by Dean Ing
Later, some prettyboy TV newsman tried to get me to say I’d had a premonition by then. No way: I’d read a piece in the Examiner about a meteorite off the central coast, but what could that possibly have to do with me? I didn’t even have a mobile phone in the Porsche, so I had no idea the Feebies had a job for me until I got home to my playback unit. The FBI purely hates to subcontract a job, anyway. Especially to me. I don’t fit their image.
My place is only a short drive from Antioch, a white two-story frame farmhouse built in 1903 in the shadow of Mount Diablo. When I bought it, I couldn’t just stop the restoration at the roof; by the time I’d furnished it in genuine 1910 I’d also become a zealot for the blacksmith shop out back. By now I had most of my money tied up in functional antiques like my Model C folding Brownie camera, my hurricane lamps with polished reading reflectors, swage sets for the smithy, even Cumberland coal for the forge and a cannonball tuyere. I had no one else to spend my money on but before I got Spot, I worried lot. While I was tracking down bail-jumpers, some thief might’ve done a black-bag job on the place. With Spot around, the swagman would have to run more than seventy miles an hour.
If I’d had more than five acres, I couldn’t’ve paid for the cyclone fence. And if I’d had less, there wouldn’t’ve been room for Spot to run. The fence doesn’t keep Spot in; it keeps sensible folks out. Anybody who ignores the CHEETAH ON PATROL signs will have a hard time ignoring Spot, who won’t take any food or any shit from any stranger. I’m a one-cat man, and Spot is a one-man cat.
I saw him caper along the fence as he heard the guttural whoosh of the Porsche fans. I levered the car into boost mode, which brings its skirts down for vastly greater air-cushion effect. Just for the hell of it, I jumped the fence.
An off-road Porsche is built to take a Baja run, with reversible pitch auxiliary fans that can suck the car down for high cornering force on its wheels, or support it on an air cushion for brief spurts. But I’d seen Feero on film, tricking his own Baja Porsche into bouncing on its air cushion so it’d clear an eight-foot obstacle. You can’t know how much fun it was for me to learn that unless you weigh as much as I do.
Of course, Spot smelled the horsemeat and I had to toss him a sample before he’d quit pestering me. After we sniffed each other around the ears-don’t ask me why, but Spot regards that as a kind of backslap-I went to the basement and checked Spot’s automatic feeder. My office is in the basement, too, along with all my other contemporary stuff. From ground level up, it’s fin-de-siècle time at my place, but the basement is all business.
My phone playback had only two messages. The first didn’t matter, because the last was from Dana Martin in Stockton. “We have an eighty-eight fugitive and we need a beard,” her voice stroked me; softly annealed on the surface, straw-tempered iron beneath. “My SAC insists you’re our man. What can I say?” She could’ve said, whatever her Special Agent in Charge thought in Sacramento, she hated the sight of me. She didn’t need to: ours was an old estrangement. “I can come to your place if you’ll chain that saber-toothed animal. And if you don’t call back by five P.M. Friday, forget it. I wish they’d pay me like they’ll pay you, Rackham.” Click.
My minicomputer terminal told me it was four-forty-six. I dialed a Stockton number, wondering why the FBI needed a disguising ploy to hunt a fugitive fleeing from prosecution. It could mean he’d be one of the shoot-first types who can spot a Feebie around a corner. I can get close to those types but I’m too easy to target. The hell of it was, I needed the money. Nobody pays like the Feebies for the kind of work I do.
Miz Martin was out mailing blueprints but was expected shortly. I left word that I’d rassle the saber-tooth if she wanted a souffle at my place, and hung up chuckling at the young architect’s confusion over my message. Time was, brick agents didn’t have to hold down cover jobs. Dana did architectural drafting when she wasn’t on assignment for her area SAC, who’s in Sacramento.
I took a fresh block of ice from the basement freezer and put it in my honest-to-God icebox upstairs. I had nearly a dozen fertile eggs and plenty of cream, and worked up a sweat all over again playing with my new butter churn until I’d collected a quarter-pound of the frothy cream-yellow stuff. It smelled too good to use for cooking, which meant it was just right. After firing up the wood stove, I went outside for coolth and companionship.
I’d nearly decided La Martin wouldn’t show and was playing “fetch” with my best friend when, far down the graveltop road, I heard a government car. When you hear the hum of electrics under the thump of a diesel, it’s either a conservation nut or a government man. Or woman, which Dana Martin most assuredly is.
Spot sulked but obeyed, stalking pipe-legged into the smithy as I remoted the automatic gate. Dana decanted herself from the sedan with the elegance of a debutante, careless in her self-assurance, and stared at my belt buckle. “It’s a wonder your heart can take it,” she sniffed. Dana could well afford to twit me for my shape. She’s a petite blonde with the face of a littlest angel and a mind like a meat cleaver. One of those exquisite-bodied little charmers you want to protect when it’s the other guy who needs protection.
I knew she worked hard to keep in shape and had a fastidious turn of mind so, “We can’t all have your tapeworm,” I said.
I thought she was going to climb back into the car, but she only hauled a briefcase from it. “Spare me your ripostes,” she said; “people are dying while you wax clever. You have an hour to decide about this job.”
Another slur, I thought; when had I ever turned down Feebie money? I let “no comment” be mine, waved her to my kitchen, poked at the fire in the stove. Adjusting the damper is an art, and art tends to draw off irritation like a poultice. I started separating the eggs, giving Dana the cheese to grate.
She could’ve shredded Parmesan on her attitude. “I can brief you,” she began, “only after you establish an oral commitment. My personal advice is, don’t. It needs an agile man.”
“Hand me the butter,” I said.
She did, shrugging. “All I can tell you beforehand, is that the fugitive isn’t human.”
“Spoken like a true believer, Dana. As soon as somebody breaks enough laws, you redefine him as an unperson.”
Relishing it: “I’m being literal, Rackham. He’s a big, nocturnal animal that’s killed several people. The Bureau can’t capture him for political reasons; you’ll be working alone for the most part; and it is absolutely necessary to take him alive.”
“Pass the flour. But he won’t be anxious to take me alive; is that it?”
“In a nutshell. And he is much more important than you are. If you screw it up, you may rate a nasty adjective or two in history books-and I’ve said too much already,” she muttered.
I stirred my supper and my thoughts, adding cayenne to both. Obviously in Bureau files, my dealings with animals hadn’t gone unnoticed. They knew I’d turned a dozen gopher snakes loose to eliminate the varmints under my lawn. They knew about my ferret that kept rats away. They knew Spot. I’d taken a Kodiak once, and they knew that, too. But true enough, I was slower now. I postulated a Cape Buffalo, escaped while some South Africans were presenting it to a zoo worth its weight in krugerrands to antsy politicians. “I think I’ll give this one a ’bye,” I sighed and, as afterthought; “but what was the fee for taking it à la Frank Buck?”
“Who the devil is Frank Buck?”
“Never mind. How much?”
“A hundred thousand,” she said, unwilling.
I nearly dropped the dry mustard. For that, I could find Spot a consort and dine on escargot every night. “I’m in,” I said quickly. “Nobody lives forever.”
G G G
While the souffle baked, Dana revealed how far afield my guess had gone. I fed her flimsy disc into my office computer downstairs and let her do the rest. The display showed a map of Central California, with a line arching in from offshore. She pointed to the line with a light pencil. “That’s the path of the so-called meteorite last Saturday n
ight. Point Reyes radar gave us this data.” Now the display magicked out a ream of figures. “Initial velocity was over fifteen thousand meters per second at roughly a hundred klicks altitude, too straight and too fast for a ballistic trajectory.”
“Would you mind putting that into good old feet and miles? I’m from the old school, in case you hadn’t noticed,” I grinned.
“You’re a goddamn dinosaur,” she agreed. “Okay: we picked up an apparent meteorite coming in at roughly a forty-five degree angle, apparent mass um, fifty tons or so, hitting the atmosphere at a speed of about-fifty thousand feet per second. Accounting for drag, it should’ve still impacted offshore within a few seconds, sending out a seismometer blip, not to mention a local tsunami. It didn’t.
“It decelerated at a steady hundred and forty g’s and described a neat arc that must’ve brought it horizontal near sea-level.”
I whistled. “Hundred and forty’s way above human tolerance.”
“The operative word is ‘steady.’ It came in so hot it made the air glow, and it was smart-I mean, it didn’t behave as though purely subject to outside forces. That kind of momentum change took a lot of energy under precise control, they tell me. Well, about eleven seconds after deceleration began it had disappeared, too low on the horizon for coverage, and loafing along at sub-mach speed just off the water.”
“Russians,” I guessed.
“They know about it, but it wasn’t them. Don’t they wish? It wasn’t anybody human. The vehicle came in over the Sonoma coast and hedge-hopped as far as Lake Berryessa northwest of Sacramento. That’s where the UFO hotline folks got their last report and wouldn’t you know it, witnesses claimed the usual round shape and funny lights.”
I sprinted for the stairs, Spot-footed across the kitchen floor, snuck a look into the oven. “Just in time,” I called, as Dana emerged from below.
She glanced at the golden trifle I held in my pot-holder, then inhaled, smiling in spite of herself. “You may have your uses at that.”
“Getting up here so fast without jolting the souffle?”
“No, cooking anything that smells this good,” she said, and preceded me to the dining room. “I don’t think you have the chance of a cardiac case on this hunt, and I said as much to Scott King.”
She told me why over dinner. The scrambled interceptors from Travis and Beale found nothing, but a Moffett patrol craft full of sensor equipment sniffed over the area and found traces of titanium dioxide in the atmosphere. Silicon and nox, too, but those could be explained away.
You couldn’t explain away the creature trapped by college students near the lake on Sunday evening. Dana passed me a photo, and my first shock was one of recognition. The short spotted fur and erect short ears of the quadruped, the heavy shoulders and bonecrunching muzzle, all reminded me of a dappled bear cub. It could have been a terrestrial animal wearing a woven metallic harness but for its eyes, small and lowset near the muzzle. It looked dead, and it was.
“The pictures were taken after it escaped from a cage on the Cal campus at Davis and electrocuted itself, biting through an autoclave power line. It was evidently a pet,” Dana said, indicating studs on the harness, “since it couldn’t reach behind to unlock this webbing, and it wasn’t very bright. But it didn’t need to be, Harve. It was the size of a Saint Bernard. Guess its weight.”
I studied the burly, brawny lines of the thing. “Two hundred.”
“Three. That’s in kilos,” Dana said. “Nearly seven hundred pounds. If it hadn’t got mired in mud near a student beer-bust, I don’t know how they’d have taken it. It went through lassos as if they were cheese, using this.”
Another photo. Above each forepaw, which seemed to have thumbs on each side, was an ivorylike blade, something like a dewclaw. One was much larger than the other, like the asymmetry of a fiddler crab. It didn’t seem capable of nipping; slashing, maybe. I rolled down my sleeves; it wouldn’t help if Dana Martin saw the hairs standing on my forearms. “So how’d they get it to the Ag people at Cal-Davis?”
“Some bright lad made a lasso from a tow cable. While the animal was snarling and screeching and biting the cable, they towed it out of the mud with a camper. It promptly chased one nincompoop into the camper and the guy got out through the sliding glass plate upfront-but he lost both legs above the ankle; it seems the creature ate them.
“The Yolo County Sheriff actually drove the camper to Davis with that thing fighting its way through the cab in the middle of the night.” Dana smiled wistfully. “Wish I could’ve seen him drive into that empty water purification tank, it was a good move. The animal couldn’t climb out, the Sheriff pulled the ladder up, and a few hours later we were brought into it and clamped the lid down tight.”
“Extraterrestrial contact,” I breathed, testing the sound of a phrase that had always sounded absurd to me. The remains of my souffle were lost in the metallic taste of my excitement-okay, maybe “excitement” wasn’t quite the right word. “If that’s the kind of pets they keep, what must they be like?”
“Think of Shere Khan out there,” Dana jerked a thumb toward a window, “and ask what you’re like.”
Why waste time explaining the difference between a pet and a friend? “Maybe they’re a race of bounty hunters,” I cracked lamely.
“The best guess is that the animal’s owner is hunting, all right. Here’s what we have on the big one,” she said, selecting another glossy. “Four men and a woman weren’t as lucky as the fellow who lost his feet.”
I gazed at an eight-by-ten of a plaster cast, dirt-flecked, that stood next to a meter stick on a table. Something really big, with a paw like a beclawed rhino, had left pugmarks a foot deep. It might have been a species similar to the dead pet, I thought, and said so. “Where’d this cast come from?”
“Near the place where the beer-bust was busted. They’re taking more casts now at the Sacramento State University campus. If the hunter’s on all-fours, it may weigh only a few tons.”
“Davis campus; Sac State-fill it in, will you?”
It made a kind of sense. Once inside a chilled-steel cage, the captive pet had quieted down for ethologists at Davis. They used tongs to fumble a little plastic puck from a clip on the harness, and sent it to Sacramento State for analysis, thinking it might be some kind of an owner tag. It turned out to be a bug, an AM/FM signal generator-and they hadn’t kept it shielded. The owner must have monitored the transmitter and followed it to Sacramento. More guesswork: its vehicle had traveled in the American River to a point near the Sac State labs where the plastic puck was kept.
And late Tuesday evening, something big as a two-car garage had left a depression on the sand of an island in the river, and something mad as hell itself had come up over the levee and along a concrete path to the lab.
A professor, a research assistant, a top-clearance physicist brought in from nearby Aerojet, and an FBI field agent had seen the hunter come through a pumice block wall into the lab with them, but most of the information they had was secure.
Permanently.
Dana Martin didn’t offer photos to prove they’d been dismembered, but I took her word for it. “So your hunter got its signal generator back,” I prompted, “and split.”
“No, no, and yes. It’s your hunter, and our man had left the transmitter wrapped in foil in the next room, where we found it. But yes, the hunter’s gone again.”
“To Davis?”
“We doubt it. Up the river a few klicks; there’s an area where a huge gold dredge used to spit its tailings out. A fly-fisher led us to remains in the tailings near the riverbank yesterday. A mighty nimrod type who’d told his wife he was going to sight in his nice new rifle at the river. That’s a misdemeanor, but he got capital punishment. His rifle had been fired before something bent its barrel into a vee and-get this-embedded the muzzle in the man’s side like you’d bait a hook.”
“That’s hard to believe. Whatever could do that, could handle a gorilla like an organ grinder’s monkey.�
�
“Dead right, Rackham-and it’s loose in the dredge tailings.”
Well, she’d warned me. I knew the tailings area from my own fishing trips. They stretch for miles on both sides of the American River, vast high cairns of smooth stones coughed up by a barge that had once worked in from the river. The barge had chewed a path ahead of it, making its own lake, digesting only the gold as it wandered back and forth near the river. Seen from the air, the tailings made snaky patterns curling back to the river again.
This savage rape of good soil had been committed long ago and to date the area was useless. It was like a maze of gravel piles, most of the gravel starting at grapefruit size and progressing to some like oval steamer trunks. A few trees had found purchase there; weeds; a whole specialized ecology of small animals in the steep slopes. The more I thought about it, the more it seemed like perfect turf for some monstrous predator.
I took a long breath, crossed my arms, rubbed them briskly and stared across the table at Dana Martin. “You haven’t given me much to go on,” I accused.
“There’s more on the recording,” she said softly.
I guessed from her tone: “All bad.”
Shrug: “Some bad. Some useful.”
I let her lead me downstairs. She had an audiotape salvaged from the lab wreckage, and played me the last few minutes of it.
A reedy male expounded on the alien signal generator. “We might take it apart undamaged,” he ended, sounding wistful and worried.
“The Bureau can’t let you chance it,” said another male, equally worried.
A third man, evidently the Aerojet physicist, doubted the wisdom of reproducing the ar-eff signals since what looked like junk on a scope might be salient data on an alien receiver. He offered the use of Aerojet’s X-ray inspection equipment. A young woman-the research assistant-thought that was a good idea at first. “But I don’t know,” she said, and you could almost hear her smile: “it looks kinda neat the way it is.”
The woman’s sudden voice shift stressed her non sequitur. It sounded idiotic. I tossed a questing frown at Dana and positively gaped as the recording continued.