by D. F. Jones
The search took a great deal longer than the spray operation. There were several false alarms; and Freedman, sweating and tired inside his suit, checked each one, running awkwardly, hampered by the specimen container he carried.
And then the man who had found the bat called out again; although his voice was muffled by the mask, the difference in his tone was recognizable. Fatigue left Freedman as he ran.
“Where?”
The soldier pointed. “I nearly stepped on it, sir!”
Panting, he unslung his specimen can, but before he could move, Arcasso — who was beside him — spoke. “Hold it, Mark. You’re sure that’s it?”
Freedman nodded, still getting his breath back.
“Good work,” said Arcasso to the soldier. “Go get the other men on search detail; I want them to see what they’re looking for. And tell their teams to stay right where they are until the searchers rejoin.” He forced himself to look closely; to do so sickened him, but if the men had to do it, so did he. Freedman was obviously very impatient, and that made him think of something else. Screwing up his courage, he said as casually as he could, “Maybe I’d better put it in. Not even Xeno can do much to my tin arm.”
Freedman, crouching, looked up. Neither could see the other’s face, but Arcasso sensed the doctor smiling. “No. Can’t trust that claw of yours with this one — but thanks all the same.”
The men arrived and stared dumbly; all started back, alarmed, as Mark took the Xeno by the tail, straightened his body, and, still kneeling, held the creature up. “Take a good look,” he commanded. “I’m not going to handle it too much — we can’t risk damaging it, but note its size and color. This line here is where the wings have folded, but you don’t have to worry about them — I don’t expect you’ll find one with wings spread — but bear it in mind.”
Inside his head, Frank Arcasso was screaming for Freedman to stop, to put the hideous thing out of sight.
At last Mark did so; as it slid into the can, Frank heard its feet or something scrape on the metal. Glad for the mask, he curtly ordered the men back to their stations.
For two more hours the teams scoured the wood, but no more were found. The BW colonel asked Arcasso if he wanted the heavy strike; Arcasso looked at Freedman, who said no. The terrible sight of the devastated wildlife and the state of the one specimen they’d found convinced him they’d gotten the only Xeno in the wood. It was not much of a victory, but at least the first step had been taken.
XXXI.
Washington knew of the success before Freedman and Arcasso got back to the office. Jaimie, haggard and on edge, awaited them. Washington had been on the line, he told them — several laboratories wanted the specimen. As the field expert on Xeno, which one did Freedman favor? Brookhaven was the closest.
Freedman, avid for a really good look at Xeno, turned on Arcasso. He had the greatest respect for Brookhaven, but it wasn’t close enough. This Xeno should not be subjected to the hazards of air travel or any other form of transportation. Compared to this specimen, the Mona Lisa was just about as priceless as a postcard of the Empire State Building. Arcasso should tell the President and anyone else that the Xeno had to stay right there in Abdera. If a second specimen was obtained, Brookhaven was welcome to it. But not this one.
Arcasso got through to the White House and proved a good advocate. The President ruled in Freedman’s favor, adding that anyone who had anything to contribute “had better haul his ass out to Abdera, and fast.” This Doctor Freedman knew more about Xeno than anyone else, and had just proved it.
The high-level chat was lost on Mark. Knowing a neighbor kept tropical fish, he gave swift orders to Civil Defense. Shortly after midnight the bewildered neighbor watched his collection being tipped into buckets and his king-sized aquarium manhandled by soldiers and carried to Freedman’s office. The dried-out tank was set up on Freedman’s desk, holding a branch of white pine hacked off the nearest tree; the doctor danced impatiently, sweeping papers and everything else onto the floor. Civil Defense had found a sheet of plate glass to cover the tank; Freedman had a hole bored in the glass, big enough to take the nozzle of a gas cylinder, foreseeing Xeno might need to be moved to bigger accommodations.
At one in the morning, still rustling around in his protective suit, he cleared his office except for the BW colonel and one of his men, armed with a gas cylinder. Fully buttoned up in their suits and masks, Freedman unscrewed the can, raised the lid a fraction, listened, then tipped the container slowly into the tank. With the same beastly slithering, scratching sound, the Xeno dropped onto the branch, toppled, and fell, landing on its back on the bottom of the tank. The colonel hardly gave Freedman time to get his arm and the container out of the way as he slid the plate glass top in position.
Freedman tore off his face mask, staring intently at the still figure. “How long d’you think?”
The colonel, his mask off, mopped his face. “Who can say? One, two hours.” He too looked at the Xeno, his mouth twisted in disgust. “What a helluva thing. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
“Join the club,” replied Freedman dryly.
Arcasso came in; he’d been on the phone in Jaimie’s office. Averting his gaze from the tank, he said, “By morning you’ll be knee-deep in biologists — so how about calling it a day?”
Freedman shook his head vehemently. “No.” Already he regretted not having taken a closer look before putting his prize in the tank.
“Aw, hell, Mark! You’re tired — we’re all tired. I can’t remember when I last ate.”
“You want anything else?” said the colonel. “Okay — I’ll be off.”
“Sure,” said Mark absently. “Thanks for all you’ve done. Maybe we can repeat the operation up by the hospital tomorrow night.”
As the colonel and his soldier left, Jaimie came in. “There’s nothing else that can’t wait. I’d like to get back to Shane. She’s lonesome.”
“You go, Jaimie — and tell Shane I said not to fear the dark. It’s friendly.”
Frank dug out a cigar. “You’re not going to stare at that damned thing all night, are you?”
“You’ll find a bottle in my second drawer,” said Freedman. “The glasses are through there, in my bathroom.”
Frank sighed and fixed the drinks.
“Frank,” said Mark, for once not looking at Xeno, “I want you to know I appreciated your offer to pick that up.” He gestured with his glass. “Give it to me straight. Does Xeno — even helpless — scare the hell out of you?”
“I can’t even bear to look at it,” confessed Frank. “I don’t go crazy over spiders or bugs of any sort — few people do — but that thing!” He thought for a moment. “If it literally looked like nothing on earth, I don’t think it would be so bad — but it could be a distant cousin to a lobster or a scorpion. And yet it isn’t. That skin or whatever it is, and that iridescence — ” He shuddered and gulped his drink.
“It’s funny,” Freedman mused, “but I don’t see it that way. I know it’s a killer. I lost a good friend today, but I don’t feel angry at Xeno. Looking at it there, it amazes me, and in a way I feel sad. I’ll do all I can to wipe out every last one of them, but with no ill feelings, just as I know that thing in there would kill me if necessary for its survival.”
He drank. “It’s no good. I can’t explain, but even while Xeno scares me, deep down I can’t hate it.”
“That’s because you’re blinded by science,” said Frank. “Also you’re tired. I know I am.”
“Go over to my place. There’s a spare bed; Thelma will fix you something to eat. Tell her I’ll be back before dawn — I hope.”
It sounded a lot more attractive than a bedroll in a tent in the ball park. “She won’t mind?”
“Hell, no! You go ahead.”
Alone, Mark dragged a chair over, set up his recorder and mike, and settled down to work.
“Description of the first captured adult Xeno. Date — ”
He got no furt
her. With a sudden, split-second convulsion Xeno leaped into the air, landing on its feet, facing him.
XXXII.
A long way back, a lifetime ago, Freedman had stared in the face of the larval Xeno. Now he faced the adult, happy for the centimeter of plate glass between them.
The caterpillar is the larval form of a butterfly; it then moves into its dormant pupal stage, from which it emerges fantastically transformed, looking nothing like its previous self. Anyone ignorant of the life cycle of a butterfly would never believe that brilliant flitting creature had once been the slow-moving, many-legged caterpillar.
But Xeno was no butterfly. Freedman saw many differences between the two stages. The outline of the adult had existed in the larva in appearance and behavior. Both forms had the same awareness of their environment, the same speed of reaction — and both were killers.
The adult was larger, its color that of a shiny chestnut straight out of the husk. It had four legs: stout, hairy supports, repulsive in their resemblance to a tarantula’s, legs spread out like a fly’s, each with three joints, powerful, holding the body rigid, parallel to the tank base on which it stood.
The head was still faintly triangular, but the shape no longer stood out, the head merging into the body almost imperceptibly. The flattened forehead sloped sharply back; the eyes, set well apart, giving the Xeno a good field of vision, were bright, intelligent, and golden: black oval pupils with fire-gold irises. He thought of Blake: “Tiger, tiger, burning bright … ”
But it was not the eyes which gripped Freedman. In the middle of the face the nostrils, closely-spaced, small and round, rhythmically opening and shutting, and below them, above the slack, hideous mouth and the weak receding chin, a short hornlike excrescence, one to one-and-one-half centimeters long.
Man and Xeno were perfectly still, watching each other. Psyching himself up for the effort, Mark lunged forward with his head, stopping just short of the glass.
The Xeno reacted with stupefying speed; Mark only glimpsed the action.
Hardly had his head begun to move than the mouth flashed open and snapped shut, fast as a high-speed camera shutter. He thought he saw the tip of the horn open; then his vision was obscured by a patch, the size of a half-dollar, yellow and viscous, on the glass. Instinctively he’d jerked back, his heart beating faster. If it were not for the glass he’d be dead — the shot would have taken him right between the eyes.
Slowly he got out of his chair and poured himself a badly needed drink. He’d learned something: The horn, not Xeno’s mouth, was the weapon.
He raised his glass, and stopped. That nasty looking mouth didn’t have to be a mouth at all. Just because it happened to be where one expected to find a mouth … Xeno fed on blood, and it wasn’t the right equipment for the job. Perhaps it had teeth like a snake, except that instead of pumping out venom, they sucked in blood.
He drank, glancing down at the tank. Xeno had moved around to stay facing him. Freedman took two swift strides around the corner of the aquarium; Xeno still stared at him head on, shifting like lightning. He moved back to the chair and sat, getting the same head-on view. Once more he lunged forward, nearly hitting his head on the glass. Xeno didn’t move.
Freedman sat back, vaguely aware that he’d spilled liquor on his suit, once again appalled at the creature’s ability to learn, reacting to his first threat, ignoring the second, knowing it was harmless. Of course, it could be it had temporarily exhausted its venom supply, but if so, he’d have expected Xeno to take cover in the pine branch. He exchanged the glass for the microphone and got busy, quietly dictating his observations, watched all the time by the Xeno.
The idea occurred to him suddenly: Did the creature know what was he doing?
He tossed the microphone into his chair and refilled his glass. If he was going to start getting paranoid he’d better quit right now and leave it all to the Brook-haven boys.
He walked up and down, ignoring Xeno. Could the thing be getting to his mind? Hell no! Sure, he was studying a truly strange, unearthly creature, which certainly had a better brain than most creatures, but in human terms it still rated a lot lower than the village idiot. To imagine it had telepathic powers was to belittle himself, to give far too much credit to this horrid thing. Maybe he was just tired, but tired or not, he’d finish his observations. He continued where he had left off, a description of the lobsterlike pincers.
Lobster-type pincers — unsegmented? It hardly made sense. They did look very powerful, and the surface seemed to be the same as the rest of the body; it could expand, so its structure was not armored like a scorpion’s — in which case it had to have an internal support structure, a skeleton. So the pincers, regardless of how they looked, must be closer to hands, with an internal bone structure.
By three thirty he had finished. Tired, and puzzled by the many problems his observations raised, he accidentally dropped the microphone. But the noise got no reaction from Xeno, who remained motionless on the tank floor. Mark knew he should go off to bed, but he found it hard to drag himself away. This was — or had been — only Day One of the counterattack. Until they succeeded in wiping out the Xenos, most of the work would have to be done at night. All right, then, he’d started in on the new, temporary schedule.
He would stick around a while longer; maybe doze in a chair, watching now and then.
He switched off most of the lights, leaving only a shaded desk lamp standing on the floor beside his desk, and pulled up an armchair. In the dim light, which came from an unfamiliar angle, and with his desk-top occupied by the tank, the office looked very strange. The light, filtering through the side of the tank, threw an eerie image of the bough of pine onto the ceiling. Freedman leaned back, exhausted.
His watch told him he had slept for several hours when he was awakened by a faint rustling sound. He kept very still. Among the indistinct shadows on the ceiling, another shadow moved slowly.
He glanced sharply at the glass top: Xeno could not escape. The movement stopped, but he forced himself to count to one hundred before he dared move.
Slowly, he raised himself on his hands. Xeno hung on a twig by its front pair of legs, tail downwards. It was definitely sleeping. The eyelids, never before observed, were closed over the terrible eyes.
Gently Freedman lowered himself back into the chair. Everything in nature had a purpose, which could be discovered if the observer had knowledge, perception, and a lot of patience. Freedman thought of two answers; unfortunately, both raised more problems than they solved. The eyelids were brilliant, shining white.
After a time he gave up, his exhausted mind refusing to accept any more. But he felt some satisfaction: He’d learned a great deal in the past few hours. The battle wasn’t won — it had hardly begun. But from now on it wouldn’t be one-sided.
*
In the days that followed, the nature of the battle changed. Mankind got organized — especially in the center of infection, Nash County, and the action around Abdera Hollow for a radius of twenty kilometers was a microcosm of the whole battle. Habits changed drastically; people slept by day or at least stayed under cover. After dark they emerged, like cockroaches in a deserted kitchen, and went about their business warily and with unusual speed. And while the township made the best of this disjointed way of life, the BW squads moved out to strike new targets and restrike old ones. They learned fast, refining their techniques; the three-man search teams were abolished in favor of individuals, each carrying his own lamp, power pack, specimen can, and tongs.
The manpower that was saved went to form other squads; overnight BW became a growth industry.
But not only man learned … Xeno showed yet again its remarkable and alarming ability to adapt. With the sharp reduction in human targets, Xeno learned to exploit any weakness or lapse in human vigilance. A window left open, a road accident — Xeno soon understood cars — the human that took a chance, were exploited all too often by the bloodthirsty predators.
The second night’s
BW operation was conducted in a patch of woods near the hospital, with excellent results: Four Xenos were captured. The jubilant BW colonel threw a small party in the early hours: Freedman, Jaimie, and several biologists (Arcasso, back in Washington, had been right) joined in. Five humans had died in the preceding twenty-four hours, but four Xenos in one strike was a great deal better than the first night.
Washington celebrated, too. With security out the window, the command post became the Icarus Intelligence Center, every scrap of information being fed in by Civil Defense authorities, who acted as local intelligence gathering points in affected areas. The total number of U.S. Xenos could not exceed eighty-seven, all ex-Papa Kilo victims; now five were in the bag. So Washington celebrated, but not quite as heartily as Abdera, for already the infected area had grown: Red markers now stood on the maps of Boston, New York City, Newark, and Atlanta. An unconfirmed report suggested a Xeno had gotten as far as Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, and the Louisiana group had clearly split up — New Orleans was now infected as well as Baton Rouge. But with that kind of news coming in, the celebration was somewhat subdued.
With five specimens to study, Freedman’s objections to the movement of the first Xeno no longer held. Two of the four were killed for examination, but first they were subjected to various experiments — one was exposed to heat, the other to cold. The first showed no signs of discomfort even at 65 degrees Celsius; the other became torpid at 5 degrees and was dead after thirty minutes at — 5 degrees. The survivor was then exposed to a variety of gases, and its reactions were much the same as a human’s. Further experimentation was stopped for fear of damaging the specimens. Formalin finished off the second. The two dead Xenos were transported for further study by biologists. One went to Brookhaven, the other to Harvard Medical School. The two live specimens were sent to Walter Reed Research.