by Dean Ing
“Like your man thought he saw his SAC coming through that wall on the campus?”
“Could be,” he nodded. “We thought you should know that, and the part about your quarry being at home in the water.”
He frowned at the river; his rod bent double until he gave it slack. I touched my sidearm for luck as his line moved sideways, then began a stately upstream progression. “Jesus, I must have a salmon,” he said, his face betraying a genuine angler’s excitement.
With the bright July sun and the clear sierra water, I saw a dark sinuous shape far below the surface and grinned. I knew what it was; it wasn’t salmon time, and salmon don’t move with the inexorable pace of a finned log moving upstream. “No, you have a problem,” I said. “And so do I, if a gaggle of Soviet tourists come snooping around here in copters.”
“Just keep it in mind,” said Wanda, scrambling up, reluctantly letting more line out. “Play it safe and don’t have a higher profile than necessary.” Then, plaintively, as I turned to go: “What the hell do I have here?”
“Sturgeon.”
Pause as the upstream movement paused. Then, “How do I land it?”
I nodded toward the plastic pizza. “Try some sixty per cent dynamite. Or wait him out. Some of ’em get to be over ten feet long; don’t worry, they’re domestic.”
He called to me as I trudged to my Porsche: “Domestic, schmomestic; what’s that got to do with it?”
I called back: “I mean it’s not a Soviet sturgeon. At least you needn’t worry about catching an alien.”
When I drove away he was still crouching there, a perfect metaphor of the decent little guy in a big government, jerking on his rod and muttering helplessly. I kept the Porsche inches off the water en route downriver as far as the county park and thrilled a bunch of sporty car freaks as I hovered to the perimeter road, trying to let the good feeling last. It wouldn’t; all the Feebie had to do was cut his line and he’d be free of his problem. All I had to do was unwrap an alien transmitter and my problem would come to me in a hurry. Maybe.
For sure, I wasn’t about to do it in full view of a dozen picnickers. I hadn’t yet seen a piece of ground that looked right for me, and I’d covered a lot of river. To regain the low profile I drove twenty miles back upriver on the freeway without being tailed, and to exercise my sense of the symbolic I demolished a pizza in Folsom. Thus fortified, I found a secondhand store in the restored Gay Nineties section of Folsom and bought somebody’s maltreated casting rig with an automatic rewind. Wanda had been right to use fishing as a cover activity. I was beginning to grow paranoid at the idea of foreign nationals watching me-and drawing sensible conclusions.
I drove from Folsom to a bluff that overlooked the river and let my paranoia have its head as I studied the scene. Somewhere, evidently downriver, lay my quarry. I’d assumed it was nocturnal simply because it hadn’t shown in daylight. But for an instant, just before I caught a glimpse of that sturgeon, I’d realized the hunting beast might have been on the other end of Wanda’s line. Truly nocturnal? Not proven . . .
I’d also assumed, without thinking it out, that the hunter was strictly a land animal. Scratch another assumption; it apparently could stroll underwater like a hippo. Gills? Scuba?
The report about the sword led me to a still more worrisome train of thought. A saber was hardly the weapon I’d expect from an intelligent alien. What other, more potent, weapons did it carry? Its harness might hold anything from laser weapons to poison gas-unless, like the smaller animal, it too was a pet. Yet there had been no evidence of modern weapons against humans. The fact was, I hadn’t the foggiest idea what range of weapons I might run up against.
Finally there was the encounter with the lovers, sacrificial lambs who weren’t slaughtered after all. Why? They could hardly have been more vulnerable. Maybe because they were mating; maybe, for that matter, because they were vulnerable. All I could conclude was that the hunter did discriminate.
One thing sure: he knew how to keep a low profile with his own vehicle. So where do you hide a fifty-ton spacecraft? Surely not where it can be spotted from the air. The likeliest place seemed to be in the river itself, but I could think of a dozen reasons why that might not be smart. And if the Feebies couldn’t track it by satellite from Berryessa to Sacramento, the hunter was either damned smart, or goddamn lucky.
I decided to make some luck on my own by being halfway smart, and eased the Porsche down to the river. It takes less fuel to hover on the water if you’re not in a big hurry, and I cruised downstream slowly enough to wave at anglers. Mainly, I was looking for a likely place to spend the night.
A glint from the bluffs told me someone was up there among the trees in heavy cover. Birdwatcher, maybe. From the British Embassy, maybe. I swept across to a banana-shaped island in plain sight and parked, then unlimbered my spinning rig and tried a few casts. I never glanced toward the bluffs and I still don’t know if it was perfidious Albion or paranoia that motivated me. But while sitting on a grassy hummock I realized that I couldn’t choose a better stakeout than one of these islands.
It required a special effort for me to scrunch through the sand at the water’s edge. If I’d weighed five tons it should slow me a lot more. Even a torpedo doesn’t move through water very fast; if I chose an island with extensive shallows and a commanding view, I’d have plenty of warning. Well, that was the theory . . .
By the time I’d found my island, the sun was nearing trees that softened the line of bluffs to the west, and dark shadows crept along the river to make navigation chancy. It’s no joke if the Porsche’s front skirts nose into white water, especially if the turbo intake swallows much of it. I floated upslope past clumps of brush and cut power as my Porsche nosed into tall weeds at the low crest. I stretched my legs, taking the fishing equipment along for protective coloration, and confirmed my earlier decision. It was the best site available.
The island was maybe two hundred yards long; half that in width. Tailings stretched away along both sides of the river. Sand and gravel flanked the island on all sides and the Porsche squatted some twenty feet above the waterline. The nearest shallows were thirty yards from me and, accounting for the lousy traction, I figured Spot might cover the distance in four or five seconds. Surely, surely the hunter would be slower: In that time I could jump the Porsche to safety and put several rounds into a pursuer.
Then I bounced my hand off my forehead and made a quick calculation. If I hoped to be ready for damnall at any second, I absolutely must not let the turbo cool down. It takes roughly twelve seconds before the Porsche can go from dead cold to operational temperature, but if I kept it idling I’d be okay. Fuel consumption at idle: ten quarts an hour. I sighed and trudged back to the car, and went back to Folsom and refueled. Oh, all right: and had Oysters Hangtown with too much garlic and synthetic bacon. Hell; a guy’s gotta eat.
I cruised back to the island again by way of the tailings. I’d been half afraid the air cushion wouldn’t work along those steep piles of river-rounded stone. Now I was all the way afraid, because it only half worked. You can’t depend on ground effect pressure when the “ground” is full of holes and long slopes. It was like roller-coasting over an open cell sponge; controlling it was a now-you-have-it, now-you-don’t feeling. As sport it could be great fun. As serious pursuit it could be suicide.
Back among the tall weeds atop the island, I let the Porsche idle as I walked the perimeter again, casting with my pitiful used rig now and then for the sake of form. How any trout could be so naive as to hit my rusty spinner I will never know; I played the poor bastard until he finally threw the hook. Ordinarily I would’ve taken him home for an Almondine. But they spoil fast, and I wasn’t planning on any fires, and if Providence was watching maybe it would give me a good-guy point. God knows I hadn’t amassed many.
There were no pugmarks or prints in the sand but mine, and the tic tac toeprints of waterbirds. I returned to the Porsche and unwrapped the foil shielding from the rounded gray
disc that had already cost too many lives. It was smaller than a hockey puck, featureless but for a mounting nipple. It didn’t rattle, hum, or shine in the lengthening shadows, but it had been manufactured by some nonhuman intelligence, and it damned well gave me indigestion. I knew it was broadcasting as it lay in my hand even if I couldn’t detect it: calling like unto like, alien to alien, a message of-what? Distress? Vengeance? Or simply a call to the hunt? I imagined the hunter, responding to the call by cruising upriver in its own interstellar Porsche, as it were, and got busy with an idea that seemed primitive even to me, while the light was still good enough to work by.
I cut a pocket from my jacket, a little bag of aramon fiber that held the alien transmitter easily. Then, using a fishhook as a needle, I sewed the bag shut and tied it, judging the monofilament line to be twenty pound test. Finally I jammed the rod into the crotch of a low shrub, took the bag, and walked down the gentle slope kicking potential snags out of the way. I laid the bag in the open, hidden by weeds fifteen yards from the water’s edge, and eyeballed my field of fire from the Porsche that whined softly to me from above. It was ready to jump. So was I.
A light overcast began to shoulder the sun over the horizon, softening the shadows, making the transition to darkness imperceptible. I retreated to the car, grumbling. I knew there were special gadgets that Dana Martin’s puppeteers could have offered me. Night-vision glasses, mass-detector bugs to spread around, constant two-way tightband TV between yours truly and the feds-the list became a scroll in my head. The trouble was, it was all special, the kind of equipment that isn’t available to private citizens. The microvid was standard hardware for any TV stringer and its “mayday” module could be removed in an instant. If I wound up as a morgue statistic surrounded by superspy gadgetry, my government connection would be obvious. I didn’t know how Dana’s SAC would explain the alien hockey puck, but I knew they’d have a scenario for it. They always do.
I cursed myself for retreating down that mental trail, practically assuming failure, which could become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Night birds called in the distance, and told me the whispering whine of my turbo was loud only in my imagination. I released the folding floptop on the Porsche and let it settle noiselessly behind me, something I should have done earlier. I might be more vulnerable sitting in the open, but my eyes and ears were less restricted. My panoramic rearview commanded the upriver sweep, the big-bore automatic was in my hand, and the Porsche’s tanks were full-well, nearly full. What was I worried about?
I was worried about that standing ripple a stone’s throw off; hadn’t it moved? I was spooked by the occasional splash and plop of feeding trout; were they really trout? I was antsy as hell over the idea that I might spend the next eight hours this way, nervous as a frog on a hot skillet, strumming my own nerves like a first-timer on a fruitless stakeout.
Recalling other vigils, days and nights of boredom relieved only by paperbacks and the passing human zoo with its infinitely varied specimens, I began to relax. The trout became just trout, the ripple merely a ripple, the faint billiard-crack of stones across the channel to my left, only a foraging raccoon. Soon afterward, another series of dislodged stones drew my interest. I decided my ’coon was a deer, and split my attention between the tailings and the innocent channel to my right. I’d been foxed once or twice by scufflers who melted away while I was concentrating on a spider or a housecat.
A third muffled cascade of stones, directly across on my left, no more than fifty yards away across the narrow channel. With it came a faint odor, something like a wet dog, more like tobacco. I hoped to see a deer and that’s what I saw, the biggest damn’ buck I’d ever seen in those parts. It relieved me tremendously as it picked its way down toward the water. Though they’re actually pretty stupid, deer know enough to stay well clear of predators. The buck that moved to the shoreline hadn’t got that big by carelessness, I figured, which meant that the alien hunter almost certainly couldn’t be nearby.
Well, I said “almost.” In the back of my mind I’d been hoping to see something like that big buck; some evidence that the locale was safe for the likes of me. He picked his way along the shore, staring across in my general direction. As part of the dark mass of the Porsche among the scrub and weeds, I moved nothing but my eyes, happy to have him for a sentry on my left, and alert for anything that might be moving through the channel to my right.
It took the animal perhaps a minute to disappear up a ravine in the tailings-but long before that I began to feel a creeping dread. It came on with a rush as I strained to see the path of the buck along the water’s edge. Where the “buck” had made his stately promenade there was a new trail that gleamed wet in the overcast’s reflection from the city, and instead of dainty hoof-prints I saw deep pugmarks in the patches of sand. They seemed the size of dinner plates. I had wanted to see something safe, and I had seen it, and somewhere up in the tailings a fresh rumble told me the alien hunter was not far off.
I let the adrenal chill come, balled my fists and shuddered hard. If I couldn’t trust my eyes or instincts, whatthehell could I trust? My ears; the hallucination had been visual, my eldritch buck larger than life, the clatter of stones a danger sign I had chosen to misinterpret.
I knew that my hunter-and the deadly semantics of that phrase implied “the one who hunted me”-would make another approach. I didn’t know when or how. Damning the soft whistle of the turbo, I fought an urge to put my foot to the floor, idly wondering what my traitor eyes would offer next as a talisman of safety. I’d made some new decisions in the past minutes: one, that the first thing I saw coming toward me would get seven rounds of heavy artillery as fast as I could pull the trigger.
I waited. I heard a swirl of water to my right, thought hard of trout, expected a shark-sized rainbow to present itself. Nothing. Nothing visual, at least-but in the distance was an almost inaudible hollow slurp as if someone had pulled a fencepost from muck. I opened my mouth wide, taking long silent breaths to fuel the thump between my lungs, and made ready to hit the rewind stud that would reel in the transmitting bait a few feet. I was leaning slightly over the doorsill, the spinning rig in one hand, the Smith & Wesson in the other, staring toward the dim outlines of weeds near my lure. I saw nothing move.
I could hear a distant labored breathing, could feel an errant breeze fan the cold sweat on my forehead, yet the stillness seemed complete. A cool and faintly amused corner of my mind began to tease me for my terror at nothing.
The truth telegraphed itself to the tip of my spinning rod; the gentlest of tugs, the strike of a hatchery fingerling, and in a silent thunderclap of certainty I realized that despite the breeze I had not seen the high grass move either, was hallucinating the visual tableau. To see nothing was to see safety. Not only that: I felt safe, so safe I was smiling. So safe there was no danger in squeezing a trigger.
I fired straight along the fishing line. Yes, goddammit; blindly, since my surest instinct told me it was harmless fun.
When firing single rounds at night, you’re wise to fire blindly anyway. I mean, blink as you squeeze; the muzzle flash blinds anyone who’s looking toward it and by timing your blinks, you can maintain your night vision to some extent. In this case, I heard a hell of a lot, thought it all hilariously silly, but still I saw nothing move until after my second blink and the round I sent with it.
The second round hit something important because my vision and my sense of vulnerability returned in a flicker. Straight ahead of me, a great dark silvery-banded shape rolled aside with a mewling growl and crunch of brush, and I knew it would be on me in seconds. I floored the accelerator, hit the reel rewind stud, let the Porsche have its head for an instant holding the steering wheel steady with my knee.
Subjectively it seemed that the car took forever to gain momentum, pushing downslope through that rank tobacconist’s odor. I dropped the automatic in my lap to steer one-handed, desperately hoping to recover the tiny transmitter.
As my Porsche whooshed to
the water’s edge I saw the hunter’s bulk from the tail of my eye, its snuffling growl louder than its passage through the brush. I was twenty feet out from the shore when it reached the water and surged into the shallows after me. Only the downward slope of the channel saved me in that moment as the hunter submerged. A flash of something ivory-white, scimitar-curved, and the Porsche’s body panel drummed just behind the left front wheel skirt. Then I scooted for the far shore.
I turned upstream at the water’s edge, grasping the spinning rig, unwilling to admit that the spring-loaded rewind mechanism had reeled in nothing but bare line. The hunter had taken my lure; now I had no bait but myself. At the moment, I seemed to be enough.
Furious at my own panic, I spun the Porsche slowly so that it backed across the shallows. Apparently I could outrun the hunter, but it wasn’t giving up yet. A monstrous bow wave paced me now, a huge mass just below the water. It was within range of my handgun but you can’t expect a slug to penetrate anything after passing through a foot of water. I took my bearings again, seeing a sandbar behind me, and hovered toward it.
I saw massive humped shoulders cleave the bow wave, grabbed for my weapon, fired two more rounds that could not have missed, marveled at the hunter’s change of pace as it retreated into deeper water. There was nothing for me to shoot at now, no indication of the hunter’s line of travel. I angled out across the channel, knowing my pursuer was far too heavy to float and hoping “deep” was deep enough. Every instant I had the feeling that something would lash up through the Porsche’s bellypan until I heard the heavy snort from fifty yards downstream. I’d been afraid the damned thing could breathe underwater, but apparently it had to surface for breath just like any mammal. Chalk up one for my side.