Poor Little Warrior!
Claude Ford knew exactly how it was to hunt a brontosaurus. You crawled heedlessly through the mud among the willows, through the little primitive flowers with petals as green and brown as a football field, through the beauty–lotion mud. You peered out at the creature sprawling among the reeds, its body as graceful as a sock full of sand. There it lay, letting the gravity cuddle it diaper-damp to the marsh, running its big rabbit-hole nostrils a foot above the grass in a sweeping semicircle, in a snoring search for more sausagey reeds. It was beautiful; here horror had reached its limits, come full circle and finally disappeared up its own sphincter. Its eyes gleamed with the liveliness of a week-dead corpse’s big toe, and its compost breath and the fur in its crude aural cavities were particularly to be recommended to anyone who might otherwise have felt inclined to speak lovingly of the work of Mother Nature.
But as you – little mammal with opposed digit and .65 self-loading, semi-automatic, dual-barrelled, digitally-computed, telescopically-sighted, rustless, high-powered rifle gripped in your otherwise defenceless paws – slide along under the bygone willows, what primarily attracts you is the thunder-lizard’s hide. It gives off a smell as deeply resonant as the bass note of a piano. It makes the elephant’s epidermis look like a thin sheet of crinkled paper. It is grey as the Viking seas, daft-deep as cathedral foundations. What contact possible to bone could allay the fever of that flesh? Over it scamper – you can see them from here! – the little brown lice that live in those grey walls and canyons, gay as ghosts, cruel as crabs. If one of them jumped on you, it would very likely break your back. And when one of those parasites stops to cock its leg against one of the bronto’s vertebrae, you can see it carries in its turn its own crop of easy-livers, each as big as a lobster, for you’re near now, oh, so near that you can hear the monster’s primitive heart-organ knocking, as the ventricle keeps miraculous time with the auricle.
Time for listening to the oracle is past; you’re beyond the stage for omens, you’re now headed in for the kill, yours or his; superstition has had its little day for today, from now on only this windy nerve of yours, this shaky conglomeration of muscle entangled untraceably beneath the sweat-shiny carapace of skin, this bloody little urge to slay the dragon, is going to answer all your orisons.
You could shoot now. Just wait till that tiny steam-shovel head pauses once again to gulp down a quarry-load of bulrushes, and with one inexpressibly vulgar bang you can show the whole indifferent Jurassic world that it’s standing looking down the business end of evolution’s sex-shooter. You know why you pause, even as you pretend not to know why you pause: that old worm conscience, long as a baseball pitch, long-lived as a tortoise, is at work; through every sense it slides, more monstrous than the serpent. Through the passions: saying here is a sitting duck, O Englishman! Through the intelligence: whispering that boredom, the kite-hawk who never feeds, will settle again when the task is done. Through the nerves: sneering that when the adrenalin currents cease to flow the vomiting begins. Through the maestro behind the retina: plausibly forcing the beauty of the view upon you.
Spare us that poor old slipper-slopper of a word, beauty; holy mum, is this a travelogue! ‘Perched now on this titanic creature’s back, we see a round dozen – and, folks, let me stress that ‘round’ – gaudily plumaged birds, exhibiting among them all the colour you might expect to find on lovely, fabled Copacabana Beach. They’re so round because they feed on the droppings that fall from the rich man’s table. Watch this lovely shot now! See the bronto’s tail lift … Yep, a couple of haystacks-full at least emerging from his nether end. That sure was a beauty, folks, delivered straight from consumer to consumer. The birds are fighting over it now. Hey, you, there’s enough to go ’round, and anyhow, you’re round enough already … And nothing to do now but hop back up onto the old rump steak and wait for the next round. And now as the sun stinks in the Jurassic West, we say “Fare well on that diet …”’
No, you’re procrastinating, and that’s a lifework. Shoot the beast and put it out of your agony. Taking your courage in your hands, you raise it to shoulder level and squint down its sights. There is a terrible report; you are half stunned. Shakily, you look about you. The monster still munches, relieved to have broken enough wind to unbecalm the Ancient Mariner.
Angered (or is it some subtler emotion?), you now burst from the bushes and confront it, and this exposed condition is typical of the straits into which your consideration for yourself and others continually pitches you. Consideration? Or again something subtler? Why should you be confused just because you come from a confused civilisation? But that’s a point to deal with later, if there is a later, as these two hog-wallow eyes pupilling you all over from spitting distance tend to dispute. Let it not be by jaws alone, O monster, but also by huge hoofs and, if convenient to yourself, by mountainous rollings upon me! Let death be a saga, sagacious, Beowulfate.
Quarter of a mile distant is the sound of a dozen hippos springing boisterously in gymsuits from the ancestral mud, and next second a walloping great tail as long as Sunday and as thick as Saturday night comes slicing over your head. You duck as duck you must, but the beast missed you anyway because it so happens that its co-ordination is no better than yours would be if you had to wave the Woolworth Building at a tarsier. This done, it seems to feel it has done its duty. It forgets you. You just wish you could forget yourself as easily; that was, after all, the reason you had to come the long way here. Get Away from It All, said the time travel brochure, which meant for you getting away from Claude Ford, a husbandman as futile as his name with a terrible wife called Maude. Maude and Claude Ford. Who could not adjust to themselves, to each other, or to the world they were born in. It was the best reason in the as-it-is-at-present-constituted world for coming back here to shoot giant saurians – if you were fool enough to think that one hundred and fifty million years either way made an ounce of difference to the muddle of thoughts in a man’s cerebral vortex.
You try and stop your silly, slobbering thoughts, but they have never really stopped since the coca-collaborating days of your growing up; God, if adolescence did not exist it would be unnecessary to invent it! Slightly, it steadies you to look again on the enormous bulk of this tyrant vegetarian into whose presence you charged with such a mixed death-life wish, charged with all the emotion the human orga(ni)sm is capable of. This time the bogeyman is real, Claude, just as you wanted it to be, and this time you really have to face up to it before it turns and faces you again. And so again you lift Ole Equaliser, waiting till you can spot the vulnerable spot.
The bright birds sway, the lice scamper like dogs, the marsh groans, as bronto sways over and sends his little cranium snaking down under the bile-bright water in a forage for roughage. You watch this; you have never been so jittery before in all your jittered life, and you are counting on this catharsis wringing the last drop of acid fear out of this system forever. OK, you keep saying to yourself insanely over and over, your million-dollar twenty-second-century education going for nothing, OK, OK. And as you say it for the umpteenth time, the crazy head comes back out of the water like a renegade express and gazes in your direction.
Grazes in your direction. For as the champing jaw with its big blunt molars like concrete posts works up and down, you see the swamp water course out over rimless lips, lipless rims, splashing your feet and sousing the ground. Reed and root, stalk and stem, leaf and loam, all are intermittently visible in that masticating maw and, struggling, straggling or tossed among them, minnows, tiny crustaceans, frogs – all destined in that awful, jaw-full movement to turn into bowel movement. And as the glump-glump-glumping takes place, above it the slime-resistant eyes again survey you.
These beasts live up to two hundred years, says the time travel brochure, and this beast has obviously tried to live up to that, for its gaze is centuries old, full of decades upon decades of wallowing in its heavyweight thoughtlessness until it has grown wise on twitterpatedness. For
you it is like looking into a disturbing misty pool; it gives you a psychic shock, you fire off both barrels at your own reflection. Bang-bang, the dum-dums, big as paw-paws, go.
With no indecision, those century-old lights, dim and sacred, go out. These cloisters are closed till Judgement Day. Your reflection is torn and bloodied from them forever. Over their ravaged panes nictitating membranes slide slowly upwards, like dirty sheets covering a cadaver. The jaw continues to munch slowly, as slowly the head sinks down. Slowly, a squeeze of cold reptile blood toothpastes down the wrinkled flank of one cheek. Everything is slow, a creepy Secondary Era slowness like the drip of water, and you know that if you had been in charge of creation you would have found some medium less heart-breaking than Time to stage it all in.
Never mind! Quaff down your beakers, lords, Claude Ford has slain a harmless creature. Long live Claude the Clawed!
You watch breathless as the head touches the ground, the long laugh of neck touches the ground, the jaws close for good. You watch and wait for something else to happen, but nothing ever does. Nothing ever would. You could stand here watching for a hundred and fifty million years. Lord Claude, and nothing would ever happen here again. Gradually, your bronto’s mighty carcass, picked loving clean by predators, would sink into the slime, carried by its own weight deeper; then the waters would rise, and old Conqueror Sea come in with the leisurely air of a card-sharp dealing the boys a bad hand. Silt and sediment would filter down over the mighty grave, a slow rain with centuries to rain in. Old bronto’s bed might be raised up and then set down again perhaps half a dozen times, gently enough not to disturb him, although by now the sedimentary rocks would be forming thick around him. Finally, when he was wrapped in a tomb finer than any Indian rajah ever boasted, the powers of the Earth would raise him high on their shoulders until, sleeping still, bronto would lie in a brow of the Rockies high above the waters of the Pacific. But little any of that would count with you, Claude the Sword; once the midget maggot of life is dead in the creature’s skull, the rest is no concern of yours.
You have no emotion now. You are just faintly put out. You expected dramatic thrashing of the ground, or bellowing; on the other hand, you are glad the thing did not appear to suffer. You are like all cruel men, sentimental; you are like all sentimental men, squeamish. You tuck the gun under your arm and walk around the dinosaur to view your victory.
You prowl past the ungainly hoofs, around the septic white of the cliff of belly, beyond the glistening and how-thought-provoking cavern of the cloaca, finally posing beneath the switch-back sweep of tail-to-rump. Now your disappointment is as crisp and obvious as a visiting card: the giant is not half as big as you thought it was. It is not one-half as large, for example, as the image of you and Maude is in your mind. Poor little warrior, science will never invent anything to assist the titanic death you want in the contraterrene caverns of your fee-fi-fo-fumblingly fearful id!
Nothing is left to you now but to slink back to your time-mobile with a belly full of anticlimax. See, the bright dung-consuming birds have already cottoned on to the true state of affairs; one by one, they gather up their hunched wings and fly disconsolately off across the swamp to other hosts. They know when a good thing turns bad, and do not wait for the vultures to drive them off; all hope abandon, ye who entrail here. You also turn away.
You turn, but you pause. Nothing is left but to go back, no, but 2181 AD is not just the home date; it is Maude. It is Claude. It is the whole, awful, hopeless, endless business of trying to adjust to an overcomplex environment, of trying to turn yourself into a cog. Your escape from it into the Grand Simplicities of the Jurassic, to quote the brochure again, was only a partial escape, now over.
So you pause, and as you pause, something lands socko on your back, pitching you face forward into tasty mud. You struggle and scream as lobster claws tear at your neck and throat. You try to pick up the rifle but cannot, so in agony you roll over, and next second the crab-thing is greedying it on your chest. You wrench at its shell, but it giggles and pecks your fingers off. You forgot when you killed the bronto that its parasites would leave it, and that to a little shrimp like you they would be a deal more dangerous than their host.
You do your best, kicking for at least three minutes. By the end of that time there is a whole pack of the creatures on you. Already they are picking your carcass loving clean. You’re going to like it up there on top of the Rockies; you won’t feel a thing.
Sector Diamond
In a great concourse of worlds such as ours, the extinction of species occurs frequently – as frequently as spacegoing man opens up another planet. Sometimes it is a backward human race, such as the inhabitants of Istinogurzibeshilaha, that is threatened. More often it is a species which has some kind of social organisation but which lacks higher intelligence.
Colonisation forms one of the main pressures operating against the survival of alien life. Every standard year, three new planets are opened up. Where possible, the colonists are assisted to fit into the network of life already established there. Sometimes the nature of this life is such that this cannot be done, in which case more drastic measures have to be taken.
Over the past four millennia, much good work has been carried out by the Planetary Ecological Survey, a Starswarmwide organisation with headquarters on the populous pleasure world of Droxy, in Sector Diamond. PES sends out teams that land on planets ripe for development and assess how the local life can best be preserved – or eliminated.
It is never an easy job. Sometimes man himself may provide a complicating factor.
At other times of day, the pygmies brought the old man fish from the river, or the watercress he loved, but in the afternoon they brought him two bowls of entrails.
He stood to receive them, staring over their heads through the open door, looking at the blue jungle without seeing it. He dared not let his subjects see that he suffered or was weak – the pygmies had a short way with weakness. Before they entered his room, he forced himself to stand erect, using his stick for support.
The two bearers bowed their heads until their snouts were almost in the still steaming bowls.
‘Your god gives you thanks. Your offering is received,’ the old man said.
Whether or not they really understood his clicking attempt to reproduce their tongue, he could not tell. They rose and departed with their rapid, slithering walk. In the bowls, the oily substance glistened, reflected from the sunshine outside.
Sinking back on to his bed, the old man fell into his usual fantasy; the pygmies came to him, and he treated them not with forbearance but with hatred. He poured over them the weight of his long-repressed loathing, striking them with his stick and driving them and all their race for ever from this planet. They were gone. The azure sun and the blue jungles were his alone; he could live where nobody would ever find or worry him. He could die at last, as simply as a leaf falls from a tree.
The reverie faded, and he recognised it for what it was. He knotted his hands together and coughed a little blood. The bowls of intestines would have to be disposed of.
Next day, the rocket ship landed a mile away.
The overlander lumbered along the forest track. It made good speed with Barney Brangwyn at the wheel. On either side of the vehicle, the vegetation was of the sombre blue-green type that characterised most living things on the planet Kakakakaxo.
‘Neither of you looks in the pink of health!’ Barney observed, flicking his eyes from the track to glance at the faces of his two companions.
The three members of the Planetary Ecological Survey team had blue shadows shading every feature of their countenances. The shadows gave an illusion of chill, yet in this equatorial zone, and with the sun Cassivelaunus shining at zenith, it was comfortably warm, if not hot. The surrounding jungle grew thickly; the bushes sagged under the weight of their own foliage. They were heading for a man who had lived in these surroundings for almost twenty years. Now that they were here, it became easier to see wh
y he was universally regarded as a hero.
‘There’s plenty of cover here for any green pygmies who may be watching us,’ Tim Anderson said, peering at the thickets.
Barney chuckled at the worried note in the younger man’s voice.
‘The pygmies are probably still getting over the racket we made in landing,’ he said; ‘we’ll be seeing them soon enough. When you get as ancient as I am, Tim, you’ll become less keen to meet the local bigwigs. The top dogs of any planet are generally the most obstreperous – ipso facto, as the lawyers say.’
He lapsed into silence as he negotiated a gulley, swinging the big vehicle expertly up the far slope.
‘By the evidence, the most obstreperous factor on Kakakakaxo is the climate,’ Tim said. ‘Only six or seven hundred miles north and south of here, the glaciers begin, and go right on up to the poles. I’m glad our job is just to inspect the planet – I shouldn’t want to live here myself, pygmies or no pygmies. I’ve seen enough already to tell you that.’
‘It’s not a question of choice for the colonists,’ Craig Hodges, leader of the team, remarked. ‘They come because of some kind of pressure: economic factors, oppression, destitution, or the need for lebensraum – the sort of grim necessities that keep us all on the hop.’
‘You’re a cheerful couple!’ Barney exclaimed. ‘At least Daddy Dangerfield likes it here! He has faced Kakakakaxo for nineteen years, playing god, wet-nursing his pygmies!’
‘He crashed here accidentally; he’s had to adjust,’ Craig said.
‘What a magnificent adjustment!’ Tim exclaimed. ‘Daddy Dangerfield, God of the Great Beyond! He was one of my childhood heroes. I can hardly believe we’re going to meet him.’
‘Most of the legends built around him originate on Droxy,’ Craig said, ‘where half the ballyhoo in the universe comes from. I am chary about the man myself, but he could prove informative.’
The Complete Short Stories- The 1950s - Volume One Page 74