by Larry Niven
“Don’t go! Terry. Where is Terry?”
Mary Ann’s mouth was a grim line. “He’ll live. I think.”
“Live—”
“Maybe. I have to go. You’re not hurt. You’re all right. So is your baby.”
Sylvia let that thought sink in. The baby is all right . . . Another shadow fell across her. Zack wandered aimlessly through the room with a bullhorn, counting the wounded, trying to get a feel for the extent of the damage. His eyes were red and puffy. Carolyn McAndrews followed him, a sallow wraith at Zack’s heels.
Zack climbed onto a dining table and raised his bullhorn. “I don’t know what to say.” He paused. There was silence. “We . . . we have more than enough medicine and bandages.” The bullhorn bellowed his voice: gravelly, ruined by an endless night of screaming. “If there are any bite victims that I am presently unaware of, please . . . ” He wavered, losing focus, and Rachel steadied him.
Sylvia felt herself coughing, watched herself raise an unsteady hand. “Zack—what do we do now? What do we do about the defenses?”
“Full alert, of course, we activate the minefield. The electric fences. But—Goddamn it, Sylvia, you know that thing was impossible! Impossible! We couldn’t have expected that. It’s a fluke. Nothing that large can live on this island, the ecology can’t support it. There’s no food chain. You said that yourself! It swam over from the mainland, it must have, and how could I have known it could do that?” He wiped his forehead with a grimy hand. His voice cracked. “There just isn’t enough food to support it.”
“It got here, didn’t it?” Ida van Don screamed. Her face was chalk, except for the smear of blood on the left side of her face. “It got—” She couldn’t get the rest out, and buckled over with sobs. Phyllis draped a blanket over her shoulders.
“Not enough food,” Sylvia said. She tried unsuccessfully to hold back her own tears. “Yes, I said that. All right, Zack, it wasn’t your fault! Is that what you want on your tombstone? It wasn’t your fault? Zack, it couldn’t be, it shouldn’t be, but it’s here, and you can’t know there aren’t more, and what in the hell do we do about it?”
“Mary Ann would have a suggestion.” Carlos’s voice was dry and carefully controlled.
Zack’s lips drew taut. His hands shook. Rachel took the microphone. Her voice was as raw as her husband’s. “Is that a suggestion or a demand, Carlos?”
“Neither. Not yet, anyway.”
“Then we needn’t worry about it yet. Sylvia, all serious suggestions are welcome. We know we need more security. Please, all of you, be assured that until the entire situation has stabilized, no aspect of security will be neglected. But we have to start somewhere—right now, we have to make sure that a total inventory of the damage and losses is made, and that all of the wounds are dealt with. Yes—Andy?”
The engineer stood. His right arm was strapped to his chest. ‘This wasn’t supposed to happen. Nothing like this was supposed to happen. I was . . . We can’t go home!”
Jill Ralston, the slender redhead from agriculture, stood. Both of her hands were wrapped in burn gauze. “Dammit, I saw that freaking animal take over a hundred rounds, and half a tank of jellied fuel. It was in the water, and the water smoked. We got a net around it, and its tail was still twitching! It had to be dead, just spasms—but I’m telling you that it almost killed the three of us. If there had been five of them, they could have killed everyone in the camp.”
“Five—hell if it would have needed five!” Ricky shouted.
Rachel tried to speak, but despite the microphone she was drowned out in the babble.
“One. One more would finish us!”
“Cadmann was right all the time. Damn, why didn’t we listen to the colonel—?”
“Ten lightyears, ten years away—”
“Power plant’s finished—”
“Vet shed—”
“The biology lab’s wrecked—”
Zack took the microphone and waved his hand. “Enough! Listen, damn it!” The babble died away. “Look, we’re not going to get productive work done until we rebuild the camp, and we can’t do that until our minds are at rest.”
“Yeah, sure, relax,” La Donna called. “Good old Zack. Noo-o problems.”
“Cut the crap. It doesn’t help the situation if everyone talks at once. Look, chances are we won’t find another one of these—things. No sense in taking chances, we’ll take precautions, but damn it, science is science. There’s nothing for it to live on here. There won’t be more of them—”
“How the hell can you know that?”
“There couldn’t have been that one—”
“Stop! You’re scientists and engineers, and the best people that could be chosen from a half-billion applicants, and goddamn it, act like it!
“All right. Now, just to be sure, we’ll put a study team on the problem. Immediately. What do we have that will kill these . . . monsters . . . and do it efficiently? We’ll find out!”
“I think we need atomic bombs,” Andy said. Two people laughed. Andy sat down again.
Zack spoke through pain, pushing his voice when it should have been allowed to rest. “We weren’t prepared. Whether we ever run into another of those or not, we’ll soon know what will kill it. One person by himself should be able to do it. We’ll find out. I swear. This is our island, and I’m not turning it over to any goddamned monster. Ours, do you understand?”
“Right.” Carolyn McAndrews stood and applauded. After several seconds others joined wearily. Sylvia rose and left the room.
She walked out through the door, out into the camp, where smoke still rose from the twisted struts. Three buildings had been totally destroyed. The power plant looked bad. People dug in the ruins, trying to find valuables or irreplaceables.
Here was the hospital. Its normal five beds had been expanded to twenty. Most of the wounds would heal, thank God, but a few, just a few . . .
Terry for instance.
Terry lay torpid in a bath of saline solution. Jerry was checking Terry’s wounds as Sylvia came through the door, and his face was grim. “We may have to amputate the right leg. The bones are shattered.”
She nodded numbly and sat down in a folding chair next to him. Terry was still unconscious, filled with painkillers. His skin was reddish and peeling, as if he had been staked out in the Mojave for days.
“He’s lucky to be alive,” Jerry said.
“We’re all lucky,” Sylvia said soberly. “Somehow, that doesn’t make things any easier.”
There was one figure conspicuously absent from the expanded hospital, one figure that she wanted desperately to see. Jerry caught the look in her eye. “We moved Cadmann back to his hut. He damned well insisted. He’s taking food there. I don’t know. He’s very weak, but there are others who need help more. He’ll heal—”
Sylvia half-stood, but Jerry’s hand tugged at her. “Name of God, Sylvia. You’re not the only one who’s sorry. We screwed up, and we’re paying for it. But you can’t do any good. How do you think Terry’s going to feel if he wakes up and you’re not here? Let it be.”
She twisted her arm in his hand, and then finally sat back again. Drained. “There isn’t anything to be done.”
“Nothing. We’ve got the body out of the river, and as soon as the wounded are stabilized, we’ll be able to spare you. Until then . . . you’re a doctor, not a lovesick schoolgirl. This is your husband. For God’s sake act like it.”
A slap across the face couldn’t have shocked her more, and she nodded. “I . . . I’m sorry, Jerry.”
“Being sorry doesn’t count for shit. Broken bones don’t care how you feel. They just need to be set.”
What time was it? How long had Jerry been working while she luxuriated in her grief? It had been twenty hours since the attack. It had probably been two days since Jerry had slept, and he was still going. Shame swept through the depths of her. But in its wake was resolve, and a kind of nervous energy. She stood. “Jerry, thank you. There’
s a time for self-pity, and this isn’t it. How long has it been since you slept?”
Jerry smiled raggedly, running his hand through a thatch of hair that looked as limp and tired as the rest of him. “Sleep. Sounds familiar. It sounds like something I read about once.”
“Get out of here, and don’t come back for at least six hours. Doctor’s orders.”
“Are you all right?”
“Now I am. I have to pass the favor on. Scoot.”
Jerry took a last look around the infirmary and shuffled off, grabbing his coat on the way out.
Sylvia rolled up her sleeves, and touched her stomach gingerly. The baby was fine, she could feel that. If anything had happened . . .
But now there was work to be done.
A war zone. That was what it looked like in here. A goddamned war zone.
♦ChaptEr 11♦
eulogy
He is gone from the mountain,
He is lost to the forest,
Like a summer-dried fountain
When our need was the sorest.
—Sir Walter Scott, The Lady of the Lake
For Sylvia, the next three days were a stabilizing time, a time of learning who was going to die, and who would live. They lost three more during that time, raising the death toll to twelve.
It seemed that none but the dead slept during those days. There just wasn’t enough painkiller or somazine to keep the wounded asleep.
If only . . .
That game was too easy, and too painful to play. “If onlys” turned wishes into guilty visions, turned thoughts of minefields and guards and infrared scans into haunted caves, vast cobwebbed torture chambers where her sleep-starved mind whipped and racked her without mercy.
She was pregnant, and she couldn’t deny it or hide it, and so every night when others went back to the hospital after dinner she was driven into bed, and given orders not to show her face until morning.
But the guilt and the pain and the sheer stark need drove her on.
She saw Zack. He was going harder than she. Perhaps harder than anyone. And if she knew that her dreams were pits of despair and self-recrimination, his were beyond her imagining.
Her life during those vital hours was consumed with the wounded—the burns, the bites and punctures, the broken bones and ruptured internal organs, the cuts, nervous exhaustion, fatigue, shell shock and even a bullet wound.
But Zack had to pore over Andy’s reports as the engineer corps examined the damage. The biology lab was almost totally destroyed. The power plant looked wounded, but was in fact dead. The plasma toroid was punctured; the only replacements within ten lightyears were in the motors of the Minerva vehicles.
And in three days, after the worst had passed—after all the fences were mended, the first tentative inventory taken and all the medical cases stabilized—it was Zack who performed the service at the mass burial.
No preachers. We didn’t want any. No preachers, no rabbi, no priests. We are the scientists, rational, thoughtful—was that wise?
“They died that we might live,” Zack began.
She thought of the last funeral she’d attended, the last time when she had felt grief gnawing at her like a living thing—the day they buried her father, only six months after her mother was laid to rest. The day she had turned from the rolling green expanse, the endless rows of white markers at Arlington National Cemetery and flown home without a word to anyone. And upon returning home made her final decision to accept the offered berth aboard Geographic. That day, and its decision, and the accompanying grief were like a wood-grain finish buried under layers of cheap, cloudy shellac. It only came to mind when she thought of how very much her mother would have wanted to touch her stomach, to hold her and cry happily with her as women cry, rejoicing in the torch of life being passed from one generation to the next.
No, today was worse. One hundred and seventy-four survivors were here for the ceremony, all those who could be moved from their beds.
Sylvia held Terry’s hand as he sat in his wheelchair. The word wasn’t final on his spinal damage yet, but the irony was crushing.
We’ve got good news and bad news.
The good news is that we won’t have to amputate his left leg!
The bad news is that his spinal cord was severed, and he’ll never walk again anyway.
There were twelve graves and a thirteenth marker. April, Alicia’s baby, the first child born on this new world, had never been found.
Greg stood near them, and there was a quality in his face that she had associated with Ernst since the Hibernation Instability. His face was empty.
It fit. Everything fit together, a mosaic that began with the endless expanse of dappled gray clouds and the thin stream of smoke rising from the smoldering tip of a volcano just the far side of the horizon.
Perhaps most of all, what fit was Cadmann. She saw him out of the corner of her left eye, standing alone, with Mary Ann. Strange how that phrasing came to her. Mary Ann stood near him, almost touching him, but they might have been strangers in a subway: intimate through proximity, yet each sealed in his own world.
Cadmann’s head turned, and he looked at Sylvia, through her, and she longed to cry out to him, realized through his inaccessibility how very much she cared.
But Terry’s hand gripped hers, and Zack’s voice called her from her reverie.
“. . . that we might live. All of us knew the risks, but these—these few paid the price for our mistake. With time, all of us will lie beneath this soil. Let these . . . thirteen . . . be the last to die by violence. Let our loss merely strengthen our resolve, deepen our commitment.”
He cleared his throat. Usually he reminded Sylvia of Groucho Marx. There was no hint of comedy now. He looked old and tired and frightened. “Does anyone want to speak?”
There was a moment’s silence, then Greg spoke in a voice that was pure venom. “Why didn’t we listen? Why couldn’t we have listened? Did Cadmann ask for so much?”
“Greg . . . ” Zack’s voice was soft. “This isn’t the time.”
“Piss on you!” Spittle flew from the corner of his mouth. “We combed this goddamned island from one end to the other, and we didn’t find a fucking thing. Now we can’t find anything, and people are already starting to say that that must have been the only monster. That it swam over from the mainland. That’s bullshit . . . ”
“Greg—”
“Fuck you, Zack. I trusted you. We all trusted you. You were supposed to be the one with the big view. Alicia trusted you. And now she’s . . . she . . . ”
Tears streamed from his eyes and he collapsed to his knees at Alicia’s grave, his fingers clawing at the earth, all the pent-up emotion exploding out of him at once. It was a trigger. Others were crying now, quietly or with great wracking sobs.
From the corner of her eye, Sylvia saw Cadmann turn on his crutches and hobble away. Silent, solitary again, vindicated by death, dishonored by the only family he would ever have.
In time, Sylvia lost herself in the work, and in greater time the flow of the work itself began to slow. Nobody was unaffected by the grief, and in a way it turned into a bond stronger than the original heigh-ho Manifest Destiny enthusiasm that had built an interstellar expedition.
Repairs were underway around the clock. In the middle of the mistiest night, the sparkle of laser and plasma torches lit the gloom like dazzling fireflies.
Within another week, what had happened had become a symbol almost as much as a reality. The electric wire around the periphery of the camp had been reinforced, reestablishment of full power given the highest priority. Guard shifts were doubled. Every night, several times a night, Sylvia awoke from troubled slumber, to be lulled back to sleep by the silent bob and swivel of the searchlights.
The minefield had been reactivated, providing the first dark moment of humor since the tragedy.
At just after three in the morning, a hollow explosion had shaken the camp. Frightened, hastily dressed colonists had joined g
uards outside the gates to find a storm of feathers still drifting down: a prodigal turkey had returned.
Grim jokes about turkey bombe and flambé had circulated for the next two days, and had helped the healing begin.
Sylvia ceased her efforts to write a new voice-recognition program into Cassandra as a familiar, disturbing figure limped past her window.
Cadmann. A crutch under his right arm, side bandaged, a ragged, badly healed scar creasing his cheek in a false smile. A silent giant with dark, accusing eyes.
He spoke to no one, taking his meals and medication in his hut. No one challenged him. No one dared to tell him that he should not hate them for what had been done. In her mind Sylvia could see that thing squatting atop Cadmann, grinning down at him, slowly raking the flesh from his body.
For a warrior of Cadmann’s nature to have been disarmed, doped, tied and then abandoned to be monster bait was an insult so deep that there was nothing that could be said. And so, to their communal shame, nothing was.
Two weeks later, the door to her lab opened without warning. Zack Moskowitz came in.
“Well, he’s gone.”
“Hi, Zack.”
“That Skeeter you heard. Cadmann stole it.”
“Stole—”
“Or borrowed. He didn’t say. We tried the radio. He isn’t answering, and he’s disconnected the tracer. We don’t know where he’s going or why.”
“You know why,” Sylvia said. “He’s telling us all to go to hell. And maybe we deserve it.”
“Yeah.” Moskowitz sighed heavily. “Yeah, I know. Some idiot suggested we go after him and get the Skeeter back. I didn’t bother to ask for volunteers.”
“So he’s gone.”
“Him, and he damn near dismantled his hut. He’s also got two dogs, a rifle, ammunition and a case of liquor.”
“It’s his rifle. He’ll have tools, too,” Sylvia said thoughtfully. “And if you add it all up, it won’t come to more than his share.”
“The Skeeter’s a lot more than his share.”