“Het!” Mr. Terokaw’s voice came bellowing down the hall behind them. “Up in the air and look out for those children! They’re trying to get away. If you see them start to cross the road, knock ’em out. Kugus—after them! They may try to hide in the house.”
Then be yowled angrily, and his gun began making the thumping noises again. The humbugs were too small to harm people, but their sharp little teeth could hurt and they seemed to be using them now.
“In here,” Auris whispered, opening a door. Ilf ducked into the room with her, and she closed the door softly behind them. Ilf looked at her, his heart pounding wildly.
Auris nodded at the barred window. “Through there! Run and hide in the grove. I’ll be right behind you . . .”
“Auris! Ilf!” Uncle Kugus called in the hall. “Wait—don’t be afraid. Where are you?” His voice still seemed to be smiling. Ilf heard his footsteps hurrying along the hall as he squirmed quickly sideways between two of the thick wooden bars over the window, dropped to the ground. He turned, darted off towards the nearest bushes.
He heard Auris gabble something to the humbugs again, high and shrill, looked back as he reached the bushes and saw her already outside, running towards the shrubbery on his right. There was a shout from the window. Uncle Kugus was peering out from behind the bars, pointing a gun at Auris. He fired. Auris swerved to the side, was gone among the shrubs. Ilf didn’t think she had been.
“They’re outside!” Uncle Kugus yelled. He was too big to get through the bars himself.
Mr. Terokaw and Mr. Bliman were also shouting within the house. Uncle Kugus turned around, disappeared from the window.
“Auris!” Ilf called, his voice shaking with fright.
“Run and hide, Ilf!” Auris seemed to be on the far side of the shrubbery, deeper in the Queen Grove.
Ilf hesitated, started running along the path that led to Sam’s sleeping pit, glancing up at the open patches of sky among the treetops. He didn’t see the aircar with the man Het in it. Het would be circling around the Queen Grove now, waiting for the other men to chase them into sight so he could knock them out with something. But they could hide inside Sam’s shell and Sam would get them across the road. “Auris, where are you?” Ilf cried.
Her voice came low and clear from behind him. “Run and hide, Ilf!”
Ilf looked back. Auris wasn’t there but the two humbugs were loping up the path a dozen feet away. They darted past Ilf without stopping, disappeared around the turn ahead. He could hear the three men yelling for him and Auris to come back. They were outside, looking around for them now, and they seemed to be coming closer.
Ilf ran on, reached Sam’s sleeping place. Sam lay there unmoving, like a great mossy boulder filling the pit. Ilf picked up a stone and pounded on the front part of the shell.
“Wake up!” he said desperately. “Sam, wake up!”
Sam didn’t stir. And the men were getting closer. Ilf looked this way and that, trying to decide what to do.
“Don’t let them see you,” Auris called suddenly.
“That was the girl over there,” Mr. Terokaw’s voice shouted. “Go after her, Bliman!”
“Auris, watch out!” Ilf screamed, terrified.
“Aha! And here’s the boy, Kugus. This way! Het,” Mr. Terokaw yelled triumphantly, “come down and help us catch them! We’ve got them spotted . . .”
Ilf dropped to hands and knees, crawled away quickly under the branches of the blue flower thicket and waited, crouched low. He heard Mr. Terokaw crashing through the bushes towards him and Mr. Bliman braying, “Hurry up, Het! Hurry up!” Then he heard something else. It was the sound the giant greenweb sometimes made to trick a flock of silverbells into fluttering straight towards it, a deep drone which suddenly seemed to be pouring down from the trees and rising up from the ground.
Ilf shook his head dizzily. The drone faded, grew up again. For a moment, he thought he heard his own voice call “Auris, where are you?” from the other side of the blue flower thicket. Mr. Terokaw veered off in that direction, yelling something to Mr. Bliman and Kugus. Ilf backed farther away through the thicket, came out on the other side, climbed to his feet and turned.
He stopped. For a stretch of twenty feet ahead of him, the forest floor was moving, shifting and churning with a slow, circular motion, turning lumps of deep brown mold over and over.
Mr. Terokaw came panting into Sam’s sleeping place, red-faced, glaring about, the blue and silver gun in his hand. He shook his head to clear the resonance of the humming air from his brain. He saw a huge, moss-covered boulder tilted at a slant away from him but no sign of Ilf.
Then something shook the branches of the thicket behind the boulder. “Auris!” Ilf’s frightened voice called.
Mr. Terokaw ran around the boulder, leveling the gun. The droning in the air suddenly swelled to a roar. Two big gray, three-fingered hands came out from the boulder on either side of Mr. Terokaw and picked him up.
“Awk!” he gasped, then dropped the gun as the hands folded him, once, twice, and lifted him towards Sam’s descending head. Sam opened his large mouth, closed it, swallowed. His neck and head drew back under his shell and he settled slowly into the sleeping pit again.
The greenweb’s roar ebbed and rose continuously now, like a thousand harps being struck together in a bewildering, quickening beat. Human voices danced and swirled through the din, crying, wailing, screeching. Ilf stood at the edge of the twenty-foot circle of churning earth outside the blue flower thicket, half stunned by it all. He heard Mr. Terokaw bellow to Mr. Bliman to go after Auris, and Mr. Bliman squalling to Het to hurry. He heard his own voice nearby call Auris frantically and then Mr. Terokaw’s triumphant yell: “This way! Here’s the boy, Kugus!”
Uncle Kugus bounded out of some bushes thirty feet away, eyes staring, mouth stretched in a wide grin. He saw Ilf, shouted excitedly and ran towards him. Ilf watched, suddenly unable to move. Uncle Kugus took four long steps out over the shifting loam between them, sank ankle-deep, knee-deep. Then the brown earth leaped in cascades about him, and he went sliding straight down into it as if it were water, still grinning, and disappeared. In the distance, Mr. Terokaw roared, “This way!” and Mr. Bliman yelled to Het to hurry up. A loud, slapping sound came from the direction of the stump of the Grandfather Slurp. It was followed by a great commotion in the bushes around there; but that only lasted a moment. Then, a few seconds later, the greenweb’s drone rose and thinned to the wild shriek it made when it had caught something big and faded slowly away . . .
Ilf came walking shakily through the opening in the thickets to Sam’s sleeping place. His head still seemed to hum inside with the greenweb’s drone but the Queen Grove was quiet again; no voices called anywhere. Sam was settled into his pit. Ilf saw something gleam on the ground near the front end of the pit. He went over and looked at it, then at the big, moss-grown dome of Sam’s shell.
“Oh, Sam,” he whispered, “I’m not sure we should have done it . . .”
Sam didn’t stir. Ilf picked up Mr. Terokaw’s blue and silver gun gingerly by the barrel and went off with it to look for Auris. He found her at the edge of the grove, watching Het’s aircar on the other side of the road. The aircar was turned on its side and about a third of it was sunk in the ground. At work around and below it was the biggest member of the clean-up squad Ilf had ever seen in action.
They went up to the side of the road together and looked on while the aircar continued to shudder and turn and sink deeper into the earth. Ilf suddenly remembered the gun he was holding and threw it over on the ground next to the aircar. It was swallowed up instantly there. Tumbleweeds came rolling up to join them and clustered around the edge of the circle, waiting. With a final jerk, the aircar disappeared. The disturbed section of earth began to smooth over. The tumbleweeds moved out into it.
There was a soft whistling in the air, and from a Queen Tree at the edge of the grove a hundred and fifty feet away, a diamondwood seedling came lancing down, stru
ck at a slant into the center of the circle where the aircar had vanished, stood trembling a moment, then straightened up. The tumbleweeds nearest it moved respectfully aside to give it room. The seedling shuddered and unfolded its first five-fingered cluster of silver-green leaves. Then it stood still.
Ilf looked over at Auris. “Auris,” he said, “should we have done it?”
Auris was silent a moment.
“Nobody did anything,” she said then. “They’ve just gone away again.” She took Ilf’s hand. “Let’s go back to the house and wait for Riquol and Meldy to wake up.”
The organism that was the diamondwood forest grew quiet again. The quiet spread back to its central mind unit in the Queen Grove, and the unit began to relax towards somnolence. A crisis had been passed—perhaps the last of the many it had foreseen when human beings first arrived on the world of Wrake.
The only defense against Man was Man. Understanding that, it had laid its plans. On a world now owned by Man, it adopted Man, brought him into its ecology, and its ecology into a new and again successful balance.
This had been a final flurry. A dangerous attack by dangerous humans. But the period of danger was nearly over, would soon be for good a thing of the past.
It had planned well, the central mind unit told itself drowsily. But now, since there was no further need to think today, it would stop thinking . . .”
Sam the mossback fell gratefully asleep.
GOBLIN NIGHT
One of the most interesting points Schmitz makes in this one is, I think, that Nature can produce killers—but it takes Man to produce the ultra-super in the way of killers!
There was a quivering of psi force. Then a sudden, vivid sense of running and hiding, in horrible fear of a pursuer from whom there was no escape—
Telzey’s breath caught in her throat. A psi screen had flicked into instant existence about her mind, blocking out incoming impulses. The mental picture, the feeling of pursuit, already was gone, had touched her only a moment; but she stayed motionless seconds longer, eyes shut, pulses hammering out a roll of primitive alarms. She’d been dozing uneasily for the past hour, aware in a vague way of the mind-traces of a multitude of wildlife activities in the miles of parkland around. And perhaps she’d simply fallen asleep, begun to dream . . .
Perhaps, she thought—but it wasn’t very likely. She hadn’t been relaxed enough to be touching the fringes of sleep and dream-stuff. The probability was that, for an instant, she’d picked up the reflection of a real event, that somebody not very far from here had encountered death in some grisly form at that moment.
She hesitated, then thinned the blocking screen to let her awareness spread again through the area, simultaneously extended a quick, probing thread of thought with a memory-replica of the pattern she’d caught. If it touched the mind that had produced the pattern originally, it might bring a momentary flash of echoing details and further information . . . assuming the mind was still alive, still capable of responding.
She didn’t really believe it would still be alive. The impression she’d had in that instant was that death was only seconds away.
The general murmur of mind-noise began to grow up about her again, a varying pulse of life and psi energies, diminishing gradually with distance, arising from her companions, from animals on plain and mountain, with an undernote of the dimmer emanations of plants. But no suggestion came now of the vividly disturbing sensations of a moment ago.
Telzey opened her eyes, glanced around at the others sitting about the camp fire in the mouth of Cil Chasm. There were eleven of them, a group of third and fourth year students of Pehanron College who had decided to spend the fall holidays in Melna Park. The oldest was twenty-two; she herself was the youngest—Telzey Amberdon, age fifteen. There was also a huge white dog named Chomir, not in view at the moment, the property of one of her friends who had preferred to go on a spacecruise with a very special date over the holidays. Chomir would have been a little in the way in an IP cruiser, so Telzey had brought him along to the park instead.
In the early part of the evening, they had built their fire where the great Cil canyon opened on the rolling plain below. The canyon walls rose to either side of the camp, smothered with evergreen growth; and the Cil River, a quick, nervous stream, spilled over a series of rocky ledges a hundred feet away. The boys had set up a translucent green tent canopy, and sleeping bags were arranged beneath it. But Gikkes and two of the other girls already had announced that when they got ready to sleep, they were going to take up one of the aircars and settle down in it for the night a good thirty feet above the ground.
The park rangers had assured them such measures weren’t necessary. Melna Park was full of Orado’s native wildlife—that, after all, was why it had been established—but none of the animals were at all likely to become aggressive towards visitors. As for human marauders, the park was safer than the planet’s cities. Overflights weren’t permitted; visitors came in at ground level through one of the various entrance stations where their aircars were equipped with sealed engine locks, limiting them to contour altitudes of a hundred and fifty feet and to a speed of thirty miles an hour. Only the rangers’ cars were not restricted, and only the rangers carried weapons.
It made Melna Park sound like an oasis of sylvan tranquility. But as it turned towards evening, the stars of the great cluster about Orado brightened to awesomely burning splendor in the sky. Some of them, like Gikkes, weren’t used to the starblaze, had rarely spent a night outside the cities where night-screens came on gradually at the end of the day to meet the old racial preference for a dark sleep period.
Here night remained at an uncertain twilight stage until a wind began moaning up in the canyon and black storm clouds started to drift over the mountains and out across the plain. Now there were quick shifts between twilight and darkness, and eyes began to wander uneasily. There was the restless chatter of the river nearby. The wind made odd sounds in the canyon; they could hear sudden cracklings in bushes and trees, occasional animal voices.
“You get the feeling,” Gikkes remarked, twisting her neck around to stare up Cil Chasm, “that something like a lullbear or spook might come trotting out of there any minute!”
Some of the others laughed uncertainly. Valia said, “Don’t be silly! There haven’t been animals like that in Melna Park for fifty years.” She looked over at the group about Telzey. “Isn’t that right, Pollard?”
Pollard was the oldest boy here. He was majoring in biology, which might make him Valia’s authority on the subject of lullbears and spooks. He nodded, said, “You can still find them in the bigger game preserves up north. But naturally they don’t keep anything in public parks that makes a practice of chewing up the public. Anything you meet around here, Gikkes, will be as ready to run from you as you are from it.”
“That’s saying a lot!” Rish added cheerfully. The others laughed again, and Gikkes looked annoyed.
Telzey had been giving only part of her attention to the talk. She felt shut down, temporarily detached from her companions. It had taken all afternoon to come across the wooded plains from the entrance station, winding slowly above the rolling ground in the three aircars which had brought them here. Then, after they reached Cil Chasm where they intended to stay, she and Rish and Dunker, two charter members of her personal fan club at Pehanron, had spent an hour fishing along the little river, up into the canyon and back down again. They had a great deal of excitement and caught enough to provide supper for everyone; but it involved arduous scrambling over slippery rocks, wading in cold, rushing water and occasional tumbles, in one of which Telzey knocked her wrist-talker out of commission for the duration of the trip.
Drowsiness wasn’t surprising after all the exercise. The surprising part was that, in spite of it, she didn’t seem able to relax completely.
As a rule, she felt at home wherever she happened to be outdoors. But something about this place was beginning to bother her. She hadn’t noticed it at first, she h
ad laughed at Gikkes with the others when Gikkes began to express apprehensions. But when she settled down after supper, feeling a comfortable muscular fatigue begin to claim her, she grew aware of a vague disturbance. The atmosphere of Melna Park seemed to change slowly. A hint of cruelty and savagery crept into it, of hidden terrors. Mentally, Telzey felt herself glancing over her shoulder towards dark places under the trees, as if something like a lullbear or spook actually was lurking there.
And then, in that uneasy, half-awake condition, there suddenly had been this other thing, like a dream-flash in which somebody desperately ran and hid from a mocking pursuer. To the terrified human quarry, the pursuer appeared as a glimpsed animalic shape in the twilight, big and moving swiftly, but showing no other details.
And there had been the dickering of psi energy about the scene . . .
Telzey shifted uncomfortably, running her tongue tip over her lips. The experience had been chillingly vivid; but if something of the sort really had occurred, the victim had died moments later. In that respect, there was no reason to force herself to quick decisions now. And it might, after all, have been a dream, drifting up in her mind, created by the mood of the place. She realized she would like to believe it was a dream.
But in that case, what was creating the mood of the place?
Gikkes? It wasn’t impossible. She had decided some time ago that personal acquaintances should be off limits to telepathic prowling, but when someone was around at all frequently, scraps of information were likely to filter through. So she knew Gikkes also had much more extensively developed telepathic awareness than the average person. Gikkes didn’t know it and couldn’t have put it to use anyway. In her, it was an erratic, unreliable quality which might have kept her in a badly confused state of mind if she had been more conscious of its effects.
But the general uneasiness Telzey had sensed and that brief psi surge—if that was what it was—fragmentary but carrying a complete horrid little story with it, could have come to her from Gikkes. Most people, even when they thought they were wide awake, appeared to be manufacturing dreams much of the time in an area of their minds they didn’t know about; and Gikkes seemed nervous enough this evening to be manufacturing unconscious nightmares and broadcasting them.
Complete Short Fiction (Jerry eBooks) Page 155