The Overlords of War

Chapter 29

The Monster was sleeping like a little child. Buried five hundred meters under the surface of the planet, gorged with enough reserve energy to fell a mountain, all it wanted was to rest. It was almost totally preoccupied with producing the eighteen thousand spores which would generate its young, and because of that it was vulnerable. Accordingly it had slithered across the sedimentary strata right to this layer of basalt where it had made its nest. The rock was slightly radioactive, and provided a little extra energy.

The Monster was dreaming. In its dreams, it remembered a planet it had never known but which was the cradle of its race. There, life had been simple and good. Although the planet had disappeared more than half a billion years ago—not that the kind of years which Earthmen measured by meant anything to the Monster—an almost flawless recollection of scenes viewed by its far-off ancestors had been transmitted to it by its genes. Now that it was about to breed, the increasing activity of its chromosomal chains heightened the colors and sharpened the details.

The Monster preserved the image of the race which had created its species, more or less in its own likeness, to play the part of a domestic pet, useless but affectionate. If Corson’s original contemporaries had been able to explore the Monster’s dreams during its brief captivity, they would have found the key to many mysteries.

They had never understood how the Monster, which except on rare occasions avoided the company of its kind, could have developed any semblance of culture, let alone the rudiments of language. They knew of asocial or presocial animals with intelligence comparable to the human, like the dolphins on Earth. But none had developed a genuinely articulate language. According to then-current theory, which had never before been found wanting, civilization and language demanded certain preconditions: the creation of organized tribes or bands, vulnerability (for no invulnerable being would be tempted to change itself to suit the world it lived on, or vice versa), and the discovery of how to put inanimate objects to practical use (for any being whose natural appendages were ideal tools for use in its environment was bound to stagnate).

The Monster broke all three of these rules. It lived in isolation. It was as nearly invulnerable as any creature humans had run across. And its ignorance of the use of any tool, even the simplest, was total. Not because it was stupid. One could induce it to operate fairly complex machines. But it had no need of them. Its claws and tendrils were quite good enough for its requirements. Yet the Monster was capable of talking after its fashion, and even—some researchers claimed—of inscribing symbols.

The origin of Monsters posed another apparently insoluble problem. At the time of Corson’s first life, exobiology had progressed far enough for comparative evolution to become an exact science. It was theoretically possible by examining a single creature to work out with fair accuracy the whole phylum it belonged to. But the Monster combined traits from a dozen different phyla. No environment that the ecologists could conceive of ought to have produced such a paradoxical beast. That was among the reasons why it was called by no name more precise than Monster. In the view of a biologist who had given up in despair a decade before Corson was born, Monsters were the sole known proof of the existence of God, or at any rate of a god.

A long finger of energy brushed the Monster for a nanosecond or so. Stirring in its sleep, it greedily drank in the sustenance offered to it, heedless of where it came from. The second contact, light as a feather touch, half roused it. The third made it alarmed. It knew how to recognize most natural sources of energy. This was artificial. Someone, or something, was trying to locate it.

It realized confusedly that it had made a mistake in absorbing the energy of the first beam. It had betrayed not only its existence but its position. And done the same the second time. It tried to restrain its appetite when the third contact occurred. But it was too scared to control itself, and could not avoid soaking up a fraction of it. When it was afraid, its instincts commanded it to gobble up all the energy available, in whatever form it was offered.

Already it felt new and harsher lances of energy stabbing its weakened body. It began to weep over its lot, a poor little creature unable to control more than a narrow fringe of the future or fission more than ten or so natural elements. It keened for the fate of the innocents between its sides, which risked losing their chance to live.

Nearly six thousand kilometers away, giant avians were surveying their instruments under the interested eye of Colonel Veran. The neutrino beam which was sweeping the bowels of the planet had thrice been absorbed at the same spot. The associated wave train had been subtly altered.

“It is there,” Ngal R’nda said worriedly. “Are you sure you can deactivate it?”

“Absolutely,” Veran said, displaying arrogant confidence. The agreement had been tough to forge, but it was biased in his favor. His encampment was threatened by Urian guns, but that did not bother him. He had a trump up his sleeve. Turning away, he issued his orders.

Five hundred meters underground the Monster mobilized its resources. It felt hamstrung. The gestation of its offspring was too far advanced for it to be able to move through time. It would be impossible to synchronize the motion of eighteen thousand babies. By now they had acquired enough independence to oppose the efforts of their parent. If the threat materialized, it would have to abandon them. It was a case where the instinct of self-preservation conflicted with that of reproduction. By good fortune some few might survive, but most would never be able to locate themselves in a stable present. They would suddenly coexist with the matter composing them. The energy released would be of the same order as that of a low-yield nuclear bomb. It would not seriously affect the Monster, but it would instantly kill the embryo involved.

Perhaps the solution lay in burrowing deeper into the planetary crust. But the Monster had chosen for its nest a weak point at the junction of crustal plates. A pocket of lava, unusually close to the surface, had drawn it as a warm hearth attracts a cat. In its normal state the Monster would have bathed luxuriously in the lava. But in present circumstances it hesitated. The intense heat would hasten the hatching. Then it would be unable to put enough distance between itself and its young to avoid becoming their first victim.

Should it return to the surface and take its chance? Unfortunately for the Monster, the giant planet where its distant ancestors had been conceived and which it recalled in its dreams had been haunted by predators which would have made a mere mouthful of it. They too knew how to move through time. They had vanished half a billion years ago, but that fact could not influence the Monster’s behavior. Its racial memory was unaware of that crucial datum. As far as the Monster was concerned, those millions of years had never happened. It did not realize that its species had outlived its creators and original masters, that it had owed its survival to its role as a pet, found in nearly every home, coddled and pampered by the members of a powerful culture wiped out in a forgotten war.

The surface was out of the question, then, while time travel was forbidden and the deeper strata were dangerous. The Monster, fully awake by now, once more bewailed its fate.

It registered a presence, not far off, a few score kilometers at most Ordinarily its first reaction would have been to jump through time. But the fear of losing its offspring overcame its terror at being spotted. The presence became more marked, then multiplied. Several creatures of its own kind were approaching. That held no comfort for the Monster. It knew from its own past experience that a Monster at gestation time was a succulent prey. In its species cannibalism facilitated the interchange of genes and thereby prevented the line from becoming decadent through inbreeding. Its creators had known nothing of the sexual mode of reproduction.

At the last moment it tried a prodigious effort and made a vain attempt to escape pursuit. It soared into the air atop a geyser of lava. But Veran’s pegasones had foreseen that, and acted in accordance with a systematic plan quite foreign to the habits of their species. They closed in from all directions at once, clear along the segment of time which the Monster controlled. They trapped and immobilized it simultaneously in much the same way as, thousands of years ago on Earth, tame elephants would surround one of their wild cousins and push it into a stockade.

The Monster found itself caught in a web of energy far stronger and more reliable than the cage aboard the Archimedes. At first it went on weeping; then, when its complaints proved futile, it allowed itself to be dragged away and at last went back to sleep, regaining in dreams the deceitful refuge of its long-vanished home world.