Enoch felt the hair crawling on his scalp and he thrust the rifle out and ready. It was puzzling. He felt and knew the danger and as yet there was no danger. Still, the very air of this place—wherever it might be—seemed to crawl with danger.
He spun around and saw that close behind him the thick, dark woods climbed down the range of river hills, stopping at the sea of grass which flowed around the hillock on which he found himself. Off beyond the hills, dark purple in the air, loomed a range of mighty mountains that seemed to fade into the sky, but purple to their peaks, with no sign of snow upon them.
Two things came trotting from the woods and stopped at the edge of it. They sat down and grinned at him, with their tails wrapped neatly round their feet. They might have been wolves or dogs, but they were neither one. They were nothing he had ever seen or heard of. Their pelts glistened in the weak sunshine, as if they had been greased, but the pelts stopped at their necks, with their skulls and faces bare. Like evil old men, off on a masquerade, with their bodies draped in the hides of wolves. But the disguise was spoiled by the lolling tongues which spilled out of their mouths, glistening scarlet against the bone-white of their faces.
The woods was still. There were only the two gaunt beasts sitting on their haunches. They sat and grinned at him, a strangely toothless grin.
The woods was dark and tangled, the foliage so dark green that it was almost black. All the leaves had a shine to them, as if they had been polished to a special sheen.
Enoch spun around again, to look back towards the river, and crouched at the edge of the grass was a line of toadlike monstrosities, six feet long and standing three feet high, their bodies the color of a dead fish belly, and each with a single eye, or what seemed to be an eye, which covered a great part of the area just above the snout. The eyes were faceted and glowed in the dim sunlight, as the eyes of a hunting cat will glow when caught in a beam of light.
The hoarse bellowing still came from the river and in between the bellowing there was a faint, thin buzzing, an angry and malicious buzzing, as if a mosquito might be hovering for attack, although there was a sharper tone in it than in the noise of a mosquito.
Enoch jerked up his head to look into the sky and far in the depths of it he saw a string of dots, so high that there was no way of knowing what kind of things they were.
He lowered his head to look back at the line of squatting, toadlike things, but from the corner of his eye he caught the sense of flowing motion and swung back toward the woods.
The wolf-like bodies with the skull-like heads were coming up the hill in a silent rush. They did not seem to run. There was no motion of their running. Rather they were moving as if they had been squirted from a tube.
Enoch jerked up his rifle and it came into his shoulder, fitting there, as if it were a part of him. The bead settled in the rear-sight notch and blotted out the skull-like face of the leading beast. The gun bucked as he squeezed the trigger and, without waiting to see if the shot had downed the beast, the rifle barrel was swinging toward the second as his right fist worked the bolt. The rifle bucked again and the second wolf-like being somersaulted and slid forward for an instant, then began rolling down the hill, flopping as it rolled.
Enoch worked the bolt again and the spent brass case guttered in the sun as he turned swiftly to face the other slope.
The toadlike things were closer now. They had been creeping in, but as he turned they stopped and squatted, staring at him.
He reached a hand into his pocket and took out two cartridges, cramming them into the magazine to replace the shells he’d fired.
The bellowing down by the river had stopped, but now there was a honking sound that he could not place. Turning cautiously, he tried to locate what might be making it, but there was nothing to be seen. The honking sound seemed to be coming from the forest, but there was nothing moving.
In between the honking, he still could hear the buzzing and it seemed louder now. He glanced into the sky and the dots were larger and no longer in a line. They had formed into a circle and seemed to be spiraling downward, but they were still so high that he could not make out what kinds of things they were.
He glanced back toward the toadlike monsters and they were closer than they had been before. They had crept up again.
Enoch lifted the rifle and, before it reached his shoulder, pressed the trigger, shooting from the hip. The eye of one of the foremost of them exploded, like the splash a stone would make if thrown into water. The creature did not jump or flop. It simply settled down, flat upon the ground, as if someone had put his foot upon it and had exerted exactly force enough to squash it flat. It lay there, flat, and there was a big round hole where the eye had been and the hole was filling with a thick and ropy yellow fluid that may have been the creature’s blood.
The others backed away, slowly, watchfully. They backed all the way off the hillock and only stopped when they reached the grass edge.
The honking was closer and the buzzing louder and there could be no doubt that the honking was coming from the hills.
Enoch swung about and saw it, striding through the sky, coming down the ridge, stepping through the trees and honking dolefully. It was a round and black balloon that swelled and deflated with its honking, and jerked and swayed as it walked along, hung from the center of four stiff and spindly legs that arched above it to the joint that connected this upper portion of the leg arrangement with the downward-spraddling legs that raised it high above the forest. It was walking jerkily, lifting its legs high to clear the massive treetops before putting them down again. Each time it put down a foot, Enoch could hear the crunching of the branches and the crashing of the trees that it broke or brushed aside.
Enoch felt the skin along his spine trying to roll up his back like a window shade, and the bristling of the hair along the base of his skull, obeying some primordial instinct in its striving to raise itself erect into a fighting ruff.
But even as he stood there, almost stiff with fright, some part of his brain remembered that one shot he had fired and his fingers dug into his pocket for another cartridge to fill the magazine.
The buzzing was much louder and the pitch had changed. The buzzing was now approaching at tremendous speed.
Enoch jerked up his head and the dots no longer were circling in the sky, but were plunging down toward him, one behind the other.
He flicked a glance toward the balloon, honking and jerking on its stiltlike legs. It still was coming on, but the plunging dots were faster and would reach the hillock first.
He shifted the rifle forward, outstretched and ready to slap against his shoulder, and watched the falling dots, which were dots no longer, but hideous streamlined bodies, each carrying a rapier that projected from its head. A bill of sorts, thought Enoch, for these things might be birds, but a longer, thinner, larger, more deadly bird than any earthly bird.
The buzzing changed into a scream and the scream kept mounting up the scale until it set the teeth on edge and through it, like a metronome measuring off a beat, came the hooting of the black balloon that strode across the hills.
Without knowing that he had moved his arms, Enoch had the rifle at his shoulder, waiting for that instant when the first of the plunging monsters was close enough to fire.
They dropped like stones out of the sky and they were bigger than he had thought they were—big and coming like so many arrows aimed directly at him.
The rifle thudded against his shoulder and the first one crumpled, lost its arrow shape, folding up and falling, no longer on its course. He worked the bolt and fired again and the second one in line lost its balance and began to tumble—and the bolt was worked once more and the trigger pressed. The third skidded in the air and went off at a slant, limp and ragged, fluttering in the wind, falling toward the river.
The rest broke off their dive. They made a shallow turn and beat their way up into the sky,
great wings that were more like windmill vanes than wings thrashing desperately.
A shadow fell across the hillock and a mighty pillar came down from somewhere overhead, driving down to strike to one side of the hillock. The ground trembled at the tread and the water that lay hidden by the grass squirted high into the air.
The honking was an engulfing sound that blotted out all else and the great balloon was zooming down, cradled on its legs.
Enoch saw the face, if anything so grotesque and so obscene could be called a face. There was a beak and beneath it a sucking mouth and a dozen or so other organs that might have been the eyes.
The legs were like inverted V’s, with the inner stroke somewhat shorter than the outer and in the center of these inner joints hung the great balloon that was the body of the creature, with its face on the underside so that it could see all the hunting territory that might lie beneath it.
But now auxiliary joints in the outer span of legs were bending to let the body of the creature down so it could seize its prey.
Enoch was not conscious of putting up the rifle or of operating it, but it was hammering at his shoulder and it seemed to him that a second part of him stood off, apart, and watched the firing of the rifle—as if the figure that held and fired the weapon might be a second man.
Great gouts of flesh flew out of the black balloon and jagged rents suddenly tore across it and from these rents poured out a cloud of liquid that turned into a mist, with black droplets raining from it.
The firing pin clicked on an empty breech and the gun was empty, but there was no need of another shot. The great legs were folding, and trembling as they folded, and the shrunken body shivered convulsively in the heavy mist that was pouring out of it. There was no hooting now, and Enoch could hear the patter of the black drops falling from that cloud as they struck the short grass on the hill.
There was a sickening odor and the drops, where they fell on him, were sticky, running like cold oil, and above him the great structure that had been the stiltlike creature was toppling to the ground.
Then the world faded swiftly and was no longer there.
Enoch stood in the oval room in the faint glow of the bulbs. There was the heavy smell of powder, and all about his feet, glinting in the light, lay the spent and shining cases that had been kicked out of the gun.
He was back in the basement once again. The target shoot was over.
29
Enoch lowered the rifle and drew in a slow and careful breath. It always was like this, he thought. As if it were necessary for him to ease himself, by slow degrees, back to this world of his after the season of unreality.
One knew that it would be illusion when he kicked on the switch that set into motion whatever was to happen and one knew it had been illusion when it all had ended, but during the time that it was happening it was not illusion. It was as real and substantial as if it all were true.
They had asked him, he remembered, when the station had been built, if he had a hobby—if there was any sort of recreational facility they could build into the station for him. And he had said that he would like a rifle range, expecting no more than a shooting gallery with ducks moving on a chain or clay pipes rotating on a wheel. But that, of course, would have been too simple for the screwball architects, who had designed, and the slap-happy crew of workmen who had built the station.
At first they had not been certain what he meant by a rifle range and he’d had to tell them what a rifle was and how it operated and for what it might be used. He had told them about hunting squirrels on sunny autumn mornings and shaking rabbits out of brush piles with the first coming of the snow (although one did not use a rifle, but a shotgun, on the rabbits), about hunting coons of an autumn night, and waiting for the deer along the run that went down to the river. But he was dishonest and he did not tell them about that other use to which he’d put a rifle during four long years.
He’d told them (since they were easy folks to talk with) about his youthful dream of some day going on a hunt in Africa, although even as he told them he was well aware of how unattainable it was. But since that day he’d hunted (and been hunted by) beasts far stranger than anything that Africa could boast.
From what these beasts might have been patterned, if indeed they came from anywhere other than the imagination of those aliens who had set up the tapes which produced the target scene, he had no idea. There had not, so far in the thousands of times that he had used the range, been a duplication either in the scene nor in the beasts which rampaged about the scene. Although, perhaps, he thought, there might be somewhere an end of them, and then the whole sequence might start over and run its course once more. But it would make little difference now, for if the tapes should start rerunning there’d be but little chance of his recalling in any considerable detail those adventures he had lived so many years ago.
He did not understand the techniques nor the principle which made possible this fantastic rifle range. Like many other things, he accepted it without the need of understanding. Although, some day, he thought, he might find the clue which in time would turn blind acceptance into understanding—not only of the range, but of many other things.
He had often wondered what the aliens might think about his fascination with the rifle range, with that primal force that drove a man to kill, not for the joy of killing so much as to negate a danger, to meet force with a greater and more skillful force, cunning with more cunning. Had he, he wondered, given his alien friends concern in their assessment of the human character by his preoccupation with the rifle? For the understanding of an alien, how could one draw a line between the killing of other forms of life and the killing of one’s own? Was there actually a differential that would stand up under logical examination between the sport of hunting and the sport of war? To an alien, perhaps, such a differentiation would be rather difficult, for in many cases the hunted animal would be more closely allied to the human hunter in its form and characteristics than would many of the aliens.
Was war an instinctive thing, for which each ordinary man was as much responsible as the policy makers and the so-called statesmen? It seemed impossible, and yet, deep in every man was the combative instinct, the aggressive urge, the strange sense of competition—all of which spelled conflict of one kind or another if carried to conclusion.
He put the rifle underneath his arm and walked over to the panel. Sticking from a slot in the bottom of it was a piece of tape.
He pulled it out and puzzled out the symbols. They were not reassuring. He had not done so well.
He had missed that first shot he had fired at the charging wolf-thing with the old man’s face, and back there somewhere, in that dimension of unreality, it and its companion were snarling over the tangled, torn mass of ribboned flesh and broken bone that had been Enoch Wallace.
30
He went back through the gallery, with its gifts stacked there as other gifts, in regular human establishments might be stacked away in dry and dusty attics.
The tape nagged at him, the little piece of tape which said that while he had made all his other shots, he had missed that first one back there on the hillock. It was not often that he missed. And his training had been for that very type of shooting—the you-never-know-what-will-happen-next, the totally unexpected, the kill-or-be-killed kind of shooting that thousands of expeditions into the target area had taught him. Perhaps, he consoled himself, he had not been as faithful in his practice lately as he should have been. Although there actually was no reason that he should be faithful, for the shooting was for recreation only and his carrying of the rifle on his daily walks was from force of habit only and for no other reason. He carried the rifle as another man might take along a cane or walking stick. At the time he had first done it, of course, it had been a different kind of rifle and a different day. It then was no unusual thing for a man to carry a gun while out on a walk. But today was different and he wo
ndered, with an inner grin, how much talk his carrying a gun might have furnished the people who had seen him with it.
Near the end of the gallery he saw the black bulk of a trunk projecting from beneath the lower shelf, too big to fit comfortably beneath it, jammed against the wall, but with a foot or two of it still projecting out beyond the shelf.
He went on walking past it, then suddenly turned around. That trunk, he thought—that was the trunk which had belonged to the Hazer who had died upstairs. It was his legacy from that being whose stolen body would be brought back to its grave this evening.
He walked over to the shelving and leaned his rifle against the wall. Stooping he pulled the trunk clear of its resting place.
Once before, prior to carrying it down the stairs and storing it here beneath the shelves, he had gone through its contents, but at the time, he recalled, he’d not been too interested. Now, suddenly, he felt an absorbing interest in it.
He lifted the lid carefully and tilted it back against the shelves.
Crouching above the open trunk, and without touching anything to start with, he tried to catalogue the upper layer of its contents.
There was a shimmering cloak, neatly folded, perhaps some sort of ceremonial cloak, although he could not know. And atop the cloak lay a tiny bottle that was a blaze of reflected light, as if someone had taken a large-sized diamond and hollowed it out to make a bottle of it. Beside the cloak lay a nest of balls, deep violet and dull, with no shine at all, looking for all the world like a bunch of table-tennis balls that someone had cemented together to make a globe. But that was not the way it was, Enoch remembered, for that other time he had been entranced by them and had picked them up, to find that they were not cemented, but could be freely moved about, although never outside the context of their shape. One ball could not be broken from the mass, no matter how hard one might try, but would move about, as if buoyed in a fluid, among all the other balls. One could move any, or all, of the balls, but the mass remained the same. A calculator of some sort, Enoch wondered, but that seemed only barely possible, for one ball was entirely like another, there was no way in which they could be identified. Or at least, no way to identify them by the human eye. Was it possible, he wondered, that identification might be possible to a Hazer’s eye? And if a calculator, what kind of a calculator? Mathematical? Or ethical? Or philosophical? Although that was slightly foolish, for who had ever heard of a calculator for ethics or philosophy? Or, rather, what human had ever heard? More than likely it was not a calculator, but something else entirely. Perhaps a sort of game—a game of solitaire?
The Works of Clifford D. Simak Volume Two Page 73