by Larry Niven
—Boswell, Life of Johnson
Hendrick Sills took Skeeter Four south toward Mucking Great Mountain. His back and shoulders and mind ached from three solid weeks of work, and he was more than ready for a rest.
Catfish had been sighted down south of Mucking Great. And plentiful samlon.
The monsters were all dead. Ding dong! The work was well and fully done, and it was time for a rest in the hinterlands. Only two days, there was work to do; but two days. Just him and a German shepherd and a fishing pole. Just a forty-eight-hour rest from troubleshooting the troubled Colony’s many troubles. For a little while, he didn’t want to hear about flow rate and freshwater access, electricity, sewage and all the other little things. He didn’t want to muck around doing brain surgery on Cassandra. He didn’t want to oversee another team jury-rigging the veterinary clinic’s ailing apparatus.
“I’m tired of doing your job as well as mine, Carolyn McAndrews!” he had shouted. The entire ordeal had been a drain, and now that the weeks and months of unrelieved tension were over, he was ready for some fun. Ding dong!
Company would have been nice. But Harry Siep had twisted an ankle. He wouldn’t say how, but Hendrick suspected it involved back windows and the inopportune arrival of a husband. He’d be on his ass in the commshack for a week to come. And Phyllis, lovely Phyllis, was on duty.
Boogie Boy was tied to the passenger seat by a short leash. In the early days, they had tried longer cords, but one night an overexcited dog had leaped out at a pterodon. The poor creature had nearly lynched itself before the beleaguered chopper pilot could set the Skeeter down again. In the air, short leashes were s.o.p.
Hendrick peered out through the flowing, eternal mists. Cadmann’s Bluff was down there somewhere. He couldn’t see it. He dropped a little lower to get a better view.
The cultivated area of the plateau was beginning to bear fruit. From the air it now looked more like agricultural land than chicken scratches in the dirt.
And then there was the main house itself.
It had grown up the mountainside now. An underground house could be expanded far more readily than a traditional structure, and Cadmann had a dwelling that would do for a multigenerational homestead.
Deadfall boulders poised above the paths up either side. Naturally. Hendrick chuckled. And in a cleared strip at the bottom was the minefield that could be activated at the touch of a switch. “Can’t blame him, maybe,” Hendrick said aloud. Boogie Boy’s tail thumped against the deck. “But damn it all, there’s got to be a better way.” The dog whined in sympathy.
Hendrick swerved up through the clouds and around the edge of Mucking Great Mountain. He headed south, picking up speed as he went. Two days. Then, perhaps, when he returned to camp, he would make a decision about Phyllis.
Baby fever! The contagion had infected the camp. Even Phyllis McAndrews, the eternal fiancée, had gotten gooey-eyed at the sight of Jessica Weyland. And last night, after an especially intense evening (God. Where did she get the energy? Or the flexibility?), Phyllis had hinted broadly of shooting the rapids. That the beautiful physicist might want a baby didn’t surprise Hendrick; that she might want to be tied down to one tall, raw-boned engineer did.
He laughed to himself. The tragedy that had befallen the Colony had an interesting side effect: ten surplus women in a community of fewer than two hundred. Hendrick was seriously tempted to remain a roving bachelor—yet he wondered if he could ever have claimed a prize like Phyllis back on Earth.
Decisions, decisions . . .
There was the strike camp. Overgrown now, but still clearer than the jungle that pressed in from all sides. Cadmann had singed the ground two months before, when the kill teams stalked the last grendels. The ground was flat, and a stream gurgled not thirty meters distant. Two months ago it had been choked with fat, flashing samlon.
The Skeeter settled with a bump. He unhooked Boogie Boy. The shepherd jumped down and sniffed the ground, bounded around in a circle and then set his paws back on the doorframe, begging Hendrick to come out and play.
Creepers and grass pushed back through the blackened earth and formed a thick cushion underfoot. He wished that the wind would clear away the mists, let him see the stars. There was nothing that Hendrick loved more than to lie on his back beneath a canopy of stars.
He’d done a lot of that when he was a boy in Michigan. Now Kalamazoo seemed just exactly as far away as it was. Impossibly far away, never to be seen again. Those had been good times, although the area was no longer as rural as it had been in his grandfather’s day, when deer would come up to the back door.
Grandfather would have approved of Avalon.
Hendrick set up his lamp, then unrolled the air mattress and opened the valve. The mattress sucked air.
Boogie Boy bounded around him, then jumped onto the mattress, tail idling. When Hendrick said, “Hey!” Boogie’s tail whipped like a rotor. Hendrick shoved him away. The dog barked in frustration, then gave up and ran off toward the bushes.
Hendrick opened his fishing kit and examined the rod and reel. He checked his hooks and lures, and the play in his line, and was satisfied. Tomorrow was going to be a good fishing day. For now, there was little to do but sleep.
“Boogie?” The dog was gone, didn’t answer, didn’t bound back to the camp. Hendrick strolled down to the river and played his handlamp across the foam.
Beautiful. The light danced across the surface, and below its floating oval the water shifted with thick, dark shapes. Tomorrow would be a wonderful day for fishing.
The dog wasn’t in sight, but Hendrick didn’t worry. Boogie would be back.
He returned to camp. He peeled back the cover, slipped into the bag, and began to put himself to sleep.
Someone pounded twice on their door, then yelled, “Goddammit, open up!”
Rachel rubbed Zack’s nose firmly with hers. “That’s what I get for sleeping with the boss.”
“I can’t believe this,” Zack muttered resentfully. He rolled away and continued rolling until he was out of the bed. He pulled on his robe as he padded through the living room. He paused, gathering himself together before he swung the front door open.
Mary Ann looked frightened; Sylvia and wheelchair-bound Terry looked identically grim. Terry’s hands fidgeted in his lap. “You’re not going to like this,” he said.
Zack pulled his robe tighter. “I’m sure you’re right. I’d better let you in anyway.”
They filed in like a jury prepared to deliver a death sentence. Each of the three looked to the others to speak first.
Rachel spoke from the bedroom. “What’s going on?”
Her voice seemed to break Sylvia’s mental dam. “What I remembered first was an African frog.”
Mary Ann jumped. “Oh! Diamonds. Africa!”
“Diamonds and frogs and Escher drawings, Rachel. It was so simple that none of us could see it.”
“See what?” Zack sat, trying to stay calm. “Slow down a little, will you?”
“Yes. Fine.” Sylvia took a deep breath. “There’s an African frog with nasty habits.”
“Yes, yes, they eat—they eat their children!” Mary Ann shouted. “Yes, Sylvie, yes!”
“They eat the tadpoles,” Sylvia said.
Zack waited. He heard Rachel move into the kitchen and start coffee. Coffee was for emergencies; Zack feared her instinct was right.
“It doesn’t sound like a workable ecology, but it is,” Sylvia said. “The simplest ecology you can imagine. Frogs and algae and nothing else. No insects, no fish. The frogs are carnivores. They can’t eat algae. But the ecology’s stable.”
“Tadpoles eat algae,” Mary Ann said triumphantly.
Zack said, “Ugh.” He saw it already.
Sylvia nodded agreement. “The frogs lay eggs. The eggs hatch into little tadpoles. The tadpoles eat pond scum until they’re big tadpoles. Then the adults eat big tadpoles. It’s enough. And the big tadpoles that are agile enough or wary enough, they b
ecome adults—”
“You are talking about samlon, aren’t you?”
“That’s it, Zack. Samlon are tadpoles. Grendels are frogs. There’s no way we could have known at the time, but we took the adults out of the picture, so there are a lot more samlon than there should be. And it’s spring. And the samlon are getting big.”
Zack felt numb. “What have we done? Sylvia? Do you know? Can there be any way to tell?”
“Not right now, but, Zack—” Sylvia spread her hands helplessly “—better late than never.”
Hendrick floated halfway up into consciousness. Something was pressing against his stomach: Boogie Boy, a warm, soft roll mat gave a growl that was almost a purr. The German shepherd’s tail thumped against the ground a few times, then it settled down to sleep.
“This isn’t just guesswork,” Sylvia said, finally winding down. “We know samlon are related to grendels. Remember when Cadmann came back with a piece of grendel and it tested out like samlon meat?”
“Jesus,” Zack said. “And we didn’t believe—”
“Yes,” Mary Ann said. “You didn’t believe him, and—”
“All right. It was my fault,” Terry said flatly.
“And it took us this long to put it together,” Sylvia finished.
“Yeah.” Zack rubbed his eyes. “Thanks, darling.” He took a refill of steaming coffee from Rachel and sipped. “Okay. Let’s sort this out—”
Halfway to the kitchen, Rachel froze in midstep. “Zack?’ She set the coffee tray down as if it were a soap bubble. “Hendrick.”
“What about—?” It hit him too suddenly, and he almost dropped his cup. “Hendrick went fishing. We’d better get to the commshack. Sylvia, thanks for a lovely evening.”
Hendrick awoke suddenly, the fringes of a nightmare crumbling in his mind. Something was wrong. He reached out a hand for Boogie, and felt only the cool grass, pressed down where Boogie’s body had been, and warmer there.
He heard the dog whine: a questioning, curious sound. As Hendrick sat up, the whine rose into a pair of sharp yips, and then a growl.
What the hell?
Hendrick reached out for the explosive-tipped spear gun by his head. Ding dong, the monsters are dead! But mother hadn’t raised any brain-damaged children, and Hendrick wasn’t taking chances.
“Boogie?”
He pulled on his pants. Boogie suddenly appeared through the bushes and barked urgently at Hendrick, then disappeared again.
The barks abruptly became a ghastly shriek of pain, and Hendrick froze.
The moons were low and weak on the horizon. The mist wreathed the plants and twisted trees like clouds run aground. His handlamp barely pierced it.
Something was killing his dog. Following a response so basic it overrode his common sense, Hendrick took two nervous steps toward the brush. And then another . . .
The radio aboard Skeeter Four began to shriek.
Boogie . . .
Hendrick ran for the Skeeter. Leaves crackled behind him, and he glanced back as he ran.
Bits of the blackness streaked toward him. He batted blindly with the harpoon gun. The tip hit something resilient.
His leg flamed with sudden pain. He stomped back, heel crushing into something dog-sized. It hissed.
Hendrick was horribly aware that he was running for his life. He tore Skeeter Four’s door open and dove in. His head banged against the instrument panel, but the door slammed shut behind him. He lay for a moment, then pushed the pain far down inside him. No locks on the Skeeter doors. What’s out there? What killed my dog? He lay with his spear gun aimed at the door. Something scrabbled outside.
Hendrick looped one of the seatbelts through the door handle, tied it shut. It would have to do. He forced himself to get off the deck and into the pilot seat. His leg was a bright sear of pain yammering for attention. It felt like a pit bull had taken a chunk out of it. Blood soaked through his tattered trousers and chamois shirt. He shut his eyes tightly and let his hand move gently downward. His fingers probed the wound: flaring pain, and a hole the size of a good-sized filet mignon.
The radio’s squawk drilled through the pain. He struggled up and grabbed the handpiece, thumbed the transmit button and screamed, “God, my leg! Oh, shit. Something’s out there killing my dog!”
The voice was Zack’s. “Get out of there. Leave the dog.”
“Damn straight!” Curiosity fought panic and pain. “What in hell is it?”
“Sylvia’s trying to tell us that all the samlon are turning into grendels!”
Hendrick laughed hysterically. Something thumped against the door again and again, shaking the Skeeter. “She’s damned right! Tell her her timing is for shit. Oh, mother, it hurts.”
“You’re wounded? Can you fly? We’ll send out a Skeeter—”
“No way I’m waiting. I can tourniquet my leg for the twenty minutes I’ll need. Just have someone waiting to stitch me up.”
Hendrick fumbled until he found the Skeeter’s first-aid pack and pulled out the elastic tourniquet. The Skeeter juddered again, and the thin metal door bent inward.
He exhaled harshly and belted his calf tightly just above the wound. He flexed it once to test. ‘This will just have to do.”
He started the motor turning, reached for the throttle, paused. Was he actually about to take off in the dark? Stupid. Muzzy thoughts. He turned on the lights.
Where he had piled the camp supplies, now dark shapes flashed in and out of a confetti storm of shredded plastic. Nothing was left whole. Half a dozen of the monsters must be batting at his door—he could hear them, feel the impact in his bones—but ten times that many were tearing into his supplies and each other. A knot of thrashing shapes suddenly separated, leaving shreds of Hendrick’s self-inflating mattress.
The Skeeter shuddered once more before Hendrick got it into the air. Below him a circle of light expanded and dimmed. Somewhere out there, Boogie was being torn to pieces. “I’m sorry, boy,” he whispered. “You probably saved my life.”
The lights were only fogging his vision now. He turned them off. That wasn’t so good either. It was dark down there. By compass he tilted the Skeeter north, toward the Colony. Some of the darkness was in his eyes.
Dark; the moons were down, the land was hidden. His thoughts wandered. Should he have taken off? Could he have stayed on the ground with unseen monsters batting at the thin metal hull?
Things batted at the hull; the Skeeter rang with the blows, and Hendrick screamed. There was texture in the dark. He’d fallen asleep, or fainted. Vertical spokes were tearing the rotor apart, smacking at the cabin walls.
♦ChaptEr 27♦
salvage
It is much safer to obey than to rule.
—Thomas à Kempis
Déjà vu:
The Avalon horsemane trees were tall and narrow and absolutely vertical: trunks white as paper, with a fringe of dark green running like a stallion’s mane down the leeward side. Hendrick’s Skeeter had smashed sideways into a grove of them. The wreck had fallen into what seemed to be shallow water. The rotor blades were nowhere to be seen, and the tail was bent at a right angle.
Cadmann’s stomach soured, and something flipped in his mind, skewed dizzyingly . . .
He was back in Zambia, southwest of the Zambezi River, on chopper recon over broken brushland. Below him were parched earth and brown, stunted vegetation. The year’s drought had been harsh on the land, harsh on the people. This year, it was all too easy for the guerrillas to recruit starving tribesmen.
Thermal scan verified that the area was clear of enemy troops. The scans had greater range than the enemy’s light antiaircraft projectiles, and a LAP had brought down Sergeant Mguvi’s helicopter. Somewhere in the smoking mass of torn metal beneath him was one of the two finest men Colonel Weyland had ever had the honor to command . . .
That image was strong now, too strong. The rage it engendered was not far behind.
Cadmann brought his Skeeter down close to
the wreckage and played his searchlight beam over the trees and water.
Beside him, Carlos cursed in Spanish. His machine pistol spat crimson streams of tracers into the darkness. The streams chewed into the mass of mini-grendels as they swarmed around the Skeeter, feuding for a scrap of Hendrick. Little knots of grendels were fighting and eating each other; Carlos fired spurts at those.
“There must be thousands of them,” Carlos said hoarsely.
“Maybe a hundred, maybe two. Save your bullets. This is like spitting into the ocean.”
Carlos’s face twisted with loathing. “We can’t leave Hendrick like this. We’ve got to bring him back.”
Cadmann felt numb. “Dead or alive, we’ll bring him in. We have to salvage the Skeeter. But I don’t see any breaks in the cabin wall, and what are they fighting for if there’s no more Hendrick? He could be safe.”
“Why are they here if they don’t smell meat? There’s a breach. There must be.”
“Colonel, we can’t remain in the area. The intelligence people say there’s a hostile force moving in from the northwest. We’re not prepared to hold off an assault . . . ”
An ugly choice to make. The lives of six men were at stake. And it was already too late to do anything for the laconic, steadfast Mguvi.
So Colonel Weyland had left his friend in the singed brush, sealed in a crumpled tomb of steel and plastic. He had left a piece of himself there as well.
Not this time.
Cadmann swooped down once more, giving Carlos time to empty his clip. “Feel better? Then don’t waste any more ammo,” he said grimly. “Before this is over, we’re going to need every last cartridge.”
But if it really comes down to counting bullets, we’re dead, all of us.
Carlos did seem calmer as he slipped in another clip. “What next?”
“Pick up the wreck and carry it home.”
“Can we carry that much mass?”
“I’ll sue the socks off somebody’s descendants if we can’t. It was in the design specs. We’ve got the power. There are lift rings built into the Skeeters. On top. The hooks have to engage.”