A few minutes later he looked down from the top of a ridge and saw a gleaming metal sphere resting silently on the grass, dripping with cold dew from the night. The Time Car; sliding and running, he leaped down the hill toward it.
He was just pushing the door open with his shoulder when the first cloud of butterflies appeared at the top of the hill, moving quietly toward him.
He locked the door and set his armload down, flexing his muscles. His hand ached, burning now with an intense pain. He had no time for that—He hurried to the window and peered out. The butterflies were swarming toward the sphere, darting and dancing above him, flashing with color. They began to settle down onto the metal, even onto the window. Abruptly, his gaze was cut off by gleaming bodies, soft and pulpy, their beating wings mashed together. He listened. He could hear them, a muffled, echoing sound that came from all sides of him. The interior of the sphere dimmed into darkness as the butterflies sealed off the window. He lit the artificial lights.
Time passed. He examined the newspapers, uncertain of what to do. Go back? Or ahead? Better jump ahead fifty years or so. The butterflies were dangerous, but perhaps not the real thing, the lethal factor that he was looking for. He looked at his hand. The skin was black and hard, a dead area that was increasing. A faint shadow of worry went through him; it was getting worse, not better.
The scratching sound on all sides of him began to annoy him, filling him with an uneasy restlessness. He put down the books and paced back and forth. How could insects, even immense insects such as these destroy the human race? Surely human beings could combat them. Dusts, poisons, sprays.
A bit of metal, a little particle drifted down onto his sleeve. He brushed it off. A second particle fell, and then some tiny fragments.
He leaped, his head jerking up.
A circle was forming above his head. Another circle appeared to the right of it, and then a third. All around him circles were forming in the walls and roof of the sphere. He ran to the control board and closed the safety switch. The board hummed into life. He began to set the indicator panel, working rapidly, frantically. Now pieces of metal were dropping down, a rain of metal fragments onto the floor. Corrosive, some kind of substance exuded from them. Acid? Natural secretion of some sort. A large piece of metal fell; he turned.
Into the sphere the butterflies came, fluttering and dancing toward him. The piece that had fallen was a circle of metal, cut cleanly through. He did not have time even to notice it; he snatched up the blowtorch and snapped it on. The flame sucked and gurgled. As the butterflies came toward him he pressed the handle and held the spout up. The air burst alive with burning particles that rained down all over him, and a furious odor reeked through the sphere.
He closed the last switches. The indicator lights flickered, the floor chugged under him. He threw the main lever. More butterflies were pushing in, crowding each other eagerly, struggling to get through. A second circle of metal crashed to the floor suddenly, emitting a new horde. Hasten cringed, backing away, the blowtorch up, spouting flame. The butterflies came on, more and more of them.
Then sudden silence settled over everything, a quiet so abrupt that he blinked. The endless, insistent scratching had ceased. He was alone, except for a cloud of ashes and particles over the floor and walls, the remains of the butterflies that had got into the sphere. Hasten sat down on the stool, trembling. He was safe, on his way back to his own time; and there was no doubt, no possible doubt that he had found the lethal factor. It was there, in the heap of ashes on the floor, in the circles neatly cut in the hull of the car. Corrosive secretion? He smiled grimly.
His last vision of them, of the swelling horde had told him what he wanted to know. Clutched carefully against the first butterflies through the circles were tools, tiny cutting tools. They had cut their way in, bored through; they had come carrying their own equipment.
He sat down, waiting for the Time Car to complete its journey.
* * * *
Department guards caught hold of him, helping him from the Car. He stepped down unsteadily, leaning against them. “Thanks,” he murmured.
Wood hurried up. “Hasten, you’re all right?”
He nodded. “Yes. Except my hand.”
“Let’s get inside at once.” They went through the door, into the great chamber. “Sit down.” Wood waved his hand impatiently, and a soldier hurried a chair over. “Get him some hot coffee.”
Coffee was brought. Hasten sat sipping. At last he pushed the cup away and leaned back.
“Can you tell us now?” Wood asked.
“Yes.”
“Fine.” Wood sat down across from him. A tape recorder whirred into life and a camera began to photograph Hasten’s face as he talked. “Go on. What did you find?”
* * * *
When he had finished the room was silent. None of the guards or technicians spoke.
Wood stood up, trembling. “God. So it’s a form of toxic life that got them. I thought it was something like that. But butterflies? And intelligent. Planning attacks. Probably rapid breeding, quick adaptation.”
“Maybe the books and newspapers will help us.”
“But where did they come from? Mutation of some existing form? Or from some other planet. Maybe space travel brought them in. We’ve got to find out.”
“They attacked only human beings,” Hasten said. “They left the cows. Just people.”
“Maybe we can stop them.” Wood snapped on the vidphone. “I’ll have the Council convene an emergency session. We’ll give them your description and recommendations. We’ll start a program, organize units all over the planet. Now that we know what it is, we have a chance. Thanks to you, Hasten, maybe we can stop them in time!”
The operator appeared and Wood gave the Council’s code letter. Hasten watched dully. At last he got to his feet and wandered around the room. His arm throbbed unmercifully. Presently he went back outside, through the doorway into the open square. Some soldiers were examining the Time Car curiously. Hasten watched them without feeling, his mind blank.
“What is this, sir?” one asked.
“That?” Hasten roused himself, going slowly over. “That’s a Time Car.”
“No, I mean this.” The soldier pointed to something on the hull. “This, sir; it wasn’t on there when the Car went out.”
Hasten’s heart stopped beating. He pushed past them, staring up. At first he saw nothing on the metal hull, only the corroded metal surface. Then chill fright rushed through him.
Something small and brown and furry was there, on the surface. He reached out, touching it. A sack, a stiff little brown sack. It was dry, dry and empty. There was nothing in it; it was open at one end. He stared up. All across the hull of the Car were little brown sacks, some still full, but most of them already empty.
Cocoons.
THE MAN WHO LIKED LIONS, by John Bernard Daley
Originally published in Infinity Science Fiction, October 1956.
Mr. Kemper leaned on the rail, watching the caged lions asleep in the August sun. At his side a woman lifted a whimpering little girl to her shoulder and said, “Stop that! Look at the lions!” Then she jiggled the girl up and down. The lion opened yellow eyes, lifted his head from between his paws and yawned. Immediately the girl put her fingers over her face and began to cry. “Shut up!” said the woman. “You shut up right now or I’ll tell that big lion to eat you up!” Looking through her fingers, the girl said, “Lions don’t eat little girls.” The woman shook her. “Of course they do! I said they did, didn’t I?”
“Lions seldom eat people,” said Mr. Kemper. With all of her two hundred pounds the woman turned to face him.
“Well!” she said.
The word hung like an icicle in the warm air, but Mr. Kemper waved it aside. “Only old lions resort to human flesh. Except for the famous incident of the Tsavo man-eaters, of course.”
The woman pulled her arm tighter around the girl, elbow up, as if to ward him off. “Come on, Shirl,”
she said. “Let’s go look at the taggers.” And with a warning look over her shoulder she lunged away from the rail. A big man with an unlit cigarette in his mouth took her place.
As her wide back swayed down the walk, Mr. Kemper wondered if she had a special intuition about him, like dogs, whose noses warned them that he was not quite the kind of man they were accustomed to. Women, particularly those with children, seemed to feel that way. He watched her leave, having decided that she was unsuited for what he had in mind.
Two things happened simultaneously, interrupting his thoughts. The big man beside him tapped him on the shoulder and asked him for a match; at the same time Kemper saw, just beyond the retreating woman, a man in a tweed jacket and gray slacks, watching him. For a second they stared at each other and Kemper felt a mind-probe dart swiftly against his shield. He tightened the shield and waited. The man was heavily tanned, like Kemper, with unusually wide eyes and a dolichocephalic head. He had remarkable cheekbones; they appeared to slant forward toward the middle of his face, which was very narrow and long in the jaw. He looked a lot like Mr. Kemper, the way one Caucasian looks like another to an Eskimo. His glance swerved from Kemper to the lion cage; then he turned his back, a little too casually. Breath hissed softly from between Mr. Kemper’s teeth.
The big man said, “Hey, buddy, I asked do you have a match?”
“What? No, I don’t smoke.” His thoughts racing, he faced the lion cage. The tanned man had turned away, obviously not wanting to contact him, but why? He knew who Kemper was; there was no doubt of that. Frowning slightly, Mr. Kemper looked at the chewed hunks of horsemeat and bone on the cage floor, and the vibrating flies. The only logical answer was that the man was waiting for reinforcements. Even now he was probably contacting the Three Councils. Still, that gave Kemper a reasonable chance; it took a while for even the most powerful minds to move along the pathways of time.
Beside him the big man was talking again. “You feel okay, pal? You looked kind of far away there all of a sudden. Maybe you oughta go over in the shade.”
“Not at all. I was only thinking of something.”
“Yeah?” The man took the cigarette from his mouth and put it in his shirt pocket. “Say, I heard you telling that broad there lions don’t eat people. You sure about that?”
“Quite sure. Look at them. Do you think they need to depend on anything as slow as Homo Sapiens for food?” With another part of his brain he wondered how many men would be sent to take him back. There was one point in his favor, however. He had nothing to lose.
“I don’t know, pal. All I ever see them do is sleep. Always laying on their fat backs, like now.”
“Well, that’s not unusual. Lions sleep in the daytime and hunt at night.”
“Yeah? What the hell good is that? The zoo closes at 5:30, don’t it?”
Kemper looked at him dispassionately. He thought: “You fool, what would you say if you knew that you were talking to a man who hunted your ape ancestors through the forests of a million years ago? Could your pigmy brain accept that?”
The man jabbed him on the shoulder again. “Look at that big one with the black streaks in his hair. Ain’t he something? Why don’t he jump around in there like the chimps do?”
“Maybe he doesn’t know it’s expected of him,” Kemper answered, hoping that the arrival of the man in the tweed jacket would not affect his sport of the moment.
“You know, I’d like to see a couple of those babies mixing it up. Like the lion against the tiger, maybe. Who do you think would win a hassle like that, anyway?”
“The lion,” Mr. Kemper said. He decided that the game would go on; an idea was beginning to scratch at the corners of his mind. Looking around with what he hoped was a conspiratorial air, he jabbed his elbow into the big man’s stomach. “Listen, you’d like to see some action, would you? Suppose you be here in say—two hours. At three o’clock.”
“Yeah? What kind of action? You ain’t trying to kid me, are you, buddy?”
Shrugging, Mr. Kemper looked at the flies swarming in the cage. “It’s just a tip. Take it or leave it, buddy.”
He turned, brushed by the scowling man, and left the rail. Although it was getting hotter he walked down the cement in the sun, avoiding the shade of the tall hedges opposite the row of cages. He went toward the stairway that lifted from the lion court to the terrace where the central zoo building stood. Behind the building was the main enclosure; the zoo itself was terraced along two hillsides, with more hills in the distance. It was not a large zoo, nor was it a good place to hide. But Mr. Kemper did not intend to hide.
In the cages he passed were other cats: cheetahs, leopards, puma and tigers, lying with heaving flanks, or lolling red-tongued on the stone floors. They hadn’t changed too much, he decided, except in size. Even the streak-maned lion was puny in comparison with the lions that Kemper had known. He walked up to the drinking fountain by the stairway, the sun in his face. He was almost tempted to stare contemptuously up at it. Bending over the fountain, he caught the dusty smell of the cats among popcorn, rootbeer and ice cream smells and the sweat stink of people. He straightened, wiping his lips, and remembered the somber jungles of the Pliocene, black-green in the sun that was a fist against your head; the plains of javelin-tall, yellow grass swinging to the horizon; and in the hills the lions with hides like hammered brass, the deadly, roaring lions. He remembered too, with the smell of those lions thick as dust in his mouth, the cities of his people, the proud people who had discovered the secrets of time through the science of their minds, a science unknown to the world he was in now. He looked up slowly and saw the man in the tweed jacket standing at the top of the stairway.
When their eyes met, Kemper probed with an arrow-swift thought but the other had his mind-shield up. The man turned and moved behind a group of women. The man was gone when Kemper got to the top of the steps. “So that’s the way you want it,” he said, looking around. Two sidewalks led from the stair top; one went up the hill to the aviary, the other around the south wing of the building. He took the one that rounded the wing. “I doubt,” he said, “if we’ll play peek-a-boo all afternoon, however.” An old lady twitching along the walk gave him a nasty look as he passed.
He went by the zebra corral where a small boy was picking up stones and turned into the side entrance of the wing. He went down the dim corridor, turned left at the men’s room, then right and left again, and came finally to a small yard partially hidden from the main enclosure by an extension of the wing. In the yard was only one exhibit, a beaver pool surrounded by a waist-high stone wall. Two teen-aged boys sprawled on the wall; otherwise the place was deserted. Mr. Kemper studied the boys. Here was game to his liking. He went over and sat down on a bench in the sun.
The boys, twins, in Levi’s, saddle-shoes, T-shirts and long hair, leaned over the pool. There was something odd about the actions of the blond one who tilted dangerously near the water. He moved, spasmodically, and Mr. Kemper saw the flicker of sunlight on the long stick held like a spear in his hand and heard a splash. Cursing, the boy pushed himself upright and dropped from the wall, shaking water from the stick. “You missed,” said the other one.
“I’ll show that flat-tailed rat,” said the blond boy. From a back pocket he took a clasp-knife and snapped it open, and from a side pocket a length of twine. With swift, vicious twists he started to tie the knife-handle to the end of the stick. He made two knots and said, “Man, look at that. That’ll hold it, man.”
“What about the cat on the bench over there? What if he sees us?”
“Him? So what if he does? We can handle him. Anyway, he’s got his eyes shut, ain’t he?”
The sun tingled on the tops of Mr. Kemper’s ears as he listened, his eyes half-shut.
“Okay, give me lots of room on the wall,” the blond boy said. There was a rasping of cloth on stone. Then Mr. Kemper closed his eyes and made a picture in the darkness of his mind, a small, bright picture that he blotted out immediately after it w
as formed. By the pool, metal clattered on stone.
The blond boy yelled, “Hey, what’d you shove me for? Look what you did!”
“I never touched you, you jerk!”
“The hell you didn’t. Look at that damn knife!”
Opening his eyes, Mr. Kemper looked at the pieces of knife blade scattered at the boy’s feet and, a little to one side, the broken stick. He smiled and settled back on the bench, listening to the argument. The boys shouted and waved their arms, but that was all. As for their invective, he felt it lacked originality; he tired of it quickly. He got up from the bench and walked toward them. The argument stopped.
They looked at him with cold, arrogant eyes. “Hello,” he said.
They looked away. “You hear something, man?” said the blond boy.
“Not a thing, Jack, not a thing,” the other answered.
The smile on Mr. Kemper’s face was his best, his friendliest; it had taken him hours of practice in front of mirrors. “Apes, your fathers were not arrogant when they died screaming on our spears. They were not bold when our hunting cats ripped their bellies—”
Aloud he said, “You know, I’m a stranger around here and I thought you might be able to help me. Just what is it that’s going on at the lion cage at three o’clock today?”
“We ain’t heard nothing about no lion’s cage, dad. We got our own troubles.”
“Yeah, our own troubles. Get lost, dad.”
“It sounded very interesting, something about a big hassle in the cages.”
The boys lifted their eyebrows and looked sidelong at each other. The blond one said, “I told you to get lost, dad. Take five. You know, depart away from here.”
Mr. Kemper said, “Well, thanks anyway,” and was still smiling as he left them.
It was hotter when he reached the main enclosure, but still cool by his standards. At a refreshment stand he ordered a hot dog with mustard. As he waited, leaning against the counter, he saw the man in the tweed jacket among a group of people walking toward the elephant yard. He paid for the hot dog, picked it up, and walked along the path, keeping the jacket in sight.
The Third Time Travel Page 16