Deathbeast

by David Gerrold

  Kalen looked up as Ethab approached. “Not good,” he reported. “But we can manage. We lost the spare superchargers.”

  Ethab was strictly professional. “We’ll parallel the semis then.” He turned and surveyed the terrain. “Loevil? Megan?”

  Loevil stood up with the fuel cell he had been checking. His scanner was hanging at his side; he brought it forward as he stood. “Just a fluke... I think.” Checking the screen, he said, “I don’t think there are any more of them around.”

  From her vantage point, Megan added, “Delta is now one oh eight; magnetic interference counterphased.”

  Ethab nodded. He turned to Eese and Tril, who stood with their goggle-plates tentatively raised. “Stand guard, there and there. Nusa, Megtm, hold where you are. Kalen, Loevil, see what you can salvage.” He glanced back and pointed. “Eese, the notch. Tril, down there.” With Nusa on the outcrop, he had placed them in an equilateral triangle around the disc of the Nexus.

  Timidly, Dorik came up to him, holding his rifle more like a shield than a weapon. “What can I do?” he asked. It was as if he were asking, “Let me be a part of the team

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  again, please—” He repeated, a little more plaintive “What can I do?” ’

  Ethab hardly noticed him. “Keep out of the way,” he said, and brushed past

  Two

  MOVING OUT

  Ethab studied the shimmering sky, the too-close horizon and the surrounding rocks—they jutted from the salt like islands. He held his rifle at the ready, but with one eye he was monitoring the readouts on an electronic sextant- compass-chronometer. “Damn,” he said. “They put us down in late afternoon.”

  Kalen, approaching with a broken widget, answered with a grin, “Be glad they hit daylight. They were aiming at a target a hundred million years away.”

  Ethab didn’t react. Ethab never reacted to anything- - except failure. He looked at the compass and measured the angle of the sun. “At least it’s a high latitude. And it feels like summer—we’ll know for sure tonight.. That’ll mean long days and short nights. That’ll be good. More time for hunting.” He looked up and seemed to notice Kalen for the first time.

  Kalen held up the derice like ah offering. “We lost one of the main rechargers too.”

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  Ethab barely glanced at it. His gaze was still shaded. “What about the bow?”

  “That’s all right.”

  “Good,” he nodded. He indicated the broken recharger with a long bony finger. “Look at the bright side, Kalen. It’s one less thing to carry.” He turned toward the Nexus and touched his communicator button. “Mr. Loevil?”

  On the disc, Loevil looked up.

  “The lowlands?”

  Loevil considered it. “Probably.”

  Ethab turned to look at Megan, still scanning from her rocky outcrop. “Megan, your opinion?”

  “It’s safer,” her filtered voice came back. “We only have three days. It’s best to keep to easy terrain.”

  “If I were interested in safety,” said Ethab, “I wouldn’t be hunting Tyrannosaur.”

  Megan gave a noncommittal shrug. “I still say the lowlands. Swamps. Herbivores... carnivores.”

  Ethab nodded in agreement. “The lowlands then.” He pointed south. To Loevil he said, “Set the beacon. Let’s move out.” He stepped over to the Nexus and retrieved his own pack, shouldered it professionally, and waited for the others to form up. “Eese and Tril, take the point; Tril at ten o’clock. Eese at two. Til lead, Kalen behind me, then Megan and Loevil. Nusa, you bring up the rear; you’ve got a good eye.”

  Nusa nodded, finally flipping up her goggle-plates to reveal a boyish smile. Megan was already moving into place, and Loevil was just activating the homing beam transmitter. Dorik was edging nervously into position just ahead of Nusa, tugging at a loose strap; Ethab hadn’t even mentioned him by name. His clothes seemed not to fit him very well, too big in some places, too tight in others. He looked misshapen. All kinds of gear hung

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  from him, from a variety of places—like the wall of a sporting-goods store, he was covered with compasses, knives, battery packs, beamers, blazers, binoculars, canteen, bedroll, first-aid kit, provisions, portable heater- stove, heated socks—Dorik was a clearance sale looking for a place to happen.

  Ethab waited till Tril and Eese were ready, then gave a perfunctory hand-signal. They began to move out, Loevil slipping into line beside Megan. She raised her goggle- plate to look at him as he did so. The two of them exchanged a familiar glance. Cautionary. This hunt is going to be... vicious. Loevil glanced back over his shoulder at the Nexus. It was their only link to home. It was marked by an orange beam of light, stabbing skyward from the generator at the center of the disc; the beam had a sparkling white core, brilliant against the dark blue sky; it would be visible day or night. The beacon also emitted a long-range radio pulse that could be homed in on by anyone with a standard communicator. When you faced the beam, its pulses became a continuous pitch; as you approached the source, the pitch rose higher. Loevil called it a “portable North”—ever since a hunt that had landed in a time-envelope of magnetic fluctuation; one of those periods when the Earth’s magnetic field had been reversing itself. Then, compasses had been useless.

  “Mr. Loevil—” Ethab’s voice buzzed in his earpieces. “Watch your scanner. That’s what I’m paying you for.” Then, “We don’t want to catch Dorik by surprise again, do we?”

  Mildly annoyed at having been reprimanded—particularly by someone he didn’t respect—Loevil returned his attention to his scanner. Ethab wasn’t the most offensive hunter Loevil had ever worked for, but he was the most cocksure—and that was dangerous. He glanced over at

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  Megan and Iheir eyes met again. She must have been thinking the same thing.

  The sunlight was orange and came across the hills from low in the west; it outlined the landscape with deep purple and blue shadows. The rocks glinted with ochre and rust-colored highlights on their p&aks. The sky was darkening above, but still light at the horizon—as if something were glowing just beyond it and the air was reflecting that glow.

  They were off the flatlands now and into low rolling plains; the vegetation was no longer stark. The guidebook described the Cretaceous as “the first appearance of willows, elms, and magnolias,” also noting the presence of “figs, beech, and often angiosperms.” Furthermore, “modem ferns are already well developed; as well as gingko trees, club mosses, conifers, cycads, and horsetails.” Loevil saw none of them. There were far more plant varieties in the Cretaceous than had survived as fossil remains, or had yet been catalogued by exploration teams.

  They were moving through a “forest” of shrublike things, gnarled clusters of spiny branches draped with featherlike leaves of dusty yellow; there were occasional tall wispy growths that looked like trees, but weren’t— they had no branches, and the “trunks” were green and stalklike; there were tufts of something mossy, but it Was purple-colored; and here and there patches of variegated leaves, dark red and purple, streaked with pink and white, that looked like sickly ivy.

  They had come nearly four kilometers in the hour since flashdown. Tomorrow they would begin their descent to the lowlands, but Ethab wanted to get as close as possible tonight, so they marched long into the dusk. Tril glanced across at Eese—she was starting to feel tired—

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  but he shook his head and smiled reassuringly; there was nothing he could do about it.

  Farther back in the line, Dorik was trying to rearrange his gear, trying to make it more comfortable—he was carrying too much and he had weighted himself wrong. Every step he took, something banged against his leg or his back or his side; one of the straps chafed against his shoulder and another one bound him too tightly across the chest. And then,
from behind him, Nusa topped it all off with a pungent “You really blew it this time.”

  “No, I didn’t,” Dorik snapped. “I’ll make it up.”

  “Ethab won’t give you another chance,” she said. “He can’t depend on you.”

  Dorik was sullen. “I’ll get the chance,” he insisted. “I’ll prove myself.” He increased his pace to put more distance between himself and her. He didn’t need her sniping remarks.

  Far ahead of him, Ethab strode on, unaffected. The line had stretched itself across a hundred meters, and Ethab led it onward, ever deeper into the darkness. His pace was strong and purposeful; if he was tired— if he was ever tired—he didn’t show it. The sun, touching the horizon now, was reflected in his goggle-plate.

  With the abruptness of sunset in a dustless land, they camped. The night was star-brilliant, glittering and cold. A billion years of emptiness looked down on them. They were a hundred million years from home, a hundred million years from the nearest human voice. They were alone as no other human beings ever had been.

  They were alien to this landscape—it was their own planet and yet they were the aliens here. There were no mammals yet, no trees, no grass, no plants or animals that they could recognize—or even safely approach; there was nothing here that they could even safely eat. Not

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  that this environment was poisonous to them—but it was alien.

  Their camp was a glowing circle in the darkness. At its center was a heater-stove, at the perimeter a line of soft-lir warning beacons. Within the circle, they were safe—almost; outside of it, they could assume nothing. They had established a beachhead at a moment that was neither the dawn nor the end of time, only one more tick of an eternal empty wasteland. At the center of their tiny circle there was heat and light; at its edge, icy stars. Even the constellations were unfamiliar, not yet become such landmarks as Orion’s Belt or the Big Dipper. The stars were heartless beacons and unfeeling, their light was still a hundred million years too soon for human eyes—they were colder here, their real selves, as yet untouched by years of human poets. A cold wind swept across the hills —a veil being pulled aside beneath the night sky’s cruel gaze.

  In the distance, the darkness muttered to- itself. It whispered in insect voices and, very faintly underneath, the sounds of screams and screeches—far below the star- limned line of the horizon, something fought and died, something else bellowed its triumph—and there was wind, an ever-present rustling, a word unheard, a soft and breathy chorus of a hundred billion souls yet unborn .and moaning for their moments. Hurry, hurry on with it, they called.

  If you die here, wondered Loevil, where does your ghost go? Does it stay here in the prehistoric past? Would your soul have a hundred million years of lonely wandering through godless Heavens and empty Hells before the rest of humanity even begins—? The image of a soul lost before its god’s existence kept coming back to haunt him. Madness—it was madness.... He buttoned up his jacket

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  against the evening chill, more imagined than real, but biting nonetheless.

  He didn’t feel good about this hunt.

  He was thirty-one and scared, wondering if he was at the midpoint of his life—or even worse, if he was now closer to the end than to the beginning. He was bearded, a dark fringe lined the edges of his face; his hair was short and curly, normally brown, but prolonged exposure to the sun had brought out reddish highlights. His smile was an easy one, but more and more infrequent—when it broke the clouded expression that he normally wore, it was usually accompanied by a quip, sometimes barbed, more often purely cynical. He once had been good-natured, but he’d been losing it with age; he was too tired to be a child any more. His eyes were green and moody; his eyebrows, wide and arched, lent themselves to the easy frown of skepticism. Inside, he hurt a lot—and couldn’t figure out why. He was analytical and rational, and when he couldn’t solve a problem, the frustration of it gnawed at him and gave him pain; that was the pain that he felt now. He couldn’t figure out why he couldn’t figure it out, and he was beginning to have self-doubts.

  Loevil was intelligent enough to know that this was normal for a man his age. In his more optimistic moods, he assumed he would grow out of it soon; in his darker moments, he wondered if he would ever feel joy again. And he wondered why—the real why beneath it all— why really did he keep coming back on all these hunts?

  He sighed with the question unresolved, and turned his attention outward.

  Dorik was just going on watch. Kalen was briefing him carefully. Loevil watched, amused. Kalen’s body language spoke like a megaphone—he was skeptical of Dorik’s ability to guard even his own shoelaces. Dorik was supplicating, he was begging for a chance at redemption; and

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  now, having been trusted with this responsibility, however meager, he was determined—he stretched himself upward to twice his normal height—determined to prove that he was capable of confronting anything the night might produce to challenge him. He would prove he was a man. He deserved a second chance, didn’t he?

  Dorik lowered his filters and moved out toward the western perimeter. Kalen took the eastern side. He lowered his goggle-plate and switched it to its night-vision capabilities. Behind the goggles, the nightscape turned bright and garish.

  Dorik did the same, also switching on his listening bugs. The sounds of the night were amplified and compressed, bringing them all close enough to touch. Something mothlike fluttered around his head. Dorik hefted his gun and began to move out—

  “Try and remember,” called Ethab from behind him. “It’s a rifle—not a club.” He was just spreading out his bedroll.

  Dorik didn’t react—not obviously—but he stiffened his back and moved out with even fiercer determination.

  Watching him, Ethab almost smiled. Almost, not quite —the comers of his mouth twitched as if preparing to curl upward, but the twitch was only a flicker and it died almost as fast as it was bom. Just as well. It would have been a cruel smile anyway.

  Ethab raised his goggle-plate and took off his helniet for the first time that day. He had an eagle’s wing tattooed around his left eye, like a flag of defiance. It was a metallic image, seemingly burned in gold leaf, outlined in red and black; it was as if the eye had been illuminated by a twelfth-century monk, working tirelessly on this single human parchment for a thousand years. The eye was fierce and shaded, a glowing mby smoldering in a fearsome setting. And yet—the tattooed eye seemed kinder

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  than the other one; probably it was—it was an implant, an artificial orb. Only the right eye was original equipment—it was the hard one, so black it seemed like a window on Hell.

  Something roared in the distance. Ethab paused in the act of putting his helmet down. This roar had been different than the usual blur of night sounds. It stood above them. Larger. Deeper. More guttural. A rumble unlike any other sound they had heard yet in this prehistoric desolation; it seemed as if the ground shook with the reverberation of it. He listened tautly, but it didn’t come again. Yet, he knew— “That’s him,” he breathed. “I’ll meet him soon....”

  Almost immediately, he became aware of something else. Megan was watching him. He glanced over at her. Her bedroll was only a couple of meters away. She was eyeing him speculatively.

  Ethab glanced outward, indicating whatever it was that had gone bump in the night. “Close,” he said.

  Megan shook her head. “Loud.” She pulled her scanner close to her and checked it. “Nothing.” She pushed it away. “It’ll beep.”

  “Scared?” he asked as he stretched out, propping himself up on one elbow.

  She hardly considered the thought. “No.”

  “There are more frightening things.”

  Again he looked quizzical. “??”

  Megan looked right back at him. “!!”

 
Ethab nodded. No smile, just a curt nod. He cleared his throat thoughtfully, as if wondering how best to approach Megan. He dropped his gaze deliberately, then raised it again to meet hers. He lowered his voice to a whisper, letting it crack slightly. It was a beautiful per

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  formance. “I’ll admit it,” he lied, “I’m scared.” He looked over at her, gauging her reaction.

  Megan was unimpressed. She waited for him to go on.

  “Really,” he said. “The beast scares me—” He paused for effect. “—when I think about him.”

  Megan listened, showing no expression—that was skepticism enough.

  “You can’t be brave unless you’re scared first,” explained Ethab. “The scareder you are, the braver you have to be.” He spread his palms out in a therefore gesture. “ ... I’m scared.”

  Megan pursed her lips, a deliberate action—because she really wanted to say, “Nonsense.” She had been wondering how Ethab would approach her. It happened sooner or later on almost every hunt: The man who had something to prove would try to prove it with her because she was the senior guide. This was her twelfth hunt; she had been propositioned on nine of them before. It wasn’t even flattering any more, only tiresome. Megan was part of a communal marriage, uptime, with Loevil. She enjoyed sex, but she enjoyed it with men and women she loved. She did not enjoy it as an expression of dominance of any person over another. She liked men who could be tender—not men who pretended to be tender so they could get laid.

  But—Ethab was the customer. And the motto of Time- Hunt Ltd. was, “The customer may not always be right, but he’s always the customer.” She looked back at Ethab with a noncommittal but questioning look.

  Ethab continued, boldly, “When the time comes, though, I won’t be scared.” His voice was cold again. Hard. “Because I won’t be thinking. Just doing." He took a deep breath. “It’s always that way.”

  Megan remained noncommittal. “That’s what I’ve heard.” She said it quietly and without emotion.