
them farther became impossible. The Qul-En returned to select its specimens in
the dark, with due care not to allow the man to use his strange means of
defense. It found the flock bedded down.

~ * ~

Salazar
and Antonio rested; they had driven the sheep as far as it was possible to
drive them, that day. Though he was sick with fear and weak with horror,
Antonio had struggled on until Salazar could do no more. But he did not leave
the flock; the sheep were in some fashion a defense—if only a diversion—against
the creature which so plainly was not flesh and blood.

He made a fire, too, because he
could not think of staying in the dark. Moths came and fluttered about the
flames, but he did not notice. He tried to summon courage. After all, the
unearthly thing had fled from bullets marked with a cross, even though they
missed; with light to shoot by, he might make a bull’s eye. So Antonio sat shivering
by his fire, cutting deeper crosses into the points of his bullets, his throat
dry and his heart pounding while he listened to the small noises of the sheep
and the faint thin sounds of the wilderness.

Salazar dozed by the fire. He had
had a very hard day, but even so he slept lightly. When something howled, very
far away, instantly the dog’s head went up and he listened. But it was nowhere
near; he scratched himself and relaxed. Once something hissed and he opened his
eyes.

Then he heard a curious,
strangled
“Baa-a-a.”
Instantly he was racing for the spot. Antonio stood
up, his rifle clutched fast. Salazar vanished. Then the man heard an outburst
of infuriated barking; Salazar was fighting something, and he was not afraid of
it, he was enraged. Antonio moved toward the spot, his rifle ready.

The barking raced for the slopes
beyond the flock. It grew more enraged and more indignant still. Then it
stopped. There was silence. Antonio called, trembling. Salazar came paddling up
to him, whining and snarling angrily. He could not tell Antonio that he had
come upon something in the shape of a mountain lion, but which was not—it didn’t
smell right— carrying a mangled sheep away from its fellows. He couldn’t
explain that he’d given chase, but the shape made such monstrous leaps that he
was left behind and pursuit was hopeless. Salazar made unhappy, disgusted,
disgraced noises to himself. He bristled; he whined bitterly. He kept his ears
pricked up and he tried twice to dart off on a cast around the whole flock, but
Antonio called him back. Antonio felt safer with the dog beside him.

Off in the night, the Qul-En
operating the mountain-lion shape caused the vehicle to put down the sheep and
start back toward the flock. It would want at least four specimens besides the
biped and the dog, but the dog was already on the alert. The Qul-En had not
been able to kill the dog, because the mouth of the lion was closed on the
sheep. It would probably be wisest to secure the dog and biped first—the biped
with due caution—and then complete the choice of sheep for dissection.

The mountain-lion shape came
noiselessly back toward the flock. The being inside it felt a little thrill of
pleasure. Scientific exploration was satisfying, but rarely exciting; one
naturally protected oneself adequately when gathering specimens. But it was
exciting to have come upon a type of animal which would dare to offer battle.
The Qul-En in the mountain-lion shape reflected that this was a new source of
pleasure—to do battle with the fauna of strange planets in the forms native to
those planets.

The paddling vehicle went quietly
in among the wooly sheep. It saw the tiny blossom of flame that was Antonio’s
campfire. Another high-temperature oxidation process ... It would be
interesting to see if the biped was burning another carcass of its own killing.
. . .

The shape was two hundred yards
from the fire when Salazar scented it. It was upwind from the dog; its own
smell was purely that of metals and plastics, but the fur, now, was bedabbled
with the blood of the sheep which had been its first specimen of the night.
Salazar growled. His hackles rose, every instinct for the defense of his flock.
He had smelled that blood when the thing which wasn’t a mountain lion left him
behind with impossible leapings.

He went stiff-legged toward the
shape. Antonio followed in a sort of despairing calm born of utter
hopelessness.

A sheep uttered a strangled
noise. The Qul-En had come upon a second specimen which was exactly what it
wished. It left the dead sheep behind for the moment, while it went to look at
the fire. It peered into the flames, trying to see if Antonio—the biped—had
another carcass in the flames as seemed to be a habit. It looked—

Salazar leaped for its
blood-smeared throat in utter silence and absolute ferocity. He would not have
dreamed of attacking a real mountain lion with such utter lack of caution, but
this was not a mountain lion. His weight and the suddenness of his attack
caught the operator by surprise, the shape toppled over. Then there was an
uproar of scared bleatlngs from sheep nearby, and bloodthirsty snarlings from
Salazar. He had the salty taste of sheep-blood in his mouth and a yielding
plastic throat between his teeth.

The synthetic lion struggled
absurdly. Its weapon, of course, was a ray-gun which was at once aimed and
fired when the jaws opened wide. The being inside tried to clear and use that
weapon. It would not bear upon Salazar; the Qul-En would have to make its
device lie down, double up its mechanical body, and claw Salazar loose from its
mechanical throat with the mechanical claws on its mechanical hind-legs. At
first the Qul-En inside concentrated on getting its steed back on its feet.