Fear That Man

I

Long ago, shortly after my mother’s blood was sluiced from the streets of Changeover and her body burned upon a pyre outside of town, I suffered what the psychologists call a trauma. That seems like a very inadequate word to me.

To understand this “trauma,” one should know some of the events that preceded it. The townsfolk came in the middle of the night and took her, decapitated her, stuffed a cross cut from stale bread into her dead mouth, and charred her on fire fed by the boughs of a dogwood tree. I was five years old at the time.

Those were the days when men still killed, before Hope sprang up as the capital of our galaxy and pushed forth a society where no man killed another man, where sanity ruled. That was a thousand years ago, a century after Galactic War I, before Eternity Combine gave us immortality. And worst of all, that was Earth. The rest of the galaxy was staggering to its feet, aware that something had gone amiss in the great chauvinistic dreams that had dominated for so many hundreds of years. Hope was an idea born in the brighter minds, a last possibility for the survival of what Man should be, a dream of kinglessness, of Utopia unmarred, a last chance but the best chance ever for mankind. Yet Earthmen were still hunting witches.

To hide me from those who would destroy me because my mother was a mutant who could lift pencils (only pencils and scraps of paper!) with her mind, my grandparents locked me in a closet of their house. Smells: mothballs, old rubber rainshoes, yellowed magazine paper. Sights: dark ghosts of wools and cottons hanging about, imagined spiders scuttering viciously through the darkness.

And I wept. There was little else to do.

On the third day, the witch-hunters were certain that I had perished in the fire of the house, for they could not find me and trusted my grandparents because — as a cover against the day he knew was coming — my grandfather had belonged to the witch-hunting group. So it was that on the third day I was brought forth from the closet and into the parlor where my grandmother kissed me and dried my eyes on her gray, coarse apron. On that same day, Grandfather came to me where I sat with my grandmother, his huge and calloused hands folded over each other, concealing something. “I’ve a surprise for you, Andy.”

I smiled.

He took one hand from the other, revealing a lump of coal with eyes a shade darker than the rest of it. “Caesar!” I cried. Caesar was my myna bird, rescued in some unknown, unknowable, miraculous fashion from the holocaust of the exorcism.

I ran to Grandfather, and as I ran, the bird screeched in imitation: “Andyboy, Andyboy.” I stopped, my feet suddenly rocks too heavy to lift another inch, and I stared at it. It fluttered a wing. “Andyboy, Andyboy, An—”

And I started to scream. It was an involuntary scream, torn from my lungs, bursting through my lips, roaring madly into the room. The myna’s words were mockings of my mother’s words. The inflection, though certainly not the tone, was perfect. Memories of my mother flooded me: warm kitchens to burned corpse to storytelling sessions to a headless, bloodless body. Bad and good memories mixed, mingled, blew each other to larger than life reality in my memory. I turned and ran from the parlor. Wings beat against me. Caesar was a stuck recording.

Grandfather was running too, but he did not seem to be Grandfather any longer. Instead, he had become one of the witch-hunters shooting out the windows of our house, screaming for my mother’s death.

Running through the half open cellar door, I stumbled down the steps, almost crashing down to a broken neck on the concrete, flailing at the hideous wings and the sharp orange beak that tried to be her lips. I locked myself in the coal room while Caesar battered himself to tatters against the thick door. When Grandfather finally broke it down, I was on my knees with my head against the floor, unable to scream in anything but a hoarse whisper. My knuckles were raw from pounding them into the concrete, my blood a polka-dot pattern on the smooth grayness.

I was taken to bed, nursed, recovered, and sent off-planet to an aunt’s house in another solar system where men were coming of age faster. I grew up, took Eternity Combine’s treatments in one of the first test groups, and outlived Caesar, Grandfather, witch-hunters, and all.

Years later at one of Congressman Horner’s parties, a psychologist told me it had all been a trauma concerning death and my new perception of it. I told him trauma was a terribly inadequate word and went off to dance with a particularly lovely young woman.

Now, even years after that, I was experiencing fear much the same as the fear that day so long ago when I was five and my mother was three days dead. It was the fear of death, stinking, oppressive, and omnipresent. I am always afraid at the beginning of a hunt. It made no difference, this day, that I had gone on two hundred and fifteen others; it was this one that was immediate and frightening. If I was killed in these jungles, Eternity Combine could never reach me in time to restore me to life. If I died here, I stayed dead. Forever is a long, long time.

Why the risk? It does seem strange that, in a galaxy so diversified, so full of things to do and ways to earn a living, anyone would chose something as dangerous as Beast hunting. But there are always reasons. Man, a part of nature, is never totally illogical. He can generally come up with reasons for his actions. Sometimes, of course, the reasons may give rise to questions… Anyway, Crazy had a good reason for coming on this hunt: this Beast had killed his only brother, who had been on the last team that had gone after it. Crazy wanted revenge. No Hamlet, but every bit as determined. Lotus came because she can’t leave us if she knows we’re endangering ourselves. She would go insane waiting for us, so she comes along. Me? Money, in part. There was an enormous bounty on this Beast, and I was determined it would be one-third mine. Besides, I was born on Earth and the faults of the place partially warped me. I like to kill. Not anything but Beasts, you understand. I could never bring myself to murder another human being. But Beasts… Well, Beasts are different…

I loaded the last of the cameras into the floater, looked around for the others. “Lotus! Crazy! Let’s get a move on!”

“All right, all right,” Crazy said, stomping down the steps to the outside entrance of the guest house. We were staying on Congressman Horner’s Earth ranch under the supervision of his aide, Sam Penuel, an altogether strange man, until the completion of the job. Horse, being as he weighed three hundred pounds plus fifty and was blessed with hooves, did not use the highly polished, slippery indoor steps of glittering plastiglass. Oh, his full name was Crazy Horse. No it wasn’t, either. Jackson Lincoln Puicca was his given name — after the famous general, the famous president and humanitarian, and the famous scientist. But we called him Crazy Horse — mostly because he was crazy — and because he sure did look like a horse.

Crazy was a natural mutant, not a product of the Artificial Wombs. One day there had been a nuclear war spreading through the civilized galaxy. Several generations later, there was Crazy — muscular, bright, shaggy-headed, and horse-behinded. Not a Beast, mind you; a valuable man on a bounty hunt.

“Where’s Lotus?” I asked.

“Out picking berries somewhere. You know her.”

“You know what about her?” Lotus asked as she drifted over a nearby corral fence, her blue-fog wings fluttering gently as she glided on the breezes. “What would you say of me behind my back, Crazy?”

Crazy Horse stomped his hooves, folded his hands in supplication. “What could I say behind your back, pretty one, when you are possessed of such marvelous ears?”

Lotus settled on the ground next to me. She fingered the delicate, elongated shells that were her elfin ears, looked at Crazy. “Yours are bigger. I don’t think I should make nasty remarks about another person’s ears if mine were distended bladders like yours.”

Crazy snorted, shook his huge head so that his wild mane of hair flopped, fluffed, and covered his baggy ears.

Satisfied, Lotus said, “I’m on time, I trust.”

“Trouble is,” I said, putting an arm around her tiny waist (twenty inches) and looking down on her small form (four feet eleven), “is that you know damned well we’d wait for you all day and not be angry.”

“That’s cause I’m the prettiest girl around,” she snapped, her green-blue eyes adance.

“Not much competition on an all-male ranch,” Crazy muttered.

“And you, Crazy, are the handsomest horse I’ve seen here.” She smiled, and she said it so that he didn’t know whether to be mad or to laugh. So he laughed.

That was Lotus. She was cute as Christmas multiplied by Halloween and Easter — and she knew it, which wasn’t always so bad because she could pull her own weight easily enough. Aside from being one of the best botanists specializing in post-A-war plants, she was our aerial reconnaissance expert since she could fly ahead, land where a floater would never fit, and let us know what was dangerous or interesting that stood in our way. You say, But why a botanist on a bounty hunt? Well, true, we usually stalked killer animals that disturbed the small towns on the rural (since the war) planets. But now and again there were plants which were every bit as deadly as the Beasts. There were those walking plants on Fanner II that latched onto the nearest warm-blooded thing (often human), lashed roots around it, grew through it all night long, absorbed it, and walked away with the sunrise — a few inches taller, sporting a few new leaf buds, and satisfied until darkness came again. Which was every nine hours on Fanner II. Thus, Lotus.

“Let’s get going,” I said. “I want these cameras set before dark.”

“After you, Butterfly,” Crazy said, bowing as low as he could, considering his less-than-human posterior, and sweeping his arm in a courtly gesture of chivalry.

Lotus breezed into the floater like a puff of smoke. Crazy followed, and I went last, dogging the door behind. We had three seats across the front of that tub — Lotus between us. I was pilot.

A floater is a round ball with an inner and outer hull, each independent of the other. This way, if you ever meet an eighteen foot bat, like on Capistrano, you can have an outer hull beaten all to hell and never feel it inside or let it deflect the floater, shunting you off your course. The inner hull carries the drive engines.

I pulled back on the stick, lifted us, set out for the forest-jungle that had spread outward from the Harrisburg Crater. The screens gave us a view of the woods: ugly, festering, and at the edges gray-green ferns with thick leaves interlaced with spidery fluff that held heavy brown spoor balls. Later, these gave way to giant trees that choked the ferns and did away with them but were still just as gray and lifeless.

“You haven’t said much about this Beast that killed Garner,” Crazy said. Garner was his brother. His twin, in fact, though Garner was perfectly normal.

“I’m trying not to think about it.”

“Tell us,” Lotus said, pulling the thin membrane of her wings about her like a cloak. “Tell us all that Mr. Penuel told you.”

“Mainly, we’re the fifth team to be sent after this Beast.”

“The others?” Crazy asked.

“Garner wasn’t its only victim. There were twenty-two in the other four teams all totaled. Twenty were never seen again.”

“The other two?” Lotus asked.

“Rescue parties brought them out — in pieces.”

Below, the world was gray-green…

Five miles into the forest where the huge, gnarled trees were dominant, I set the floater down in a small, rare clearing. Lotus went ahead to check for other clearings and crossings where it might be wisest to place the cameras and their triggers. If anything passes the electric eyes set ten feet before the cameras, it starts the film spinning. Chances were, we would get plenty of strange things on the film, but our killer would be easy to spot in the crowd. We had three descriptions from townspeople — all three making him around eight feet tall, man-like, and ugly. There were a lot of things that fit the first and last parts, but few of these Beasts were man-like. None of the descriptions gave any indication, however, why twenty-two experienced bounty hunters had not killed it.

Crazy was setting up the electric eyes and stringing the trip wire back to me, concealing it with a fine layer of dust. I was rigging the cameras in the rocks and bushes. Both of us had our backs to the same part of the forest.

That was a mistake…

II

Crazy would have heard it first except he still had his hair down over his ears, hindering his usually keen hearing. When I heard it — the snapping and low, fierce keening — it was almost on top of us. Whirling, I brought my gun up…

And up and up and up… Damn, was it big! Big and quiet, which is a combination we hit upon more often than you might think. It stared down through the trees at us, thirty feet high, its bulbous body burdened by an underslung belly which was slashed, in turn, by a wet, wicked mouth that opened and closed over us like an enormous vise. No long, slow throat-to-stomach affairs. Just open up and—slurp! Spiders make me sick. They are a common mutation, and they are always hideous and revolting. This one made me sicker than usual. There were ugly, cancerous scabs all over it, pus-coated hairs hanging heavily from each ripe disease pocket.

“Don’t shoot yet!” I told Crazy. But he didn’t have to be told. More than once, he had seen these things react reflexively to a shot, leap in and chomp up whatever was holding the gun. A big spider is not as large as it looks, because it is mostly spindly legs which can squeeze together fast into a little ball, drop the spider fifteen feet in height, and let it scuttle in under the trees after you. Spiders are handled with gentle, loving care until you’re ready to kill them. Any other way, they’ll kill you first.

“The rocks,” I said quietly, watching the multi-prismed eye watch me. Very slowly, and with grace, we edged our way along the rocks where I had been setting that particular camera. Tiptoes and marshmallow footfalls…

The spider watched, swiveling its strangely tiny head to follow us, a row of fine hairs atwiddle below its eyes. Except for those hairs, it seemed petrified, immobile. In a split second — even before the splitting could be finished — it could be moving faster than a man could ever run.

The rocks we were negotiating were actually the ruins of centuries, tossed here by the A-blast that had leveled Harrisburg, a provincial capital at that time. It was a vast tumble of caves, valleys, mountains of bricks and stone and powdered mortar.

Moving a tentative step, the spider settled massive legs through the brush with a minimum of noise, keened a bit louder, an out-of-tune harmonica.

Ulysses, you were a punk hero!

We reached a place where the rock broke open, forming a small valley, closing again four hundred feet away and ending at the mouth of a dark tunnel that led further into the ruins — a tunnel too small for a Beast like this, but not too small for Crazy and me. “Now,” I whispered. “Run!”

We turned, loped into the valley, cutting ourselves off from the view of the spider. Crazy reached the tunnel first. His legs are often an asset when speed is needed — but, God, you should see him try to dance!

I was halfway down the valley when the spider mounted the one valley wall and looked down on us. The colossal red eyes glittered accusingly. Supper had run away. Bad, bad. Then the belly appeared, mandibles open and clacking. Clackinty-clack-clack!

Fsstphss! Crazy opened fire with his vibra pistol, caught on of the legs. The spider drew its member up, twiddled it madly. Crazy fired again, caught another leg and blew it completely off. The huge limb bounced over the rocks, wedged between two of them, and continued squirming, not yet aware that it was loose, a thing away from its owner and soon to rot.

I ran.

The spider started down into the valley.

I pressed my aching lungs and screaming muscles to even faster operation.

Crazy fired again, caught the Beast in the side, tore it open. But spiders don’t bleed, and a fist-sized hole wasn’t stopping this baby.

Besides, we had overlooked, in our haste, a very important thing: tunnels make nice homes — for things. Crazy was raising his pistol for a shot at the giant head when a pinkish grub-like creature came wriggling out of the tunnel in defense of its abode, casting off three inch, hard thorns, one of which struck Crazy’s arm, sent him tumbling, his gun lost in the stones.

The spider screeched insanely, head hobbling, stomach clacking.

The grub, suddenly a more immediate danger, hissed, arched its ribbed back, and flung itself forward in spasmodic lurches that were immediately followed by the jerking release of the spines that in some places, were hurled with enough force to penetrate rocks. I ran to Crazy, tried dragging him to the walls where the Beasts could attack only from the front. But dragging three hundred and fifty pounds of unconscious horse-man is harder to do than it sounds — and it sounds pretty damn hard!

I crouched behind Crazy Horse, back to the spider, pulled the spine from his arm. There was a lot of blood pumping out of that arm. Entirely too much blood. Nothing there to stop it with, either. I turned to the grub, looked for a vulnerable spot. Most of its belly was calloused, but the first two segments always seemed to be aloft in the manner of a “running” snake. I aimed my vibra-pistol at these first two soft segments, pulled the trigger and held it down. The worm went kicking into the air, turning over and over, tossing off spines that shot over our heads. It crashed back to the ground when I stopped firing, was very still.

But the spider…

It was at the opposite end of the valley now, having used the grub’s diversions as a chance to make an easy entry. Behind it, anchored to the rubble, was a thin web structure. It was getting ready to snare us.

Crazy moaned, kicked a foot, lapsed into unconsciousness again, blood all over him, face twisted strangely.

The spider leaped.

All those legs just tensed, and it was moving through the air, hitting the ground, running. Silent.

I fired.

The shot caught it in the legs, folded the spindly members up under it, and sent it tumbling backward like a greasy dust ball caught in a strong draft. After it came to rest, it lay still so long that I thought it was dead. But finally it stirred, stood, and clung to the rubble wall, watching me. I was mentally charting all possible pathways of advancement for it, trying to anticipate its next move. But I didn’t expect the silk to come spitting out like liquid smoke from so great a distance. Lazily, it twirled toward us, undulating like a snake formed of mist. The spider could, it seemed, direct two of these lines at the same time, for two of them approached. One struck the wall to the left, curling over a rocky projection halfway up; the second hit an equal height on the opposite wall, lacing through loosely stacked rubble and welding its hold into a solid position. Then the Beast began swinging the lines, wrapping them back and forth from wall to wall, closing us in.

I sat on the ground, braced my back against Crazy, thumbed the controls of the pistol to full power. The web dropped over us, fouled my hand. I had to spend several valuable seconds untangling the sticky mess from the gun and my fingers. When I raised the weapon again, the spider had advanced fifty feet. I fired. But the web was so dense now that it absorbed the blast, diffused it, dissolved it. Still, I could not dissolve it as fast as the spider could make it.

Another filament dropped across my back. Another curled over my right ear, dropped across my shoulder and down to wind at my waist. Crazy was almost covered. I shot it again. The web absorbed it. The web dissolved. The web was replaced. The spider was keening more frantically than ever, no longer quiet in its advance, now assured of victory, now jubilant. Several sticky strands lashed around me, pinning my arms to my chest. More. Still more. I was being cocooned. The gun dropped out of my hands as circulation was cut down in my arms, my hands made numb and useless.

A strand crossed my face, fouled an eye. It was amazingly cool against my skin.

Another strand curled over my lips, drifted upward into my nostrils and stuck there, tickling.

Crazy was invisible beneath a white drift of the snowy thread.

The spider tensed to leap…

III

Lotus when there is danger? A helpless, frightened rabbit of a girl? No. That’s not Lotus at all. Lotus is a girl who comes fluttering over the treetops when a spider is about to devour her friends and leaps onto the spider because she has no gun.

Why no gun? A knife, that’s why. She keeps it in her waistband. Only the red gem handle shows — until she has to use it. Then, lightning isn’t any faster.

I was pinned by the web, watching the hairy black mutant dance across the foggy highway it had built when she came into view in the morning sky and spotted the action. She dipped, swayed with half a second’s hesitation, then landed on the twisted semi-shoulders behind the Beast’s head. She tossed her legs around that neck, riding it like it was a wild bronc and seeming to enjoy the ride as much as the cowboys on real horses back at Horner’s ranch. It swiveled its eyes, trying to catch sight of her, but the eyes didn’t revolve far enough. Just when they were at the apex of their revolution, she drove the silver blade into the left orb, up to the crimson gem hilt, and slashed downard.

The spider reared.

The stream of web fluid ceased abruptly, and the Beast wobbled backward down the inclined silken plane, throbbing its voice like a thousand flutes gone sour. It staggered sideways like a drunk. I wanted to shout that it might try to roll over on her, but my mouth was blocked with fast-drying web, and I could not move my arms to clear it.

She pulled the knife out, found the second eye with it. The spider flailed, ran at the cliffs, found it too much trouble to climb out and still bear the pain that was wracking it. Blindly, it stumbled from one cliff to the other, seeking some pathway in the darkness and finding none. Then it rolled.

“Lotus!” I screamed. But it came out a choked, reverberating whisper, strained through the matting on my lips.

But she was flying again, her wings beating furiously until they had taken her high enough to catch the low breezes. They fluffed out then, carried her back and forth across the chasm, letting her watch the spider.

It died. Slowly, and with lots of kicking. Once I was sure it was going to blunder onto the web and fall in on Crazy and me, but it never did. When it was down for good, Lotus drifted in to the web, settled very gently at its edge. “Andy! Crazy!”

I tried to call out. The result was a low-key vibration in the web.

“I hear you! I’ll get you out.”

I blessed her elongated ears. A moment later, she began hacking into the silken fiber with her knife. In time, she reached me, cut away the fuzz that bound my arms and closed my mouth. Together, we removed Crazy, ready for the worst.

But it wasn’t that bad at all. He was still unconscious, but the webbing had matted over the grub-spine wound, putting a stop to the blood that had been fountaining from it.

“We’ll have to take him back,” I said.

“The cameras?”

“We were only setting up the second one.”

“You finish.”

“I can’t just—”

“You finish,” she insisted. “I checked ahead. Follow the main trail for half a mile, and you’ll cross six major intersections. That should give us enough coverage to see if the Beast uses these trails regularly. If you bring the floater here first, I can get to the medikit and take care of Crazy.”

“He may be—”

“He’ll be okay. There’re enough supplies in the floater to fix him up without any trouble.”

She was a good nurse; I knew that from wounds of my own she had bound. “Okay,” I said. “I’ll be back in a minute.” Actually, it was four minutes, but when I settled the floater down next to the pieces of web, she already had Crazy uncovered and clean of every fragment of the stuff. I took the cameras, slung them over my shoulders, and set out — lugging what two were meant to carry — keeping my gun drawn and an eye out for hairy trees…

Three hours later, I stumbled back, worn out and showing it. Lotus and Crazy were sitting there laughing about something. “Nice way to get out of work,” I said, standing over them.

Crazy looked up and whinnied that silly whinny of his. “You can have this blasted arm if you want. I’d rather have gone setting the cameras than nursing this.”

“A likely story.”

“We’d better be getting back,” Lotus said. “Looks like a storm, and I don’t want to see what might come tramping around in the rain.”

It was heavy rain that gave Fanner II’s vampire plants their most voracious appetites.

“Okay. Can you walk, Crazy?”

“I can manage.”

One day, the men start looking like animals to you. Noses metamorphose into snouts. Eyes grow beadier. Ears suddenly become tufted with hair. Fingernails take on the appearance of claws. And you realize you are allowed to shoot animals: it is within you to shoot animals, though men are off limits. You go to oil your guns… But you also realize you are just imagining them as animals so that you will be able to shoot them and revenge your mother — and maybe wipe out that entire chapter of your life. Deep down, you fear that you want to spill the rich blood of men — spill it and drink it…

I must have been moaning in my sleep. It was an old and often felt dream, recurring through all the years that I could remember. I say that I must have been muttering, for when I slipped from the dream to the dark reality of the bedroom, there was a light body against mine, lips on my two, and soft velvet wings enclosing us in the closet of our souls… The next morning, we went out to collect the cameras. Crazy’s arm was almost healed, thanks to the speedheal salve and bandages. We hoped that he would be well enough to begin the hunt shortly after noon, in the event the cameras had recorded anything that would interest us.

And the cameras had.

“I don’t like it,” Crazy grunted as the film loop came across the viewer for the sixth time.

“It isn’t the ugliest we’ve met,” I said, trying to reassure myself as well as them. Not the ugliest, but ugly enough. Seven and a half feet, heavier than Crazy. Two arms trailing the ground, six-inch claws on them, and a set of smaller arms in the middle of the barrel chest. The little hands fiddled with each other, lacing fingers, picking insects from each other, scratching in a strange symbiosis. The mouth was a treasure trove — if one happened to be a biologist who valued sharp yellow teeth. The Beast had one sunken eye in the left side of its face, an undeveloped socket where the other one should be. The facial skin was leathery, dark, broken occasionally by tufts of bristly hair. “It doesn’t even look as dangerous as the spider.”

“That’s what I mean. I don’t like it.”

“Huh?”

“I think,” Lotus interrupted, “that Crazy means it looks too easy. Anything as easy as this Beast looks would have been knicked out by the first team that went after it. It must have something else besides claws, teeth, and an extra pair of hands.”

It did look evil. And there were those other twenty-two bounty hunters to think about. “What do you think?”

“Can’t say,” Lotus murmured, almost as if she were talking to herself. “That would be like stating the cause of death before the murder.”

“What’s the consensus? Should we back out of this one?”

They both said no.

“We don’t really need the money yet.”

“There was Garner,” Crazy added.

I smiled, shut off the tape loop. “Okay. Let’s get started. Crazy, your arm good enough?”

He peeled off the bandage, flexed the muscular arm. The skin stretched new and tight and delicately across the wound. It was swollen and red, but unscarred. “Never felt better. Let’s go.”

And we did.

IV

After a short but hot march, we made camp near the cross-way where the camera had caught him. Lotus took the first watch near evening, and I was halfway into the second when I heard something of more than medium size coming along from the right. Unholstering my pistol, I stretched out behind a heavy row of bushes and waited. My infrared goggles filtered away most of the night, giving me a view that was probably as good as the Beast’s.

In a way, I wished it were still dark. This fellow looked a great deal more formidable in person than seen from a little piece of film through the eye of an unemotional lens. First, in the short view it gave, the camera didn’t catch the easy loping motion of the mutant. I decided upon its ancestry pretty quickly: ape. There must have been a zoo around when the big bang wiped out the city and its suburbs — a zoo just far enough out to be saved from a mortal blow. Radiation did the rest. I watched, horrified, as it loped by in the night.

I was sweating profusely, yet the wind was cold.

Pushing up from the ground, I stepped back to my previous waiting post. I had not fired, for I wanted to judge how much it would take to stop this Beast before I leaped out firing my little toy-like gun. Now I had that figured out, and I could wait for its reappearance. I was in the process of sitting down when I saw, from the corner of my eye, that the Beast had returned and was standing a dozen yards away, squinting at me. I cursed myself for forgetting the curiosity and cunning of the apes.

Suddenly, it started for me.

I brought up my pistol, fired.

Blue-white, blue-white!

But when the flash was gone and the night had angrily rushed back in to claim its territory, there was no ape-alive or dead. If I had killed it, it would be lying there, a blackened corpse. Had I wounded it, it certainly could not have gotten away that quickly. Which meant that it was still alive, somewhere near.

The night seemed exceptionally black, even with the goggles.

I stood very still, listening. Then it struck me that the Beast might be hunched below the dense brush line, moving along the pathway to a point where it could more easily leap — and dismember me. I cursed myself for missing, tried to reassure myself that it had moved too fast for any marksman to hit. Rather than wait for the attack, I began moving backward through the brush, gun drawn, eyes watering as I kept them pinned to the weeds and flowers, trying to sight anything that would give me a target.

Behind me, a hundred yards away, a small knoll rose in a clearing. If I could back to that, I would be looking down on this area and could spot the mutant as it stalked me, blast it before it could get close. Carefully, I moved toward that knoll. No use in yelling for help. The dense woods would cut that shout to nothingness before it had passed over the ridge that separated me from camp.

The wind was not just cold. The wind was laden with the freezing steam of dry ice. I shivered inwardly and outwardly.

When I reached the knoll, I found it was not a knoll at all. The clearing was filled with a dense clover-like vegetation that was only inches tall at the edge but which grew higher toward the middle until it reached a mushroom-like peak of about five and a half feet. I stopped, turned to go back the way I had come. But I stopped again. Somewhere ahead of me lay the Beast, waiting. I couldn’t know where, and it would be certain suicide to try to go back the way I had entered. My only hope was to continue back through this clearing, out of it, up the ridge, down the ridge and into camp. I backed.

It was not as simple as it sounded.

Halfway into the clover stuff, with thick, bushy vegetation up to my shoulders, I became aware of the growling and snuffling that boomed ferociously somewhere very close at hand.

I stopped, stood perfectly still, trying not to breathe even. Somewhere in this clover, somewhere beneath its almost sea-like surface, the Beast moved — and searched. I panicked, fired wildly into the growth. A spot the size of a man was burned away, leaving a black, shadow-filled hole in the sea that did not refill itself. There was still growling, closer now. I forced myself into calm. Shooting without a target would do me no good and might serve to give the Beast a fix on me.

Ice wind whistled around me.

Finally, I saw what I was looking for. A ripple in the surface of the clover. A body as large as the Beast’s, moving crouched through the clover, would leave a wake on the top that should be noticeable. I pointed at the ripple, steadied my hand…

And reeled sideways as the Beast leaped! It missed me only by inches, crashing into the clover and disappearing beneath the green surface. I fired at the spot where it went in, but it had moved now and was somewhere else. Heart pounding, I started to survey the surface again.

And again it jumped. This time, though I twirled wildly aside, it caught me a bruising swipe with its claws before crashing into the brush again. Blood spurted from my shoulder, then subsided into a steady, thick flow. Fire shot through every muscle in my arm, and I transferred the gun to my good hand.

Forcing myself to ignore the pain and find the ripple in the clover that marked the enemy, I searched the surface again, half resolved to being mauled by the Beast before I could locate it. Then, just when aching fatigue began to creep upward from my feet, I saw it. Sighting carefully on the lead of the wake, I fired. The Beast staggered erect, clutching its arm, reeled sideways. Shivering, I fired again, opened a wound on its leg. It was bleeding as badly as I was. I sighted for another shot.

Then, suddenly, everything went into a slow, syrupy, fogbound set of events that registered only indirectly on my mind. The Beast was trying to stagger away… I could not shoot… the Beast had done something so that I could not shoot… the trigger was stone to me… the night swallowed him… I passed out.

Later, the sun was up and the birds were singing, and Lotus was pouring something warm into my mouth, forcing me to wake to a beautiful scene: her face. Then Crazy spoiled it by sticking his horsey mug into the picture. “What happened?”

“We found you in that clover, almost dead. What was it?”

I struggled to sit up, managed with their help. My head spun, settled slowly like a great amusement ride reaching its end, came to a full stop. “I shot it, wounded it anyway. It tried to kill me.”

“Why didn’t you kill it?” Lotus asked.

“I guess… it knocked my gun away.”

“No,” Crazy said. “You had your gun when we found you. You must have been holding it when the Beast made its getaway. We had to pry it from your fingers. Why didn’t you shoot it again?”

I tried to remember. I could picture the blue-white vibra-beam tearing the night apart and sewing it back together. There was some sort of exclamation which I had not made. Then I could not shoot. I explained the memories to the others.

“Hypnosis?” Crazy asked.

“I don’t think so. I wasn’t spellbound or anything like that. Something… something else.”

“I think we should back out now,” Lotus said. “We’ll just end up like Garner. Sorry, Crazy, but we will! I think we should pack our gear and move out fast.”

“No,” I said, trying to look more chipper than I felt. “We’ll get it. I know we will.”

“But there are other jobs — easier jobs,” she protested.

“We’ve shed our blood over this one,” Crazy said. “When you spill your blood for a hunt, you’re bound to get the Beast no matter what. It goes above revenge.”

She fluttered her downy blue wings, looked right through me like only she can. “It’s more than that to you, isn’t it, Andy?”

“Yes,” I croaked. No use hiding anything from Lotus — not with eyes that enter the soul like hers do. “Yes, I suppose it is. Though I don’t know what.” Then I passed out again.

Two days later.

All my wounds had healed under the speedheals. We had not seen the Beast since, though we were not inexperienced enough to think it had crawled away to die. That is a dangerous assumption in this profession; turn your back for even a second and bang! We decided, instead, that it had returned to its lair, somewhere in the forest, to lick its wounds and heal itself. We had ceased to speculate about why I had been unable to kill it when I had the chance, for that was not a happy thing to speculate about. Too many bad dreams in something like that.

Leaving everything that could not be carried with relative ease, we struck out with inflatable mattresses, food, water, and guns. Most of all, guns. After establishing what our quarry’s footprints were like (humanish, four-toed, long and wicked claws tipping each toe) from a set that led away from the clover patch fight scene in a limp pattern, we moved deeper into the woods. On the second day of the trek, we found where it had fallen and had lain for some time until it found the strength to go on. On the third day, we tracked it to the lip of the Harrisburg Crater — where the footprints ceased.

We stood there on the rim of the vast depression, staring across the table of nuclear glass that the triple-headed super-nuclear rocket had made. The crater, I knew from the maps, was two and a quarter miles in diameter. There was a lot of space. Dotting it were thousands of bubbles in the glass. A great number of them were broken and led to the maze of uncharted tunnels and caves that lay under the floor of the crater. Apparently, in one of these caves, the Beast was licking its wounds — and waiting.

“How can we cover all that?” Crazy asked. “It’s big! And slippery!”

“We’ll do it,” I said. I didn’t want to do it. I didn’t know why I didn’t order everyone to backtrack, to get the hell out of there chop-chop, on the double. Lotus was right, of course: the reason was more than revenge against a dumb animal. For a moment, I felt like Hamlet on the castle ramparts, talking to a ghost. But that feeling passed. My determination had something to do with that night when I could have killed it but did not. That night when I almost let it kill me. And why? And what about the other twenty-two?

“I guess here is as good a place as any,” Lotus said. “Let’s make camp here.” She swung a hand around, indicating the thirty feet of hard-packed earth that separated the forest from the crater edge. Here and there, a few sparse pieces of vegetation were trying to grow on the no-plant’s-land between woods and glass. They weren’t doing very well, but they made the bleakness a little less bleak.

“Here it will be,” I said, dropping my own gear. “We’ll search the caves tomorrow.”

Nightfall stole in, a black fog.

There were stars in the sky, but the greatest light show of all lay at our feet. For two and one quarter miles ahead, the nuclear glass shimmered with vibrant colors as it gave off the heat of the day. Blues chased reds across its surface while ambers danced with ebonies, locked arms with streaks of green.

I was sitting on the crater wall, dangling my legs, a hundred yards from the main camp. Crazy was back there still eating supper. His suppers lasted two hours, with no time wasted in those hundred and twenty minutes either. Lotus drifted down next to me, folded her tiny legs under her, and put her head on my shoulder. Her hair was cool and sweet-smelling. Also nice: it was black as the night and blew around my ears and chin and made me feel good.

“Beautiful, isn’t it,” I said. There was a burst of orange rimmed with silver.

“Very,” she said as she tried to crawl even closer. She was our consolation. She held the team together. Crazy and I could not last a month without her. Briefly, I wondered how, when she consoled Crazy, they managed, what with his being so big and clumsy and her being so tiny, so fragile. But she never came back chipped or cracked, so maybe the lummox was gentler than he seemed.

“You scared?” I asked. She was trembling, and it was not cold.

“You know me.”

“We’ll win.”

“You sound so sure.”

“We have to. We’re the good guys.”

I felt something wet on my neck, and I knew it was a tear. I shifted a little and cuddled her and said now-now and other things. Mainly, I just sat there being uncomfortable and damned happy all at once. Lotus almost never cries. When she does, she is worried about one of us—really worried. Then you can’t stop her until she’s dried out. You can only sit and hold her. And when she’s finished, she never mentions the fact that she was crying; you better never mention it either, if you know what’s good for you.

So, she was crying. And I was cuddling.

And Crazy was suddenly screaming—

V

A very long time ago, as I had sat at the upstairs window before my mother made me leave our house, there had come two giant red eyes out of the night mists. They had been as large as saucers, casting scarlet light ahead of them, focusing on the house. It was a jeep covered with sheets and red cellophane and painted to look like a dragon by the Knights of the Dragon to Preserve Humanity. I thought it very funny that grown people should play at such ridiculous games.

Below me now, in the pit that had suddenly opened and gulped down Crazy, a spider, spindly legs bracing it a hundred feet down, was looking up with crimson headlamp eyes. Only there was something worse than a jeep behind these lamps. Much worse.

“Crazy!” I shouted.

“Here. To the left!”

I took the lantern Lotus brought from the camp, lowered it into the steeply sloping tunnel. The spider backed off another fifty feet but no more. Probably a female. Females are more fearless than their mates. Branching off from the main fall were several side tunnels, all filled with sticky eggs and webbing.

“It must have burrowed close to the surface,” Crazy shouted. “I just stepped on the ground. It wiggled, gave, and fell through.”

He had rolled into one of the side tunnels, was caught up in the stickiness and eggs. The web was probably a different variety than the one the other spider had used to entrap us earlier. This one was for protecting eggs and would be even more thick and gummy. The mother spider fidgeted below, wanting to come charging up to protect her eggs, frightened only for a moment. “Lotus!” I shouted. “Climbing cleats and your knife. Hurry!”

She lifted away, was back almost instantly. I slipped the cleat attachments onto my boots, took her knife to cut steps into the tunnel wall. “I’m coming down, Crazy.”

“What about the bitch below?”

“She looks scared.”

“She’ll get over that. Stay out.”

“Crazy, you’re crazy.” I crawled into the sloping cave, hating to turn my back on the spider but unable to negotiate the steep passage headfirst. Every moment I felt as if she were rushing up the tunnel, mouth silently open and ready to kill. Painstakingly, I moved down.

Looking over my shoulder for brief moments, I could see the red eye watching. They never blinked. No lids.

I reached the side cave where Crazy was trapped, dirt packed so tightly under my fingernails that they ached. I hacked away the web, balled it up, and stuffed it behind him. I didn’t want to drop it down the main shaft for fear the jolt would bring the spider plunging upward, stomach open. When I had his head free and his arms loose, he was able to help himself. In short time, he had stripped away the remainder of the sticky thread.

“You first,” I said. “Can you make it up?”

“These hooves give perfect balance.” He kicked out of the egg pocket and started up the incline as if it were just another walkway through some charming garden. I waited until he was almost out, then launched myself on the climb. But all this action had shaken the mother spider to action. I could hear the scuttling of her feet coming up fast.

“I can’t shoot, Andy!” Lotus shouted. “You’re in the way!”

I started to say something (something probably better left unsaid) when the furry legs touched me around the waist, pulled me loose. It was hardly any use fighting the tremendous power behind her grasp. But she wasn’t prepared for all of my weight. She wobbled under me, collapsed, and we both crashed down the slope, twisted around a bend — all her legs kicking furiously — and dropped twenty feet onto a cavern floor.

I was on top of the spider.

She was screaming. God, the screams. They boomed from the walls. Even the echoes threw themselves back and reechoed. Then, despite the pounding of my heart, I saw that this place seemed to be a nest and that more than one spider, judging from excretion, inhabited it. We were alone now, but her screams would soon draw others.

I felt something wet, scrambled for a handhold on the flailing Beast, looked down. My foot was dangling inside her gut! She had rolled onto her back in the fall, and I was mounted on her deadly underside. The mandibles quivered. I jerked my foot back, discovered the knife still clutched in my hand. I was shaking violently — so violently that I feared I might drop my only weapon.

The head reared up as she tried to throw me off. I struck for the eye as Lotus had done earlier, pulled back the blade, was rewarded with gushing blood. She screamed even louder than the impossibly loud screams already filling the cavern, rolled about in fury. I was tossed free, thrown against the wall where I found a large boulder to crawl behind.

The spider did her death dance, flashing legs awkwardly akimbo.

I remained hidden in the rocks, holding tight to an aching arm as if the pressure of my hold would drive the pain off, afraid to look at my wound until I saw the Beast was dead and would never again be rushing me. It took her some time to die, but when she did expire it was with a great deal of thrashing and frothing. When I finally looked at my arm, I could see the reason for the pain: a small piece of white bone sticking through the flesh, white and spotted with blood. Head spinning roller-coaster mad, I felt more than a thousand years old — older, indeed, than the universe itself.

Above, from the tunnel that the spider and I had fallen through, came a noisy scuffling. My head spun even faster, my flesh burned with fever, and visions of the Beast’s mate swam through my head to magnify my fears. I got to my feet with a bit of difficulty and felt as if I were walking on a thin cushion of air instead of the rock floor. My eyes were flaming coals someone had dropped into raw sockets, while my head was made of ice — and melting. I staggered out of the large cavern, moving to a tunnel that glittered with light at its end, hoping that this — in some way — would lead me out. Light meant goodness, did it not? Light meant freedom — or is there a brilliant light at the end of death?

The stones seemed to melt and re-form around me. My teeth chattered in my ice head; I perspired.

The end of the tunnel was a branching-off place where the walls became glass and wound erratically under the floor of the vast Harrisburg Crater. Turquoise and crimson ceilings flashed over me, reflecting me as colored mirrors might. The walls threw my image back at me in various shades and sizes, shapes and textures. It was much like a mirror hall at a carnival. Reality was pushed even further from my mind, and delusion and fever grew stronger. I moved to the right with a thousand copies of myself, a shabby army in the corridors of eternity.

My arm had become a flaming tree, its roots grown deep into my chest, constricting my lungs. Panting, I moved on through the winding glass hallways, sane enough to know who I was and that I must get out, but just delirious enough not to think of turning back and retracing my steps. In this manner, I came across the Beast in its lair. The Beast.

The tunnel ended in a room where grasses had been dragged in, where bits of rotting flesh from past meals littered the floor grotesquely. There was a natural stairway, uneven, sharply edged, but usable, breaking one wall. It led to the ceiling where a half-moon aperture offered escape to the crater floor overhead. I felt like a man trapped beneath an ice-covered river who finally sees a thin patch overhead. But lying between that escape route and me was the Beast. And, though dying, it was not yet dead.

I stopped, swayed crazily. For a moment, I thought I would fall over onto the mutant and lay immovable while he mauled me. With a great deal of effort, I forced away an almost imperceptible fraction of the fogginess, just enough to keep tenuous control of my body. The Beast watched me from where it lay, its massive head raised from the floor, its single red eye a hideous lantern, bright even in this sparkling room of fantasy walls. It grunted, tried to move, howled. Its leg was a mess. That was the work of my vibra-pistol. It shoved its other leg under itself, pulled to a sitting position, all its weight on the good arm and good leg. It snarled. I saw that, even in its weakness, the Beast was going to attempt to leap.

I looked about for a chunk of loose glass, found one the size of my fist. I bent, growing dangerously dizzy with the effort, picked it up, weighed it in my palm. I brought my healthy arm back, heaved the glass at the Beast’s head. It struck its chest instead, knocking it onto its behind. The Beast struggled to a sitting position while I searched for another chunk of glass: the battle of the invalids, nonetheless deadly for its absurdity.

The walls shone, seemed to quickly approach and recede when I moved too much…

I found a sharp-edged piece, brought it back to throw.

And the Beast spoke. “Make Caesar shut up!” it said. “Make him shut up!”

I almost dropped the rock. The walls wiggled crazily. The Beast kept repeating the blasphemy over and over. Then it leaped.

The force of its impact was not as great as it would have been had the Beast been able to use both feet to propel itself. Still, it bowled me over, raked claws down the side of my face as we rolled. I kicked free, rolled across the floor to the far wall. Above was the exit.

“Andy!” Lotus and Crazy appeared at the entrance to the room. It had been they, not the spider’s mate, who had been scrambling down that inclined tunnel!

“Make Caesar shut up!” the Beast recited. “Make him shut up!”

The two of them froze. Crazy had his gun drawn and was about to fire. Now he left the weapon dangling from his fingers, unable to fire upon something that seemed human.

“Kill it!” I shouted.

“It’s intelligent,” Lotus said, rubbing her tiny hands together.

“It is like hell!”

“It’s more than an animal,” Crazy said, the gun useless in his hand.

“It got that phrase from me!” I shouted hoarsely, and I suppose a little insanely. “I said that when I shot it in the woods. It must have been speaking then — something it picked up from a previous bounty hunter — and I thought it was intelligent. That’s why I couldn’t shoot it again. Man does not kill man. But this isn’t a man in any way! This is a myna bird!”

“It got that phrase from me!” the Beast shouted, struggling across the floor toward me, throwing a few cautious glances behind it at Crazy and Lotus. But its old trick was working. It was immobilizing the enemy. Crazy and Lotus couldn’t wipe out all those centuries of pacifism against other humans in one short moment. It talked; that might make it human. And they could not shoot it. “It got that phrase from me!” it said again.

“See!”

“See!” it echoed.

Lotus grabbed the gun from Crazy, aimed. But she could not fire. “Here, Andy!” And she tossed it over the Beast. It clattered against the wall five feet away. Wearily, I started after it, every inch a mile to me.

And the Beast was on me.

I kicked out with a last ounce of strength, caught it on the chin, stunned it. But it recovered and lunged again, thrusting claws deep into my hips and twisting them. I howled and found another ounce of strength despite what my body told me about this being the end. I kicked it again, pushed myself ahead a few more inches. My fingers slipped over the gun. It was a hard and reassuring feeling. I seemed to draw strength from the cold metal. Bringing it around, the barrel centered on the brutish face, I choked as my finger wrapped the trigger.

“See!” he shouted, reaching a long, hairy arm out for me.

Myna bird? Could I be certain?

The arm brushed my chest.

Strange scenes of a house afire, of a woman burning, of people turning into animals flashed through my mind. Noses became snouts everywhere I looked… I pulled the trigger, saw his face go up in a red fountain, and collapsed backward into darkness.

When I came to, it was to see a blue sky overhead, trees flashing by on both banks, and blue water underneath. Crazy had broken the top from one of the glass bubbles, had used it as a boat, placing it in the small river that drifted through Congressman Horner’s ranch. This would be a much swifter route than the one by which we had come.

“How are you feeling?” Lotus asked, rubbing my forehead.

“Relieved,” I croaked.

“I know,” she said, running a tiny hand over my cheeks.

“No. No, you don’t,” I said, turning my face to the glass bottom where the water was revealed in depth.