He could hear the loose part rattle around; and then it gave a hard click, as though it had settled into its final position.
Quintero picked himself up and massaged his neck with both hands. Had he been subject to a hallucination? Or had he seen something secret and magical that perhaps a few people knew about and used to maintain their financial positions—one more of the concealed and incredible things that people do?
He didn’t know the answer, but he knew that he had to witness at least one more of those visions. He stood on his head again and looked through the binoculars.
Yes, he could see! He was looking into a dreary furnished room. Within that room he saw a thin, potbellied man in his thirties, stripped to the waist, standing on his head with his stockinged feet pressed against the wall, looking upside down into a pair of binoculars that lay on the floor and were aimed at a wall.
It took him a moment to realize that the binoculars were showing him himself.
He sat down on the floor, suddenly frightened. For he realized that he was only another performer in humanity’s great circus, and he had just done one of his acts, just like the others. But who was watching? Who was the real observer?
He turned the binoculars around and looked through the object-lenses. He saw a pair of eyes, and he thought they were his own—until one of them slowly winked at him.
BOB SHAW
Amphitheatre
The retro-thrusters were unpleasantly fierce in operation, setting up vibrations which Bernard Harben could feel in his chest cavity.
He had little knowledge of engineering, but he could sense the stress patterns racing through the structure of the shuttle craft, deflecting components and taking them close to their design limits. In his experience, all machines—especially his cameras—gave of their best when treated with the utmost gentleness, and he wondered briefly how the shuttle pilot could bear to subject his craft to such punishment. Every man to his trade, he thought, for the moment incapable of originality, and as if to reward him for his faith the precisely timed burst of power came to an abrupt end. The shuttle was falling freely, in sweet silence.
Harben looked upwards through the crystal canopy and saw the triple cylinder of the mother ship, the Somerset, dwindling to a bright speck as it slid ahead on its own orbit. The shuttle was brilliantly illuminated from above by the sun, and from below by the endless pearl-white expanses of the alien planet, which meant that every detail of it stood out with a kind of phosphorescent clarity against the background of space. Up at the front end the pilot was almost hidden by the massive back of his G-seat. He sat without moving, yet controlling their flight. Harben felt an ungrudging admiration for his skill, and for the audacity which enabled him to drive a splinter of metal and plastics down through the all-enveloping cloud layers to a predestined point on an unknown world.
At that moment Harben felt a rare pride in his humanity. He turned to Sandy Kiro, who was in the seat next to him, and placed his hand over hers. She continued to stare straight ahead, but the fullness of her lips altered a little and he knew she shared his mood.
“Let’s claim this planet tonight,” he said, referring to a secret game in which love-making established their title to any place in which it occurred.
Her pale lips parted slightly, giving him the answer he wanted, and he relaxed back into his own seat. In a few minutes the silence of their descent was replaced by a thin, insistent whistle as they penetrated the uppermost layers of the stratosphere, and the ship began to stir in response. Presently its movements became more assertive, more violent, and when he looked up front Harben saw the pilot had abandoned his Godlike immobility and was toiling like any other mortal. Quite abruptly, they were surrounded by greyness and the space shuttle had become an aircraft contending with wind, cloud and ice. Their pilot, his stature reduced in proportion, might have been a twentieth-century aviator trying for a touchdown in an unpredicted storm.
Sandy, unaccustomed to blind planetfalls, turned anxiously to Harben.
He smiled and pointed at his chronometer. “It’s almost time for lunch. We’ll eat as soon as we set up camp.”
His apparent preoccupation with domestic routine seemed to reassure her, and she settled back with a tentative preening of her shoulders. Again his trust in the pilot was justified. The ship broke through the cloud cover and steadied in its course as a grey-green landscape materialized below—ranges of hills, terraces and ramparts formed by broken strata, dark vegetation, and a pewter filigree of small rivers. Harben assessed the view with professional speed, took a panoramic camera from his breast pocket and recorded the rest of their descent. In a surprisingly short time the pilot had grounded the shuttle amid a turmoil of vertical jets, and the three of them were outside and testing their Northampton-made boots against wafers of alien shale.
“That’s the Bureau’s radio beacon,” the pilot said, pointing at a squat, yellow pyramid which clung like a limpet to the rocky surface a hundred metres away. He was a competent-looking boy with fine gold hair and a bored manner which, in view of his extreme youth, Harben thought to have been cultivated.
“You dropped square on to it, didn’t you?” Harben said, testing his theory. “Nice flying.”
The pilot looked gratified for an instant, then got back into his vocational stride. “It’s ten minutes off local noon. The shuttle will be back here at noon six days from now—that’s giving you ten minutes more than the charter called for.”
“Generous.”
“We’re like that, Mr Harben.” The boy went on to explain the cost penalties involved if they failed to rendezvous promptly, and to check that their chronometers were properly set to cope with Hassan IV’s day of almost thirty hours.
“The shuttle will be here on time,” he concluded. “You can be assured of that—though I don’t know if I’ll be the pilot.”
“Oh, I hope it is you,” Sandy said, joining in Harben’s game. “I was really impressed. David, isn’t it?”
“That’s right.” The pilot was unable to hold back a wide smile. “I have to go now. Good hunting!”
“Thank you, David.” They picked up their field packs, retired to a safe distance and watched the shuttle rise vertically for a few metres before vectoring its thrust and swooping upwards into the clouds. It was lost to view long before the irregular, surging echoes from its jets had subsided, but it was not until the final whisper had faded—dissolving their perceptual link with the rest of mankind—that Harben became fully aware of the planet on which he was standing.
Visibility was surprisingly good, considering the amount of moisture in the air, and he could see complex perspectives of grey hills, inter-locking wedges of vegetation, and bodies of water which were leaden, black or soft-glowing silver depending on the direction of the light. The temperature was in the region of ten degrees and a breeze was blowing steadily from the east, laden with ozone and the smell of mosses and wet rock. There were no birds, nor any immediately visible signs of animal life—though Harben knew the area was the haunt of one very special creature, the one whose killing technique he had been commissioned to film.
“What a nice boy,” Sandy said lightly.
“He’s gone,” Harben reminded her, gently making the point that it would be best to put the ways of Earth behind them and concentrate on successfully interacting with the new environment. Their marriage covenant had only two months to run and, although he had repeatedly sworn to her that he intended to renew, he suspected she did not fully believe him and had come along on the current expedition with some idea of cementing a bond. He would have been pleased had it not been for the fact that a previous team had disappeared without a trace while filming E.T. Cephalopodus subterr. petraform. His attempts to pursuade her not to come had been resisted on grounds he believed were emotional rather than logical, and in the end he had assented on condition that she bore a full working load, both mental and physical.
“Let’s go,” Harben said. “With any luck we’ll find a
good site in less than an hour, then we can eat.”
Sandy shouldered her pack willingly and they set off in a direction which was virtually due north by their compasses. Harben could actually see the point he was aiming for—a notch in an east-west rampart about eight kilometres away—but he made a careful note of the bearing so that they could return in the foggy conditions which were common throughout the region. In keeping with the agreement that Sandy was not to be sheltered in any way, he insisted that they carry their energy guns at the ready—hers set for a slightly divergent beam which would compensate for any lack of expertise, his own adjusted for maximum convergence at five hundred metres. There was no evidence to suggest that the Visex team of two years earlier had encountered a fate more sinister than, say, falling into one of the numerous underground rivers, but Harben had agreed with his employers that they should take as few chances as possible.
Sandy and he continued north, zigzagging on tilted platforms of sedimentary rock, and gradually reached a softer terrain where the tricky shale gave way to a blackish sand in which thrived shrubs and ground-hugging creepers. In some places the surface was infested with saltatorial insects which leaped from underfoot with audible pops, causing Sandy to flinch away from them. Harben assured her their metallized field suits were proof against much larger creatures, and after a short time she began to take his word for it. She was a travel journalist whose previous experience had been on resort worlds, and he was relieved to see how quickly she adapted to Hassan IV.
Presently they drew near the natural gateway to the north and, as he had hoped, Harben found signs of E.T. Alcelaphini, the gnu-like animals which were the principal prey of petraform. The tracks fanned outwards from the notch in the encircling cliffs and dispersed into the rocky table-land from which Harben and Sandy had just emerged.
“This is good,” Harben said. “I think we’re on a main migration route to the south.”
Sandy glanced around her. “Shouldn’t we have seen some of them?”
“No—that’s the whole point. The females slow down a lot when they’re getting ready to drop their young, and they and their mates become super-cautious. That could be why our friend petraform evolved the way he did.”
An expression of distaste appeared briefly on Sandy’s classically feminine features. “Don’t refer to those things as our friends, please.”
“But they’re going to bring us a lot of money,” Harben protested, smiling. “And that’s the second friendliest thing anybody can do for you.”
“They’re horrible.”
“Nothing in nature is horrible.” Harben raised his compact binoculars and felt a pang of excitement as he scanned the flat ground immediately south of the pass. The angles were too acute for good observation, and his view was obstructed by boulders and vegetation, but he thought he could see no less than three horseshoe formations of grey rocks. They were like miniature and incomplete versions of terrestrial Druid circles, each about five metres in diameter. Harben’s pleasure mounted as he counted the stones and confirmed that there were seven in each circle. Most significant of all was the fact that in each case the gap, where the eighth stone should have been, faced due north—in the direction from which the quasi-gnu came every spring in search of the lush pastures needed by their young.
“In fact, everything in God’s garden is lovely,” Harben said.
“What do you mean?”
“I think we’ve hit the jackpot first time. Let’s go—I’m hungry.”
As they approached the circles Harben discovered that the site was even better for his purpose than he had at first supposed. He had four automatic cameras in his pack and right away could see vantage points in the shape of trees and boulders where they could all be hidden and serviced. There was even a small, wind-hewn monolith just to the north of the group of circles which would enable him to get high-angle shots to improve the visual texture of the completed film. He became so absorbed in plotting camera locations that his attention wandered from Sandy and it was only when he noticed she was unconcernedly walking straight ahead that he became alive to the danger.
“Sandy!” He touched her arm. “Where do you think you’re going?”
She froze, sensing the warning in his voice. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing—but stay here with me.” He waited until she had positioned herself slightly behind him, then pointed out the three circles. “Those are what we’ve come to film.”
She stared at the flat ground, uncomprehending, for almost a minute before—guided by his gyrating index finger—she picked out the loose patterns among the natural scatter of rocks. Her pallor grew more pronounced, but he was glad to see that she held her ground without flinching.
“I thought they’d look more like spiders,” she said. “Or octopuses.”
He shook his head. “If they looked like anything but ordinary rock formations they’d starve to death. Their whole survival plan depends on suitable prey walking straight into their arms.”
“Then . . . those rocks aren’t real.”
“No. They’re arms in which most of the power of movement has been traded off against the ability to stimulate stone. I suspect you could even tap them with a hammer and not know any difference—as long as you were standing outside the circle.”
“What would happen if you were inside it?”
“The eighth arm would probably get you.” Harben continued the impromptu lesson in extra-terrestrial zoology by pointing out the shallow depression at the “entrance” to each circle. It was there, under a camouflage of pebbles and grass, that the whip-like eighth arm was coiled in readiness to snap itself around any creature unwary enough to enter the circle.
Sandy was quiet for a moment. “What happens then?”
“That’s what we’re here to check out and put on film,” Harben said. “Petraform seems to have the same body plan as an ordinary cephalopod, which means the mouth is in the centre of the circle, but we don’t know how long the processes of killing and ingestion actually take. For all we know, when it gets hold of an animal it simply waits until the beast has died of fright or starvation, and then absorbs it.” Harben paused for breath, his eyes still assessing the photographic potentialities and limitations of the scene.
“You know, Sandy, this is the big one I’ve been looking for—the one that’ll set me up for life. I can see it going out on every TV network there is.”
“I’d like a hot drink now,” Sandy said. “Can we put up the shelter?”
“Sure.” Harben led the way to a suitable spot, spread out the shelter’s base sheet and triggered a built-in gas cartridge to erect the pliant hemispherical roof. He was an exceptionally tall man, with a long back and slightly stiff limbs which did not readily fold into cramped spaces, but he was undisturbed by the prospect of six nights in the tiny inflatable. The rewards promised to be so great that his next field trip, assuming he chose to go out again, would be made in ostentatious luxury. He took twelve flat autotherm trays—guarantee of two hot meals a day—and handed them to Sandy, who stacked them in the shelter with her own supplies. While she was heating cans of coffee he moved off to an appropriate distance and manually dug a latrine, an ancient procedure still in favour because of its superb cost-effectiveness.
He was folding up the lightweight spade when a wisp of sound reached him. With a tingling sense of shock he realized that Sandy, who was a good fifty metres away from him, was speaking to someone in normal conversational tones. Harben ran a short way towards her, then stopped as he saw that—as had to be the case—she was completely alone. She was kneeling with her back to him, apparently opening the coffee cans.
“Sandy,” he shouted, not sure of why he was alarmed, “are you all right?”
She turned and he saw the look of surprise on her face. “Bernard? What are you doing over there? I thought you were . . .” Sandy stood up, looked all round her and began to laugh.
He crossed the intervening space and accepted a coffee. “Most
people take years of this sort of life before they go crazy.”
“I thought you were right behind me.” She sipped her drink, somehow managing to look feminine, even fashionable, in the silver-grey quilting of a field suit, and her eyes steadied on the flat space dominated by the stone circles. “Bernard, why are there no animal bones over there?”
“They get eaten. If they were left sitting about they might scare off other prey, but it’s most likely that they get absorbed for the mineral content. Hassan IV has some funny gaps in its geochemistry, especially where metals are concerned.”
“What a place!”
“All part of nature’s rich tapestry, lover.” Harben finished his coffee, appreciating its warmth, and put the can down. “I’m going to set up the auto-cameras in case there’s some action soon.”
“I’ll stay here and put some notes together for an article.” Sandy gave him a wry smile. “I might as well make some money too.’
Harben nodded. “I’d want you to stay here anyway. It’s best to leave as little spoor and scent as possible around the place.”
He took the four automatic cameras from his pack, slung the rifle on to his shoulder and walked towards the circles. The cloud ceiling had come down low enough to hide the tops of the tallest trees, but close to the ground the air had the clarity of glass. He kept his gaze fixed on the innocuous-looking rock formations, wondering if the bizarre creatures waiting below ground could feel the vibrations of his footsteps and were preparing themselves in anticipation of his walking into a trap. Tough lucky rocktopus, he thought. Tm not going to feed you—you’re going to feed me.
There were two trees conveniently positioned on each side of the subject area, and he clamped cameras to their trunks, checking the coverage they provided as he did so. The small monolith to the north was easy to climb by the outer face and he installed a third camera on top of it. Two largish boulders were available on the south side as camera mounts. He chose one which was beside a deep-looking pool, hoping that some of the quasi-gnu would be attracted towards the water, thus providing extra film sequences he could use. An advantage of the holofilm system he employed was that it had unlimited depth of focus and a very wide recording angle, which meant that long shots, close-ups, panoramas and framed sequences could be prepared afterwards, at will, through selective processing of one roll of film. Harben was leaning on the boulder and smoothing out the plastic dough of a mounting pad when he became aware of Sandy standing behind him.
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