The Mammoth Book of Extreme Science Fiction

by Ashley, Mike;

  But not for Joe. Something else got Joe.

  It seemed to explode out of the rocks a split second before the slide hit. It took Joe Flent in the chest so hard it lifted him right off his feet and flung him down and away from the slide. Katherine screamed again as she ran, because the thing that had knocked Joe down was bouncing up and down in a crazy irregular hop, each one taking it closer to Joe as he lay on his back half stunned, and she recognized it for the thing that had attacked Clement the day the primate bit him.

  She logged this report on the voicewriter and I heard the tape, and I wish they’d transcribe it and then destroy it. Nobody should hear a duty-bound horror-struck soul like that tell such a story. Read it, okay. But that torn-up monotone, oh God. She was having nine agonies at once, what with her hands all gone and what happened to Joe out there, and what he’d said . . . arrgh! I can’t tell it without hearing it in my head.

  Well. That stinking horror hopped up on Joe and he half sat up and it hopped again and landed right over his face and slumped there quivering, bleeding and streaming rain and acid. Joe flipped so hard his feet went straight up in the air and he seemed to hang there, standing on the back of his head and his shoulder-blades with his arms and legs doing a crazy jumping-jack flailing. Then he fell again with the monstrosity snugger than ever over his face and neck and head, and he squirmed once and then lay still, and that was when Katherine got to him.

  Katherine went at that thing with her bare hands. One-half second contact, even in all that rain, was enough to pucker and shrivel her skin, and it must have felt like plunging her hands into smoking deep-fat. She didn’t say what it felt like. She only said that when she grabbed at the thing to tear it away from Joe’s face, it came apart in small slippery handfuls. She kicked at it and her foot went in and through it and it spilled ropy guts and gouted blood. She tore into it again, clawing and batting it away, and that was probably when she did the most damage to her hands. Then she had an idea from somewhere in that nightmare, fell back and took Joe’s feet and dragged him twenty feet away – don’t ask me how – and turned him over on his face so the last of that mess dropped off him. She skinned out of her shirt and knelt down and rolled him over and sat him up. She tried to wipe his face with the shirt but found she couldn’t hold it, so she scooped her ruined hand under it and brought it up and mopped, but what she mopped at wasn’t a face any more. On the tape she said, in that flat shredded voice, “I didn’t realize that for a while.”

  She put her arms around Joe and rocked him and said, “Joey, it’s Katherine, it’s all right, honey. Katherine’s here.” He sighed once, a long, shuddering sigh and straightened his back, and a hole bigger than a mouth opened up in the front of his head. He said, “Amy? Amy?” and suddenly fought Katherine blindly. She lost her balance and her arm fell away from his back, and he went down. He made one great cry that raised echoes all up and down the ridge: “A . . . meeeee. . . .” and in a minute or two he was dead.

  Katherine sat there until she was ready to go, and covered his face with the shirt. She looked once at the thing that had killed him. It was dead, scattered in slimy bits all over the edge of the rock-fall. She went back to the base. She didn’t remember the trip. She must have been soaked and chilled to the bonemarrow. She apparently went straight to the voicewriter and reported in and then just sat there, three, four hours until the others got back.

  Now if only somebody had been there to . . . I don’t know. Maybe she couldn’t have listened, after all that. Who knows what went on in her head while she sat there letting her blood run out of her hands on to the floor? I’d guess it was that last cry of Joe’s, because of what happened when Glenda and Amy came in. It might have been so loud in her head that nobody else’s voice could get in. But I still wish somebody had been there, somebody who knows about the things people say when they die. Sometimes they’re already dead when they say those things; they don’t mean anything. I saw an engineer get it when a generator threw a segment. He just said “Three-eighths . . . three-eighths . . .” What I’m trying to say, it didn’t have to mean anything . . . Well, what’s the difference now?

  They came in dripping and tired, calling out. Katherine Flent didn’t answer. They came into the recording shack, Amy first. Amy was half across the floor before she saw Katherine. Glenda was still in the doorway. Amy screamed, and I guess anyone would, seeing Katherine with her hair plastered around her face the way it had dried, and blood all over her clothes and the floor, and no shirt. She fixed her crazy eyes on Amy and got up slowly. Amy called her name twice but Katherine kept on moving, slow, steady, evenly. Between the heels of her ruined hands she held a skinning knife. She probably couldn’t have held it tightly enough to do any damage, but I guess that didn’t occur to Amy.

  Amy stepped back toward the door and with one long step Katherine headed her off and herded her toward the other corner, where there was no way out. Amy glanced behind her, saw the trap, covered her face with her hands, stepped back, dropped her hands. “Katherine!” she screamed. “What is it? What is it? Did you find Clement? Quick!” she rapped at Glenda, who stood frozen in the doorway. “Get Joe.”

  At the sound of Joe’s name Katherine moaned softly and leaped. She was met in midair by the same kind of thing that had killed her husband.

  The soft horror caught Katherine off the floor in mid-leap and hurled her backward. Her head hit the corner of a steel relayrack . . .

  The stench in the small room was quite beyond description, beyond bearing. Amy staggered to the door, pushing an unresisting Glenda ahead of her . . .

  And there they were as we found them, Purcell and me: one fevered freak that could out-eat six men, and one catatonic.

  I sent Purcell out to the shale hill to see if there was enough left of Clement and Joe Flent for an examination. There wasn’t, Animals had scattered Joe’s remains pretty thoroughly, and Purcell couldn’t find Clement at all, though he moved rocks till his hands bled. There had probably been more slides after that rain. Somehow, in those weeks when she maintained the basic instrumentation single-handed, Amy Segal had managed to drag Katherine out and bury her, and clean up the recording room, though nothing but burning would ever get all that smell out of it.

  We left everything but the tapes and records. The scout was built for two men and cargo, and getting her off the ground with four wasn’t easy. I was mighty glad to get back on the bridge of the flicker-ship and away from that five-nines hell. We stashed the two girls in a cabin next to the sick bay and quarantined them, just in case, and I went to work on the records, getting the story in about the order I’ve given it here.

  And once I had it, there wasn’t a thing I could do with it. Amy was at all times delirious, or asleep or eating; you could get very little from her, and even then you couldn’t trust what you got. From Glenda you got nothing. She just lay still with that pleasant half-smile on her face and let the universe proceed without her. On a ship like ours we are the medical division, the skipper and the officers, and we could do nothing for these two but keep them fed and comfortable; otherwise, we mostly forgot they were aboard. Which was an error.

  Status quo, then, far as I knew, from the time we left the planet until we made earthfall, the crew going about its business, the two girls in quarantine with Purcell filling the hopper with food for the one and spoon-feeding the other, and me locked up with the records, piecing and guessing and trying to make sense out of a limbless, eyeless monstrosity which apparently could appear from nowhere in midair, even indoors (like the one that killed Katherine Flent); which looked as if it could not live, but which still would attack and could kill. I got no place. I mulled over more theories than I’ll go into, some of ’em pretty far-fetched, like a fourth-dimensional thing that . . . well, on the other hand, Nature can be pretty far-fetched too, as anyone who has seen the rear end of a mandrill will attest.

  What do you know about seacucumbers, as another nauseating example?

  We popped out of the flic
ker-field in due time, and Luna was good to see. We transferred to a rocket-ferry at Outer Orbit and dropped in smoothly, and came into the base here in quarantine procedure, impounding ferry and all. The girls were at last put into competent hands, and the crew were given the usual screening. Usual or not, it’s about as thorough as a physical examination can get, and after they’d all been cleared, and slept six hours, and gone through it again and been cleared again, I gave them 72–hour passes, renewable, and turned ’em loose.

  I was more than anxious to go along too, but by that time I was up to the eyeballs in specialists and theorists, and in some specialties and theories that began to get too fascinating for even a home-hungry hound like me to ignore. That was when I called you and said how tied up I was and swore I’d be out of there in another day. You were nice about that. Of course, I had no idea it wouldn’t be just one more day, but another six weeks.

  Right after the crew was turned loose they called me out of the semantics section, where we were collating all notes and records, into the psych division.

  They had one of the . . . the things there.

  I have to hand it to those guys. I guess they were just as tempted as Clement was when he first saw one, to burn it into nothing as fast as it could be burned. I saw it, and that was my first impulse. God. No amount of clinical reporting like Clement’s could give you the remotest idea of just how disgusting one of those things is.

  They’d been working over Glenda Spooner. Catatonics are hard to do anything with, but they used some high-potency narcosyntheses and some field inductions, and did a regression. They found out just what sort of a catatonic she was. Some, you probably know, retreat like that as a result of some profound shock – after they have been shocked. It’s an escape. But some go into that seize-up in the split second before the shock. Then it isn’t an escape, it’s a defense. And that was our girl Glenda.

  They regressed her until they had her located out in the field, searching for Clement. Then they brought her forward again, so that in her mind she was contacting Amy, slogging through the rain back to the base. They got to where Amy entered the recording shack and screamed, seeing Katherine Flent looking that way. There they located the exact split second of trauma, the moment when something happened which was so terrible that Glenda had not let herself see it.

  More dope, more application of the fields through the helmet they had her strapped into. They regressed her a few minutes and had her approach that moment again. They tried it again, and some more, making slight adjustments each time, knowing that sooner or later they would have the exact subtle nudge that would push her through her self-induced barrier, make her at last experience the thing she was so afraid to acknowledge.

  And they did it, and when they did it, the soft gutty thing appeared, slamming into a technician fifteen feet away, hitting him so hard it knocked him flat and slid him spinning into the far wall. He was a young fellow named Petri and it killed him. Like Katherine Flent, he died probably before he felt the acid burns. He went right into the transformer housing and died in a net of sparks.

  And as I said, these boys had their wits about them. Sure, someone went to help Petri (though not in time) and someone else went after a flame pistol. He wasn’t in time either; because when he got back with it, Shellabarger and Li Kyu had the glass bell off a vacuum rig and had corralled the filthy thing with it. They slid a resilient mat under it and slapped a coupling on top and jetted the jar full of liquid argon.

  This time there was no charred mass, no kicked-apart, rainsoaked scatter of parts to deal with. Here was a perfect specimen, if you can call such a thing perfect, frozen solid while it was still alive and trying to hop up and down and find someone to bubble its dirty acids on. They had it to keep, to slice up with a microtome, even to revive, if anyone had the strong guts.

  Glenda proved clearly that with her particular psychic makeup, she had chosen the right defense. When she saw the thing, she died of fright. It was that, just that, that she had tried to avoid with catatonia. The psycho boys breached it, and found out just how right she had been. But at least she didn’t die uselessly, like Flent and Clement and poor Katherine, Because it was her autopsy that cleared things up.

  One thing they found was pretty subtle. It was a nuclear pattern in the cells of the connective tissue quite unlike anything any of them had seen before. They checked Amy Segal for it and found the same thing. They checked me for it and didn’t. That was when I sent out the recall order for the whole crew. I didn’t think any of them would have it, but we had to be sure. If that got loose on Earth . . .

  All but one of the crew had a clean bill when given the new test, and there wasn’t otherwise anything wrong with that one.

  The other thing Glenda’s autopsy revealed was anything but subtle.

  Her abdomen was empty.

  Her liver, kidneys, almost all of the upper and all of the lower intestine were missing, along with the spleen, the bladder, and assorted tripe of that nature. Remaining were the uterus, with the Fallopian tubes newly convoluted and the ovaries tacked right to the uterus itself; the stomach; a single loop of what had once been upper intestine, attached in a dozen places to various spots on the wall of the peritoneum. It emptied directly into a rectal segment, without any distinctive urinary system, much like the primitive equipment of a bird.

  Everything that was missing, they found under the bell jar.

  Now we knew what had hit Katherine Flent, and why Amy was empty and starved when we found her. Joe Flent had been killed by . . . one of the . . . well, by something that erupted at him as he bent over the trapped Clement. Clement himself had been struck on the side of the face by such a thing – and whose was that?

  Why, that primate’s. The primate he walked into submission, and touched, and frightened.

  It bit him in panic terror. Joe Flent was killed in a moment of panic terror too – not his, but Clement’s, who saw the rock-slide coming. Katherine Flent died in a moment of terror – not hers, but Amy’s, as Amy crouched cornered in the shack and watched Katherine coming with a knife. And the one which had appeared on earth, in the psych lab, why, that needed the same thing to be born in – when the boys forced Glenda Spooner across a mental barrier she could not cross and live.

  We had everything now but the mechanics of the thing, and that we got from Amy, the bravest woman yet. By the time we were through with her, every man in the place admired her g— uh, dammit, not that. Admired her fortitude. She was probed and goaded and prodded and checked, and finally went through a whole series of advanced exploratories. By the time the exploratories began, about six weeks had gone by, that is, six weeks from Katherine Flent’s death, and Amy was almost back to normal; she’d tapered off on the calories, her abdomen had filled out to almost normal, her temperature had steadied and by and large she was okay. What I’m trying to put over is that she had some intestines for us to investigate – she’d grown a new set.

  That’s right. She’d thrown her old ones at Katherine Flent.

  There wasn’t anything wrong with the new ones, either. At the time of her first examination everything was operating but the kidneys; their function was being handled by a very simple, very efficient sort of filter attached to the ventral wall of the peritoneum. We found a similar organ in autopsying poor Glenda Spooner. Next to it were the adrenals, apparently transferred there from their place astride the original kidneys. And sure enough, we found Amy’s adrenals placed that way, and not on the new kidneys. In a fascinating three-day sequence we saw those new kidneys completed and begin to operate, while the surrogate organ which had been doing their work atrophied and went quiet. It stayed there, though, ready.

  The climax of the examination came when we induced panic terror in her, with a vivid abreaction of the events in the recording shack the day Katherine died. Bless that Amy, when we suggested it she grinned and said, “Sure!”

  But this time it was done under laboratory conditions, with a high-speed camera to wat
ch the proceedings. Oh God, did they proceed!

  The film showed Amy’s plain pleasant sleeping face with its stainless halo of psych-field hood, which was hauling her subjective self back to that awful moment in the records shack. You could tell the moment she arrived there by the anxiety, the tension, the surprise and shock that showed on her face. “Glenda!” she screamed, “Get Joe!” – and then . . .

  It looked at first as if she was making a face, sticking out her tongue. She was making a face all right, the mask of purest, terminal fear, but that wasn’t a tongue. It came out and out, unbelievably fast even on the slow-motion frames of the highspeed camera. At its greatest, the diameter was no more than two inches, the length . . . about eight feet. It arrowed out of her mouth, and even in midair it contracted into the roughly spherical shape we had seen before. It struck the net which the doctors had spread for it and dropped into a plastic container, where it hopped and hopped, sweated, drooled, bled and died. They tried to keep it alive but it wasn’t meant to live more than a few minutes.

  On dissection they found it contained all Amy’s new equipment, in sorry shape. All abdominal organs can be compressed to less than two inches in diameter, but not if they’re expected to work again. These weren’t.

  The thing was covered with a layer of muscle tissue, and dotted with two kinds of ganglia, one sensory and one motor. It would keep hopping as long as there was enough of it left to hop, which was what the motor system did. It was geotropic, and it would alter its muscular spasms to move it toward anything around it that lived and had warm blood, and that’s what the primitive sensory system was for.

  And at last we could discard the fifty or sixty theories that had been formed and decide on one: that the primates of Mullygantz II had the ability, like a terran sea-cucumber, of ejecting their internal organs when frightened, and of growing a new set; that in a primitive creature this was a survival characteristic, and the more elaborate the ejected matter the better the chances for the animal’s survival. Probably starting with something as simple as a lizard’s discarding a tail-segment which just lies there and squirms to distract a pursuer, this one had evolved from “distract” to “attract” and finally to “attack.” True, it took a fantastic amount of forage for the animal to supply itself with a new set of innards, but for vegetarian primates on fertile Mullygantz II, this was no problem.