Enoch worked the bolt again and the spent brass case glittered in the sun as he turned swiftly to face the other slope.
The toad-like things were closer now. They had been creeping in, but as he turned they stopped and squatted, staring mindlessly at him.
He reached a hand into his pocket and took out two cartridges, cramming them into the magazine to replace the shells he’d fired.
The bellowing down by the river had stopped, but now there was a honking sound that he could not place. Turning cautiously, he tried to locate what might be making it, but there was nothing to be seen. The honking sound seemed to be coming from the forest, but there was nothing moving.
In between the honking, he still could hear the buzzing and it seemed louder now. He glanced into the sky and the dots were larger and no longer in a line. They had formed into a circle and seemed to be spiraling downward, but they were still so high that he could not make out what kinds of things they were.
He glanced back toward the toad-like monsters and they were closer than they had been before. They had crept up again.
Enoch lifted the rifle and, before it reached his shoulder, pressed the trigger, shooting from the hip. The eye of one of the foremost of them exploded, like the splash a stone would make if thrown into water. The creature did not jump or flop. It simply settled down, flat upon the ground, as if someone had put his foot upon it and had exerted exactly force enough to squash it flat. It lay there, flat, a big round hole where the eye had been. The hole was filling with a thick and ropy yellow fluid that might have been the creature’s blood.
The others backed watchfully away, all the way off the hillock, and only stopped when they reached the grass edge.
The honking was closer and the buzzing louder. There could be no doubt that the honking was coming from the hills.
ENOCH SWUNG about and saw it, striding through the sky, coming down the ridge, stepping through the trees and honking dolefully. It was a round and black balloon that swelled and deflated with its honking. It jerked and swayed as it walked along, hung from the center of four stiff and spindly legs that arched above it to the joint that connected this upper portion of the leg arrangement with the downward-spraddling legs that raised it high above the forest. It was walking jerkily, lifting its legs high to clear the massive treetops before putting them down again. Each time it put down a foot, Enoch could hear the crunching of the branches and the crashing of the trees that it broke or brushed aside.
Enoch felt the skin along his spine trying to roll up his back like a window shade, and the bristling of the hair along the base of his skull, obeying some primordial instinct in its striving to raise itself erect into a fighting ruff.
But even as he stood there, almost stiff with fright, some part of his brain remembered that one shot he had fired. His fingers dug into his pocket for another cartridge to fill the magazine.
The buzzing was much louder and the pitch had changed; now it was approaching at tremendous speed.
Enoch jerked up his head. The dots no longer were circling in the sky, but were plunging down toward him, one behind the other.
He flicked a glance toward the balloon, honking and jerking on its stilt-like legs. It still was coming on, but the plunging dots were faster and would reach the hillock first.
He shifted the rifle forward, outstretched and ready to slap against his shoulder, and watched the falling creatures. They were dots no longer, but hideous streamlined bodies, each carrying a rapier that projected from its head. A bill of sorts, thought Enoch, for these things might be birds; but longer, thinner, larger, more deadly than any Earthly bird.
The buzzing changed into a scream and the scream kept mounting up the scale until it set the teeth on edge. Through it, like a metronome measuring a beat, came the hooting of the black balloon that strode across the hills.
Without knowing that he had moved his arms, Enoch had the rifle at his shoulder, waiting for that instant when the first of the plunging monsters was close enough to fire.
They dropped like stones out of the sky. They were bigger than he had thought they were—big and coming like arrows aimed directly at him.
The rifle thudded against his shoulder. The first one crumpled, lost its arrow shape, folding up and falling, no longer on its course. He worked the bolt and fired again; and the second one in line lost its balance and began to tumble—and the bolt was worked once more and the trigger pressed. The third skidded in the air and went off at a slant, limp and ragged, fluttering in the wind, falling toward the river.
The rest broke off their dive. They made a shallow turn and beat their way up into the sky, great wings like windmill vanes threshing desperately.
A SHADOW fell across the hillock and a mighty pillar came down from somewhere overhead, driving down to strike to one side of the hillock. The ground trembled at the tread, and the water that lay hidden by the grass squirted high into the air.
The honking blotted out all else and the great balloon was zooming down on him, cradled on the enormous legs.
Enoch saw the face, if anything so grotesque and so obscene could be called a face. There was a beak and beneath it a sucking mouth and a dozen or so other organs that might have been the eyes.
The legs were like inverted Vs, with the inner stroke somewhat shorter than the outer. And in the center of these inner joints hung the great balloon that was the body of the creature, with its face on the underside so that it could see all the hunting territory that might lie beneath it.
But now auxiliary joints in the outer span of legs were bending to let the body of the creature down so it could seize its prey.
Enoch was not conscious of putting up the rifle or of operating it, but it was hammering at his shoulder. It seemed to him that a second part of him stood off, apart, and watched the firing of the rifle—as if the figure that held and fired the weapon might be a second man.
Great gouts of flesh flew out of the black balloon. Jagged rents suddenly tore across it, and from these rents poured out a cloud of liquid that turned into a mist, with black droplets raining from it.
The firing pin clicked on an empty breech and the gun was empty, but there was no need of another shot.
The great legs were folding, trembling as they folded. The shrunken body shivered convulsively in the heavy mist that was pouring out of it. There was no hooting now. Enoch could hear the patter of the black drops falling from that cloud, as they struck the short grass on the hill.
There was a sickening odor. The drops where they fell on him were sticky, running like cold oil; and above him the great structure that had been the stilt-like creature was toppling to the ground.
Then the world faded swiftly and was no longer there.
Enoch stood in the oval room in the faint glow of the bulbs. There was the heavy smell of powder and all about his feet, glinting in the light, lay the spent and shining cases that had been kicked out of the gun.
He was back in the basement once again. The target shoot was over.
ENOCH LOWERED the rifle and drew in a slow and careful breath. It always was like this, he thought. As if it were necessary for him to ease himself, by slow degrees, back to this world after the season of unreality.
He knew that it would be illusion when he kicked on the switch that set into motion whatever was to happen, and he knew it had been illusion when it all had ended. But during the time that it was happening it was not illusion. It was as real and as substantial as if it all were true.
They had asked him, he remembered, when the station had been built, if he had a hobby if there was any sort of recreational facility they could build into the station for him. And he had said that he would like a rifle range, expecting no more than a shooting gallery with ducks moving on a chain or clay pipes rotating on a wheel. But that, of course, would have been too simple for the screwball architects who had designed, and the slap-happy crew of tentacled workmen who had built, the galactic way station.
At first they had not
been certain what he meant by a rifle range. He had to tell them how a rifle operated and for what it might be used. He had told them about hunting squirrels on sunny autumn mornings and shaking rabbits out of brushpiles with the first coming of the snow (although one did not use a rifle, but a shotgun, on the rabbits), about hunting coons of an autumn night, and waiting for the deer along the run that went down to the river. But he was dishonest. He did not tell them about that other use to which he’d put a rifle during four long years.
He’d told them (since they were easy folks to talk with) about his youthful dream of some day going on a hunt in Africa, although even as he told them he well aware of how unattainable it was.
But since that day he’d hunted (and been hunted by) beasts far stranger than anything that Africa could boast.
From what these beasts might have been patterned, if indeed they came from anywhere other than the imagination of those aliens who had set up the tapes which produced the target scene, he had no idea. There had so far, in the thousands of times that he had used the range, not been a duplication either in the scene nor in the beasts which rampaged about the scene. Although, perhaps, he thought, there might, somewhere, be an end of them, and then the whole sequence might start over and run its course once more. But it would make little difference now, for if the tapes should start rerunning there’d be but little chance of his recalling in any considerable detail those adventures he had lived so many years ago.
HE DID not understand the techniques or the principle which made possible this fantastic rifle range. Like many other things, he accepted it without the need of understanding. Although, some day, he thought, he might find the clue which in time would turn blind acceptance into understanding—not only of the range, but of many other equally wonderful things.
He had often wondered what the aliens might think about his fascination with the rifle range, with that primal force that drove a man to kill, not for the joy of killing so much as to negate a danger, to meet force with a greater and more skillful force, cunning with more cunning. Had he, he wondered, given his alien friends concern in their assessment of the human character by his preoccupation with the rifle? For the understanding of an alien, how could one draw a line between the killing of other forms of life and the killing of one’s own? Was there actually a difference that would stand up under logical examination between the sport of hunting and the sport of war? To an alien, perhaps, such a differentiation would be rather difficult, for in many cases the hunted animal would be more closely allied to the human hunter in its form and characteristics than would many of the aliens.
Was war an instinctive thing, for which each ordinary man was as much responsible as the policy makers and the so-called statesmen? It seemed impossible. Yet deep in every man was the combative instinct, the aggressive urge, the strange sense of competition—all of which spelled conflict of one kind or another if carried to its logical, inevitable conclusion.
He put the rifle underneath his arm and walked over to the panel. Sticking from a slot in the bottom of it was a piece of tape.
He pulled it out and puzzled out the symbols. They were not reassuring. He had not done so well.
He had missed that first shot he had fired at the charging worthing with the old man’s face, and back there somewhere, in that dimension of unreality, it and its companion were snarling over the tangled, torn mass of ribboned flesh and broken bone that had been Enoch Wallace.
XX
HE WENT back through the gallery, with its gifts stacked there as other gifts, in regular human establishments, might be stacked away in dry and dusty attics. It was, he thought, the packrat instinct that he had which had never let him bring himself to throw them away. Although, even if he could, it would have been impossible to throw any of this collection of stuff away. It would never do to put in the reach of other humans any single item which rested on the shelves.
The tape nagged at him, the little piece of tape which said that while he had made all his other shots, he had missed that first one back there on the hillock. It was not often that he missed. And his training had been for that very type of shooting—the you-never-know-what-will-happen-next, the totally unexpected, the kill-or-be-killed kind of shooting that thousands of expeditions into the target area had taught him. Perhaps he had not been as faithful in his practice lately as he should have been.
Near the end of the gallery he saw the black bulk of a trunk projecting from beneath the lower shelf, too big to fit comfortably beneath it, jammed against the wall, but with a foot or two of it still projecting out beyond the shelf.
He went on walking past it, then suddenly turned around. That trunk, he thought. That was the trunk which had belonged to the Hazer who had died upstairs. It was his legacy from that being whose stolen body would be brought back to its grave this evening.
He walked over to the shelving and leaned his rifle against the wall. Stooping, he pulled the trunk clear of its resting place.
Once before, prior to carrying it down the stairs and storing it here beneath the shelves, he had gone through its contents, but at the time he’d not been too interested. Now, suddenly, he felt an absorbing interest in what it might contain.
He lifted the lid carefully and tilted it back against the shelves.
Crouching above the open trunk, and without touching anything to start with, he tried to catalogue the upper layer of its contents.
THERE WAS a shimmering cloak, neatly folded. Perhaps it was some sort of ceremonial garment. Atop it lay a tiny bottle that was a blaze of reflected light, as if someone had taken a large diamond and hollowed it out to make a bottle of it. Beside the cloak lay a nest of balls, deep violet and dull, with no shine at all, looking for all the world like a bunch of table tennis balls that someone had cemented together to make a globe. But that was not the way it was, Enoch remembered; for that other time he had been entranced by them and had picked them up, to find that they were not cemented, but could be freely moved about, although never outside the context of their shape. One ball could not be broken from the mass, no matter how hard one might try, but would move about, as if buoyed in a fluid, among all the other balls. One could move any, or all, of the balls, but the mass remained the same.
A calculator of some sort, Enoch wondered? But that seemed only barely possible, for one ball was entirely like another; there was no way in which they could be identified. Or, at least, no way to identify them so far as concerned the human eye. Was it possible that identification might be possible to a Hazer’s eye? And if a calculator, what kind of a calculator? Mathematical? Or ethical? Or philosophical? Perhaps a sort of game—a game of solitaire?
Given time a man might finally get it figured out. But there was no time and no incentive at the moment to spend upon one particular item any great amount of time when there were hundreds of other items equally fantastic and incomprehensible. For while one puzzled over a single item, the edges of his mind would always wonder if he might not be spending time on the most insignificant of the entire lot.
He was a victim of museum fatigue, Enoch told himself, overwhelmed by the many pieces of the unknown scattered all about him.
He reached out a hand, not for the globe of balls, but for the shining bottle that lay atop the cloak. As he picked it up and brought it closer, he saw that there was a line of writing engraved upon the glass (or diamond?) of the bottle. Slowly he studied out the meaning of the writing.
THERE HAD been a time, long ago, when he had been able to read the Hazer language, if not fluently, at least well enough to get along. But he had not read it for some years now and he had lost a good deal of it and he stumbled haltingly from one symbol to another. Translated very freely, the inscription on the bottle read: To be taken when the first symptoms occur.
A bottle of medicine! To be taken when the first symptoms occur. The symptoms, perhaps, that had come so quickly and built up so rapidly that the owner of this bottle could make no move to reach it and so had died, falling f
rom the sofa.
Almost reverently, he put the bottle back in its place atop the cloak, fitting it back into the faint impression it had made from lying there.
So different from us in so many ways, thought Enoch, and then in other little ways so like us that it is frightening. For that bottle and the inscription on its face was an exact parallel of the prescription bottle from any corner drugstore.
Beside the globe of balls was a box, wood, with a simple clasp to hold it shut., He flipped back the lid and inside he saw the metallic sheen of the material the Hazers used as paper.
Carefully he lifted out the first sheet, and saw that it was a long strip of the material folded in accordion fashion. Underneath it were more strips, apparently, of the same material.
There was writing on it, faint and faded, and Enoch held it close to read it.
To my—friend: (although it was not friend. Blood brother, perhaps, or colleague. And the adjectives which preceded it were such as to escape his sense entirely.)
The writing was hard to read. It bore some resemblance to the formalized version of the language, but apparently bore the imprint of the writer’s personality, expressed in curlicues and flourishes which obscured the form. Enoch worked his way slowly down the paper, missing much of what was there, but picking up the sense of much that had been written.
The writer had been on a visit to some other planet. While there he had performed some sort of function (although exactly what was not entirely clear) which had to do with his approaching death.
ENOCH, STARTLED, went back over the phrase again. And while much of the rest of what was written was not clear, that part of it was. My approaching death, he had written, and there was no room for mistranslation. The words were clear.
The Complete Serials Page 97