Antonio’s eyes bugged out. He thought instantly of magic. Black magic. He could not imagine dissection in the spirit of scientific inquiry. To him, anything that killed and then acted in this fashion could only come from the devil.
He gasped and fled, squawking. When he had run a good hundred yards Salazar caught up to him, very much astonished. He overtook his master and went on ahead to see what had scared the man so. He made casts to right and left, and then went in a conscientious circle all around the flock under his care. Presently he came back to Antonio, his tongue lolling out, to assure him that everything was all right. But Antonio was packing, with shaking hands and a sweat-streaked brow.
In no case is the neighborhood of a mountain lion desirable for a man with a flock of sheep. But this was no ordinary mountain lion. Why, Salazar—honest, stouthearted Salazar—did not scent a mountain lion in those tracks. He would have mentioned it vociferously if he had. So this was beyond nature. The lion was un fantasmo—or worse. Antonio’s thoughts ran to were-tigers, ghost-lions, and sheer Indian devils. He packed, while Salazar scratched fleas and wondered what was the matter.
They got the flock on the move. The sheep made idiotic efforts to disperse and feed placidly where they were. Salazar rounded them up and drove them on. It was hard work. But even Antonio helped in frantic energy—which was unusual.
Near noon, four miles from their former grazing ground, there were mountain peaks all around them. Some were snow-capped, and there were vistas of illimitable distance everywhere. It was very beautiful indeed, but Antonio did not notice. Salazar came upon buzzards again. He chased them with loud barkings from the meal they reluctantly shared with blowflies and ants.
This time it wasn’t a rabbit. It was a coyote. It had been killed and most painstakingly taken apart to provide at a glance all significant information about the genus Canis, species latrans, in the person of an adult male coyote. It was a most enlightening exhibit. It proved conclusively that there was a third type of animal, structurally different from both mountain lions and rabbits, which had the same general type of nervous system, with a mass of nerve tissue in one large mass in a skull, which nerve tissue contained the same high percentage of the desired hormone as the previous specimens. Had it been recorded by a tiny colored flame in the hidden ship—the flame was now being much admired by small red bugs and tiny spiders—it would have been proof that the Qul-En would find ample supplies on Earth of the complex hormone on which the welfare of their race now depended. Some members of the Qul-En race, indeed, would have looked no farther. But sampling which involved only three separate species and gave no proof of their frequency was not quite enough. The being in the synthetic mountain lion was off in search of further evidence.
Antonio was hardly equipped to guess at anything of this sort. Salazar led him to the coyote carcass. It had been neatly halved down the breastbone. One half the carcass had been left intact. The other half was completely anatomized, and the brain had been beautifully dissected and spread out for measurement. Antonio realized that intelligence had been at work. But—again—he saw only the pad-tracks of a mountain lion. And he was literally paralyzed by horror. He was superstitious to the core. He cherished not only the relatively mild superstitions of the Spanish but the other blood-curdling terrors of his pagan Indian ancestors. And a man who really believes in Aztec demons will consider a mere werewolf as practically a household pet by comparison!
Antonio was scared enough to be galvanized into unbelievable energy. He would have fled gibbering to Ensenada Springs, some forty miles as the crow flies, but to flee would be doom itself. The devils who did this sort of work liked—he knew—to spring upon a man alone. But they can be fooled.
The Qul-En in the artificial mountain lion was elated. To the last quivering appendage on the least small tentacle of its body, the pilot of the facsimile animal was satisfied. It had found good evidence that the desired nervous system and concentration of the desired hormone in a single mass of nerve tissue was normal on this planet! The vast majority of animals should have it. Even the local civilized race might have skulls with brains in them, and from the cities observed from the stratosphere that race might be the most numerous fair-sized animal on the planet!
It was to be hoped for, because the taking of hormone specimens from cities would be most convenient. Long-continued existence under the artificial conditions of civilization—a hundred thousand years of it, no less—had brought about exhaustion of the Qul-En’s ability to create all their needed hormones in their own bodies. Tragedy awaited the race unless the most critically needed substance was found. But now it had been! So the tiny explorer in the seeming mountain lion was very joyful and impatient to finish the gathering of evidence and take the good news home.
Antonio saw it an hour later and wanted to shriek. It looked exactly like a mountain lion, but he knew it was not flesh and blood because it moved in impossible bounds. No natural creature could leap sixty feet. The mountain-lion shape did. But it was convincingly like its prototype to the eye. It stopped and regarded the flock of sheep, made soaring progression to the front of the flock and came back again. Salazar ignored it. Neither he nor the sheep scented carnivorous animal life. Antonio hysterically concluded that it was invisible to them. He began an elaborate, lunatic pattern of behavior to convince the lion that magic was at work against it, too.
He began to babble to his sheep with infinite politeness. He spoke to blank-eyed creatures as Senor Gomez and Senora Onate. He chatted feverishly with a wicked-eyed ram, whom he called Senor Guttierez. A clumsy, wobbling lamb almost upset him, and he scolded the infant sheep as Pepito. He lifted his hat with great gallantry to a swollen ewe, hailing her as Senora Garcia, and observed in a quavering voice that the flies were very bad today. He moved about in his flock, turning the direction of its march and acting as if surrounded by a crowd of human beings. This should at least confuse the devil whom he saw. And while he chatted with seeming joviality the sweat poured down his face in streams.
Salazar took no part in this deception. The sheep were fairly docile, once started, and he was able to pause occasionally to scratch, and once even to do a luxurious, thorough job on that place in his back between his hind legs which is so difficult to reach. There was only one time when he had any difficulty. That was when there was a sort of eddying of the sheep ahead. There were signs of panic. Salazar went trotting to the spot. He found sheep milling stupidly and rams pawing the ground defying they had no idea what, and Salazar found a deer carcass on the ground and the smell of fresh blood in the air and the sheep upset because of it. He drove them on past, barking where barking would serve and nipping flanks where necessary, and afterward disgustedly tonguing bits of wool out of his mouth.
The sheep went on. But Antonio, when he came to the deer carcass, went icy-cold in the most exquisite terror. The deer had been killed by a mountain lion—there were tracks about. Then it had been cut into as if by a dissectors scalpel, but the job was incomplete. Actually, the pseudo mountain lion had been interrupted by the approach of the flock. There were hardly blowflies on the spot as yet. Antonio came to it as he chatted insanely with a sheep, with sore eyes and a halo of midges about its head, whom he addressed as Senorita Carmen. But when he saw the deer his throat clicked shut. He was speechless.
But he was also half crazed by fear. To pass a creature laid out for magical ceremony was doom indubitable, but Antonio craved so terribly to escape this haunted place that he acted from pure desperation. He recited charms which were stark paganism and would involve a heavy penance when next he went to confession. He performed other actions, equally deplorable. When he went on, the deer was quite spoiled for neat demonstration of the skeletal, circulatory, muscular and especially the nervous system and brain structure of genus Cervus species dama, specimen an adult doe. Antonio had piled over the deer all the brush within reach, had poured over it the kerosene he had for his night-lantern, and had set fire to the heap with incantations that
made it a wholly impious sacrifice to quite nonexistent heathen demons. But he was frantic with fear.
Salazar, trotting back to the front of the flock after checking on Antonio and the rear guard, wrinkled his nose and sneezed as he went past the blaze again. And Antonio tottered on after him.
But Antonio’s impiety had done no good. The tawny shape bounded back into sight among the boulders on the hillside. It leaped with infinite grace for impossible distances. Naturally! No animal can be as powerful as a machine, and the counterfeit mountain lion was a machine vastly better than men could make. It was a traveling and exploring—and dissecting—mechanism for the use of a very small being of the Qul-En, who was now zestfully regarding the flock of sheep. It looked upon Salazar and Antonio with no less interest. The biped, observed the Qul-En, had initiated a primitive chemical process at the carcass of the last specimen. Why? And the small, four-legged creature which ran about the flock? The Qul-En explorer was an anatomist and organic chemist rather than a zoologist proper, but it guessed that the dog was probably a scavenger and the man had some other symbiotic relationship to the flock.
Salazar, the dog, was done a grave injustice in that estimate. Even Antonio was given less than he deserved. In his panic he had turned a specimen prepared for magic into an utterly pagan sacrifice—a burnt offering to placate a purely mythical devil out of Aztec folklore. Now he was gray with terror. The blood in his veins turned to ice as he saw the false mountain lion bounding back upon the hillside. No normal wild creature would display itself so openly. Antonio considered himself both doomed and damned. Presently the thing would come and carry him off, shrieking, to horrors unspeakable. Stark despair filled him. But with shaking hands and no hope at all he carved a deep cross on the point of a bullet for his ancient rifle. Licking his lips, he made similar incisions on other bullets in reserve.
The Qul-En vehicle halted. The flock had been counted. Now to select specimens and get to work. There were six new animal types to be dissected for the nervous organism yielding the looked-for hormone. Two kinds of sheep—male and female, and adult and immature of each kind—the biped and the dog. Then a swift survey to survey the probable total number of such animals available, and…
Antonio saw that the devil mountain lion was still. He got down on one knee, fervently crossed himself and fed a cross-marked bullet into the chamber of his rifle. He lined up the sights on the unearthly creature. The lion facsimile watched him interestedly. The sight of a rifle meant nothing to the Qul-En, naturally. But Antonio’s kneeling posture was strange. It was part, perhaps, of the pattern of conduct which had led him to start that oxidation process about the deer specimen. The Qul-En, of course were far too civilized to make use of so crude a technical aid as fire, but the pilot of the mountain lion had seen a flame once, in a scientific demonstration of oxidation. He had recognized the same reaction in the crackling blaze above the deer.
Antonio fired. His hands trembled, and the rifle shook. Nothing happened. He fired again and again, gasping in his fear. And he missed every time.
The cross-marked bullets crashed into red earth and splashed from naked rock all about the Qul-En vehicle. When sparks spat from a flint pebble the pilot of the mountain lion realized that there was actual danger here. It could have slaughtered man and dog and sheep by the quiver of a tentacle, but that would have ruined them as specimens. And its discoveries had been so splendidly heartening that it did not wish to delay its return to its home planet to hunt for more. To avoid spoiling specimens it intended to take later, the Qul-En put the mountain-lion shape into a single, magnificent leap. It soared more than a hundred feet uphill and over the crest at the top. Then it was gone.
Salazar ran barking after the thing at which Antonio had fired. He sniffed at the place from which it had taken off. There was no animal smell there at all. He sneezed and then trotted down again. Antonio lay flat on the ground, his eyes hidden, babbling. He had seen irrefutable proof that the mountain lion was actually a fiend from hell.
Salazar approached him, cautiously. He sniffed. Antonio screamed. Salazar licked his hand placatingly. Then Antonio lifted his head and stared affrightedly about him, then struggled feebly to his feet. Salazar stood beside him, wagging his tail. Antonio sobbed. His flock was going on ahead. He tottered after it. He panted pure terror at every breath, and he passionately repented all his sins. Antonio’s nerves were in bad shape.
Behind the hill-crest the Qul-En moved away. It had not given up its plan of selecting specimens from the flock, of course, nor of anatomizing the man and dog. It was genuinely interested in the biped’s novel method of defense. It dictated its own version of the problems raised on a tight beam to the wavering, color-changing flame. Why did not the biped prey on the sheep if it could kill them? What was the symbiotic relationship of the dog to the man and the sheep? The three varieties of animal associated freely. The Qul-En dictated absorbed speculations. Then it hunted for other specimens. It found a lobo wolf and killed it, and verified that this creature also could be a source of hormones. It slaughtered a chipmunk and made a cursory examination. Its ray-beam had pretty well destroyed the creature’s brain tissue, but by analogy of structure it should be a source also.
In conclusion, the Qul-En made a note via the wavering pinpoint of flame that the existence of a hormone-bearing nervous system, centralized in a single mass of hormone-bearing nerve tissue inside a bony structure, seemed universal among the animals of this planet. Therefore it would merely examine the four other types of large animal it had discovered and take off to present its findings to the Center of its race. With a modification of the ray-beam to kill specimens without destroying the desired hormone, the Qul-En could unquestionably secure as much of the hormone as the race could possibly need. Concentrations of the local civilized race in cities should make large-scale collection of the hormone practical unless that civilized race was an exception to the general nervous structure of all animals so far observed.
This was dictated to the pinpoint flame, and the flame faithfully wavered and changed color to make the record. But the tape did not record it. A rather large beetle had jammed the tape-reel. It was squashed in the process, but it effectively messed up the recording apparatus. Even before the tape stopped moving, though, the record had become defective. Tiny spiders had spun webs. Earwigs got themselves caught. The flame, actually, throbbed and pulsed restlessly in a cobwebby coating of gossamer and tiny insects. Silverfish were established in the plastic lining of the Qul-En ship. Beetles multiplied enormously in the air-refresher chemical. Moth larvae already gorged themselves on the nest material of the intrepid explorer outside. Ants were busy on the food stores. Mites crawled into the ship to prey on their larger fellows, and a praying mantis or so had entered to eat their smaller ones. There was an infinite number of infinitesimal flying things dancing in the dark, and larger spiders busily spun webs to snare them. Flies of various sorts were attracted by odors coming out of the ventilator-opening, centipedes rippled sinuously inside, and…
Night fell upon the world. The pseudo mountain lion roamed the wild, keeping in touch with the tide of baa-ing sheep now headed for the lowlands. It captured a field mouse and verified the amazing variety of planetary forms containing brain tissue rich in hormones. But the sheep could not be driven at night. To move them farther when stars came out became impossible. The Qul-En returned to select its specimens in the dark, with due care not to allow the man to use his strange means of defense. It found the flock bedded down.
Salazar and Antonio rested. They had driven the sheep as far as it was possible to drive them that day. Though he was sick with fear and weak with terror, Antonio had struggled on until Salazar could do no more. But Antonio did not leave the flock. The sheep were in some fashion a defense—if only a diversion—against the creature which so plainly was not flesh and blood.
He made a fire, too, because he could not think of staying in the dark. Moths came and fluttered about the flames, but he did not no
tice. He tried to summon courage. After all, the unearthly thing had fled from bullets marked with a cross, even though they missed. With light to shoot by he might make a bull’s-eye. So Antonio sat shivering by his fire, cutting deeper crosses into the points of his bullets, his throat dry and his heart pounding as he listened to the small noises of the sheep and the faint, thin sounds of the wilderness.
Salazar dozed by the fire. He had had a very hard day, but even so he slept lightly. When something howled, very far away, his head went up instantly and he listened. But it was nowhere near. He scratched himself and relaxed. Once something hissed, and he opened his eyes.
Then he heard a curious, strangled “Baa-a-a.” Instantly he was racing for the spot. Antonio stood up, his rifle clutched fast. Salazar vanished. Then the man heard an outburst of infuriated barking. Salazar was fighting something, and he was not afraid of it. He was enraged. Antonio moved toward the spot, his rifle ready.
The barking was moving toward the slopes beyond the flock. It grew more enraged and more indignant still. Then it stopped. There was silence. Antonio called, trembling. Salazar came padding up to him, whining and snarling angrily. He could not tell Antonio that he had come upon something in the shape of a mountain lion, but which was not—it didn’t smell right—carrying a mangled sheep away from its fellows. He couldn’t explain that he’d given chase, but the shape made such monstrous leaps that he was left behind and pursuit was hopeless. Salazar made unhappy, disgusted, disgraced noises to himself. He bristled. He whined bitterly. He kept his ears pricked up and he tried twice to dart off on a cast around the whole flock, but Antonio called him back. Antonio felt safer with the dog beside him.
First Contacts: The Essential Murray Leinster Page 16