“What do you want, Sandy?” he said, not hiding his annoyance. There was no reply. He turned to remind her that she should have kept away from the area, but there was nobody near him. A sudden heightening of his senses made the moisture-laden breeze cooler and the murmer of streams louder. He allowed the strap of his rifle to slip from his shoulder, transferring the weight of the weapon to his hand, and at the same time he scanned the vicinity, satisfying himself there were no places of concealment. A full minute dragged by while he held the defensive pose, but there was no movement except for the slow drift of downward-reaching fingers of mist.
Finally, with the clamour in his nerves gradually abating, he turned back to the camera and completed the task of setting it up. When he had finished he checked the operation of the hand-held remote controller and walked thoughtfully back to the shelter. One explanation for what had happened was that Sandy and he were more jumpy than they realized—walking the face of an alien world was a supremely unnatural experience; another was the possible presence of hallucinogens in the atmosphere. Official survey samplings had indicated a standard mixture of gases, but that did not exclude local or temporary variations. He decided to monitor the performance of his own sensory apparatus for a few hours before saying anything to Sandy.
As soon as he had rejoined her she triggered one of the autotherm trays and they ate their first meal on Hassan IV. Harben periodically checked the approach from the north with his binoculars, and between times tried to decide if he was perceiving his surroundings in a completely normal manner. There was no repetition of the delusion, but as he moved around the camp there were moments, always as he was relaxing his vigilance, when he got an unaccountable feeling he was in a party of three. The impressions were so vague and fleeting that they could have been a consequence of his edginess, and he learned to dismiss them. Sandy, dictating notes into a recorder, appeared to be untroubled.
Late in the afternoon Harben detected a movement in the folds of grey rock to the north, and he made ready with his main camera, snorting with excitement as he checked its settings. A few minutes later two animals which bore a superficial resemblance to antelope came through the pass, delicately picking their way over the broken ground. One was a doe, and even at a distance it was obvious she was soon to give birth.
Being careful to remain in cover, Harben filmed their progress. As the animals began to draw level with him he saw that what he had taken to be the doe’s tail was actually two spindly legs of her nascent fawn projecting from the vagina. His heart began a steady pounding as the animals reached the flat area where the petraforms lay in waiting. He pressed a button on his remote controller, setting the four automatic cameras in operation, and watched through his viewfinder as the quasi-gnu reached the deadly circles.
As though guided by a powerful instinct, they threaded a path through the danger zone—passing within a metre or so of the ill-defined perimeters—and continued southwards into the safety of the higher ground. Harben shut down his cameras, wondering if the disappointment he felt was being shared by the three immobile predators lurking below the surface. He turned to Sandy, who had been watching the animals through her own binoculars.
“Too bad,” he said. “Still, we couldn’t really expect to connect first time.”
She looked at him with sombre eyes. “Bernard, was the female giving birth?”
“She wasn’t far off it.”
“But that’s awful! Why don’t they stop and rest?”
Harben smiled at her concern, suddenly reminded of how little she knew about wildlife. “Animals like that, which stay alive through being able to run fast, usually keep on the move. Especially if they feel threatened. When she drops the fawn it’ll have maybe five minutes to learn to walk—then they’ll be on their way again.”
Sandy glanced about her and shivered. “I don’t like this place.”
“It’s the same on any Earth-type planet,” he told her. “You can see the same sort of thing back in Africa.”
“Well, I’m glad that one got away. It would have been too horrible if those monsters had caught the mother.”
It was not a good time for an argument, but Harben decided he should straighten out Sandy’s thinking before she actually witnessed a kill. “In nature there aren’t any monsters,” he said. “There aren’t any good guys or bad guys. Every creature is entitled to take its food, and it doesn’t matter whether that creature is a robin or a rocktopus.”
Sandy shook her head, lips compressed. “There’s no comparison between a robin and one of those . . . things.”
“They both have to eat.”
“But a robin is only a . . .”
“Not from a worm’s point of view.”
“I’m cold,” Sandy said, looking away from, him All at once she seemed absurdly small and defenceless, and he felt a pang of remorse over having allowed her to accompany him to a world which was so foreign in every way to her own milieu.
There were no more sightings that day, and as soon as it began to get dark Harben laid out the alarm cord in a large circle around the shelter. Sandy crawled into their artificial cave almost immediately, but Harben sat on the ground outside it for another hour, staring into the total blackness and listening to the complex, conflicting whispers of nearby streams. Once he developed a conviction that he was being watched, but none of the green-glowing needles on the alarm panel even trembled, and he concluded there was still some tension lingering in his nervous system.
When he moved in beside Sandy she moulded her body into his so that they fitted together as neatly as two spoons. The love-making they had planned earlier in the day would have relaxed Harben and made it easier for him to sleep, but—sensitive to her mood—he made no advances. He lay awake for a long time, enduring the stretched-out hours and waiting impatiently for the morning.
The return of daylight, the aromas of hot food and coffee, the purposeful domesticity of the morning chores—all combined to elevate Sandy’s spirits, and Harben felt a corresponding lift within himself. He moved around a lot, driving the stiffness from his limbs, and talked rather more than was necessary about their plans for the next few years. Sandy may have realized he was scheming to influence her attitude towards his work as a whole, and to the Hassan IV expedition, but there was no adverse reaction on her part. She even started a running joke based on the notion of treating the planet as a luxury resort in an article for a travel magazine.
Harben’s principal concern while this was going on was that during the night the cloud ceiling had descended almost to ground level. He kept a watchful eye on it as he ate and was relieved to find that the sandwich of clear air was—in response to the action of the invisible sun—gradually growing wider, revealing more and more of the high branches of trees. It gave him the sense of being at the bottom of a glass of aerated water which was steadily clarifying from the base upwards. As soon as the northern hill slopes beyond the pass had come into view he raised his binoculars and at once saw a small herd of quasi-gnu patiently filtering down through rocky obstacles.
“I think we’re in business,” he said, sliding his hand through the wrist-strap of his main camera. “Perhaps you should stay here.”
He doubled over and ran to a hummock from the lee of which he had a good view of the flat area and the sentient circles. A glance at the remote controller told him the automatic cameras on their vantage points were ready to function and, as a precaution against being forgetful in the forthcoming excitement, he switched them on early. He sensed Sandy taking up a position close behind him, but was too busy getting long shots of the approaching herd to speak to her. The quasi-gnu were emerging from the pass and their leaders were heading straight for the waiting circles.
Harben watched the entire scene in enlargement through his viewfinder as the herd of about twenty came level with him and began crossing what, for them, was the danger zone. Again, as though protected by an extra sense, the animals threaded tangential courses between circles. He was b
eginning to think none of them would make the fatal mistake when a large buck, which was being followed by a pregnant female, walked into the nearest circle. Harben’s mouth went dry as the creature, unaware of its peril, stepped over the depression marking the petraform’s eighth arm. It crossed the ring of stones which were not stones and, moving with a stately nonchalance, passed safely out the other side.
Harben’s disappointment was as sharp as a blow. Could the petraform be dead? Would he have to look for another site?
He tensed again as the doe followed her mate’s footsteps into the circle. There was an explosive flurry of movement in the entrance depression. A slim black tongue snapped upwards and, with an easily audible whipcrack, coiled around the legs of the partially-born fawn which protruded from the doe’s haunches. The doe screamed in terror and immediately came to a standstill.
I’m going to be rich, Harben exulted, as he jumped to his feet to improve his camera angle.
At the doe’s cry of pain and fear the rest of the herd, with the exception of her mate, bolted off to the south. Their hooves drummed briefly, then there was silence broken only by the plaintive bleating and snuffling of the captured animal.
The buck watched her, helplessly, from a safe distance as she shifted her feet, inching backwards as the leathery black arm of the petraform increased its tension, threatening to drag the fawn from her womb. Harben guessed she could have ejected it easily and made her escape, but that the maternal instinct in the species was too strong to permit the sacrifice of her young. And as he watched, keeping his camera trained on the struggle, the doe’s dilemma became more urgent—the petraform‘s other seven legs had begun to stir like giant snails. The living stones churned the wet soil as they closed in on the trapped animal.
“Bernard!” Sandy’s voice came from some distance behind Harben, and was followed by the sound of her footsteps as she ran towards him. On one level of his consciousness he was slightly surprised—he had been certain Sandy was close by him—but his attention was concentrated on the natural drama being enacted before him.
“Bernard!” Sandy arrived at his side, breathing heavily. “You’ve got to do something!”
“I’m doing it,” he said. “I’m not missing a thing.”
As the doe became aware of the arms closing in on her, elongating as they came, she gave a convulsive movement and the full length of her fawn’s forelegs came into view, followed by its head. Sandy gave a low sob and stepped past him, and from the corner of his eye he saw the metallic lustre of the rifle in her hands. He risked looking away from the viewfinder long enough to grasp the weapon, and used his superior strength to twist it out of her grasp.
“You’ve got to help her, Bernard.” Sandy beat ineffectually on his shoulder with her fists. “I’ll never forgive you if you don’t help her.”
“There’s no point.” He fended Sandy off, knowing that subsequent processing would eliminate the effects of camera movement. “This is the way nature intended the rocktopus to provide for itself. What you’re seeing now has happened billions of times before we got here, and it’ll happen billions of times after we’ve gone.”
“I don’t care,” Sandy pleaded. “Just this once . . .”
“Look at that, for God’s sake!” Harben shouted.
Through the viewfinder he saw the ground suddenly begin to open beneath the doe’s feet. The rocktopus was ready to feed. As the surface supporting her began to shift and dissolve, the doe’s courage failed her and she lurched towards safety. The fawn fell behind her and, on the instant of being born, disappeared into the waiting mouth. Freed of her constraint, the doe leaped effortlessly over the advancing arms of the petraform and galloped to the waiting buck. Both animals fled into the surrounding greyness and were lost to sight.
“I’ve got to have this.” Harben was only dimly aware of Sandy’s whimpering as he ran forward, past a tree, into the flat area to get a downward view into the predator’s maw. She kept beside him, pulling desperately at the rifle in his left hand.
He pushed her away, intending to continue running to the centre of the flat area, but his wrist was gripped with a force which brought him to a standstill with an arm-wrenching jolt. Sandy screamed his name with a new urgency. Harben swung round angrily and found he had been snared, anchored to the ground, by a thin black cord. He tugged at it disbelievingly and an identical cord sprang from another point and encircled his ankles. Within a second a dozen others, pulsing with eager life, had coiled themselves around his limbs, rendering him helpless. He looked about him in desperation and saw that Sandy was going to her knees amid a similar web of tendrils.
“The gun!” Her voice shrilled into the topmost registers. “Burn them off!”
As though her words had been understood by a mind other than his own, new cords wrenched the rifle out of his grip. Harben was barely aware of this—because all of the flat space surrounding the three stone circles had begun to writhe with black feelers which waved in the air like wind-blown grass. And then, as the ultimate horror, the trees and boulders forming the outer circle began to change shape, to move inwards. Even the surface of the dark pool humped upwards into a pseudopod of black jelly.
The shifting and loosening of the ground beneath his feet brought a total, though belated, understanding to Harben—the entire area was part of one huge, complex and hungry beast of prey.
He fell to his knees as the glistening cords increased their multiple tensions, and he felt the surface gently parting to receive him, yearning, beginning to exert suction. Sandy was almost hidden from view by skeins of black threads. A strange, sad humming filled the air.
Harben raised his gaze skywards as he gave vent to one last bellow of fear and despair, but the protest died in his throat as he saw something—something incredible—moving in the cloud ceiling above him.
There was a humanoid figure, unnaturally tall, difficult to focus on because it slanted in and out of visibility in a way which had nothing to do with obscuration by mist. It was sheathed in prismatic colours and carried glimmering artifacts. A tongue of blue-white incandescence stabbed downwards from it, a scream which Harben felt rather than heard vibrated through the vastness of the plasm beneath him, and suddenly he was free to move. The thickets of black tendrils had vanished into hidden pores.
He staggered to his feet, caught Sandy’s hand, and they half-ran, half-waded towards the safety of the firm ground beyond the circle of boulders and trees. As they passed a weirdly misshapen, but now immobile, tree Harben glanced back and glimpsed the rippling, polychromatic figure suspended among a swirl of vapours. He could not distinguish the eyes, but he knew the being was looking directly at him, into him, through him.
Know that you were wrong, my friend. The door to an intellectual furnace was opening, and its fire washed through Harben’s mind. I, too, am a recorder, but my experience far surpasses yours. Entropy demands that all living things shall die—but Life is counter-entropic, and that must apply in particular as well as in general. If you surrender the ability to sympathize with the individual, you will become isolated from Life itself . . .
There was a shifting of super-geometries, and the figure vanished.
By the time Harben had broken camp the arena in which they had almost died looked exactly as it had done before. The trees looked like ordinary trees, the boulders and pool were indistinguishable from natural features of the landscape, and in the centre the three stone circles were quiescent. A thin, steady drizzle was gradually erasing all signs of disturbance from the surface layer of soil.
The sedatives she had taken had quelled the trembling of Sandy’s limbs, but her face was pale and distracted as she looked at the deceptively peaceful scene. “Do you think,” she said, “that it’s all part of the same organism?”
“I doubt it,” Harben replied as he opened a valve to deflate the shelter. “I’d say the three in the middle have some kind of symbiotic relationship with the big brute.”
“I don’t see why it let
the herd pass on through, then went for us.”
“Neither do I—yet. It might be because it’s mineral-hungry and we carry so much metal. Look at the way the material of our suits perished in a matter of seconds.” Harben got to his feet as the shelter subsided. “Can you roll this up?”
Sandy nodded, and her troubled gaze steadied on his face. “Where are you going?”
“To pick up the automatic cameras.”
“But . . .”
“It’s all right, Sandy. I’ll be safe as long as I stay outside the circle.”
She approached him and took his hand in hers. “Are you going to take the film back with you?”
“You’re still in shock, little girl.” Harben laughed incredulously, withdrawing his hand. “That stuff is worth a fortune, especially if our visitor registered on it. Of course I’m taking it back.”
“But . . . don’t you remember what he said?”
“I’m not sure that he said anything, and what there was of it didn’t make too much sense to me.”
“He said we all have to die—but not for the benefit of an audience.”
“I told you it didn’t make sense.”
“It’s very simple, Bernard.” Sandy’s eyes were dulled with drugs, and yet were oddly intent. “When you point your camera at any creature you make it special. You enlist the sympathy of millions of viewers, and if our sympathy isn’t worth anything . . . what are we worth?”
“I’ve never had myself valued.”
Anticipations Page 6