The Year's Best Science Fiction 11

I

Young Dyak and Utliff with the panting breath stood on the seamed brow of the hill. It was a fine hot day, with a million cicadas thrilling about them like the heat itself. Under the heat haze, the far mountains were scarcely visible, so that the river that wound its way down from them held a leaden grayness until it got close to the foot of their hill.

At the foot of the hill, it flattened out into swamps, particularly on the far side where marshy land faded eventually into mist. The iguanodons were croaking and quacking by the water’s edge, their familiar lumpy shapes visible. They would not trouble the men.

“How is it with you Utliff? Are you coming down the hill with me?” Dyak asked.

He saw by Utliff’s face that there was something wrong with him. The lie of his features had altered. His expression was distorted, changed in a way Dyak did not like; even his bushy beard hung differently this morning. Utliff shrugged his thick shoulders.

“I will not let you hunt alone, friend,” he said.

Determined to show his imperviousness to suffering, he started first down the sandy slope, sliding among the bushes as they had often done. He was pretending to be indifferent to an illness to which no man could be indifferent. With a flash of compassion, Dyak saw that Utliff was not long for this life.

Glancing back, Utliff saw his friend’s expression.

“One more runner for the pot, Dyak, before I go,” he said, and he turned his eyes away from his friend.

Living things scuttled out of the bush as they headed toward the river, the furred things that were too fast to catch, and a couple of the reptiles they called runners—little fleet lizards, waist-high, which sped along on their hind legs.

Utliff had a crude pouch full of stones at his side. He threw hard at the runners as they went, hitting one but not stopping it. Both men laughed. They were in no desperate need for food. There was always plenty; and besides, hunting runners was done more easily from the bottom of the hill, as they knew from experience.

They pulled up in a cloud of dust at the bottom, still laughing. At this time of day, high noon, there was nothing to fear. In fact there were only the crunchers to fear at any time, and crunchers stayed supine in the shade at this period of heat. The quackers over in the swamp hurt nobody unless they were molested. It was a good life.

True, there came silent moments of fear, moments—as when one looked at Utliff’s distorted face—when unease crawled like a little animal inside one’s skull. But then one could generally run off and hunt something, and do a little killing and feel good again.

Dyak disliked thinking. The things that came from the head were bad, those from the body mainly good. With a whoop, he ran through the long grass and hurled himself in a dive over the steep bank and into the river. The river swallowed him, sweetly singing. He came to the surface gasping and shaking the water from his eyes. The water was deep under him, in a channel scoured by the river as it curved along its course, and it flowed warm and pure. It spoke to his body. On the opposite bank, where the quacker herd now plunged in confusion at his appearance, it was staled and too hot.

Letting out a shriek of delight, Dyak fought the satin currents that wrapped his body and called to his friend. Utliff stood mutely on the miniature cliff, staring across at Dyak.

“Come on in! You’ll feel better!”

Before Utliff obediently jumped, Dyak took in the whole panorama. Afterwards, it remained stamped on his mind.

Behind his friend stood the hillside that none of them had ever climbed, though their dwelling caves tunneled into the lower slopes. He noted that three women from the settlement stood there, clutching each other in the way women always did and laughing. On the heavy air, their sounds were just audible. In the evening, they would come down to the river and bathe and splash each other, laughing because they had forgotten (or because they remembered?) that the dark was coming on. Dyak felt a mild pleasure at their laughter. It meant that their stomachs were full and their heads empty. They were content.

Behind Utliff to the other side, Dyak saw Semary appear and stand unobtrusively in a position where she could watch the two men from behind a tree. Semary was smiling, although she did not laugh as frequently as the other women. No doubt the noise had attracted her from her own settlement. Though Dyak and Utliff knew little about her, they knew this girl was for some reason something of an outcast from her own people, the three men and three women who lived toward the place where the cruncher had its current den.

Dyak stopped smiling when he saw her. It hurt him to look at Semary.

She was less corpulent and bowed than any other women he had seen. On her face was not even an incipient mustache, such as sometimes blossomed on the lips of other women; nor was there hair between her breasts. Though all this was strange, it was the strangeness that attracted. And yet—to be with her hurt. He knew this from the times when Utliff and he had stayed with her; and from that time, he knew too that she was passive, and did not fight and bite and laugh as the other women did when they had hold of you.

The being with her and the passivity hurt in his head.

As he looked at these things and thought these things hearing the heat calls of the cicadas and soaking in the heavy green of the world, Utliff jumped into the river.

It was far from being his usual flashing crashing dive. When his head appeared above the surface, he was crying for help.

“Dyak, Dy! Help me, I’m a goner!”

Alarmed, Dyak was with him in three strokes, although still half expecting this might be a ruse that would earn him a ducking as soon as he reached his friend. But Utliff’s body was limp and heavy. He closed his eyes and opened his mouth and groaned.

Grasping him firmly under the arm with one hand, Dyak slid beneath him until they were both on their backs, and kicked out for the nearest tree, a gnarled old broken pine that overhung the water so conveniently that they often used it to climb out on. Struggling only feebly, Utliff groaned again, and choked as water slopped into his mouth. With his free hand, Dyak reached up and seized a projecting limb of the tree.

He hauled himself far enough out of the water so that he could wrap his left leg around the tree trunk for leverage. It was still a terrible job to hook Utliff out of the water. As he leaned over, head almost in the river, panting and tugging, another pair of hands reached out to help him. Semary had run along the tree trunk and was beside him. With a grunt of thanks, he was able to let her support Utliff in the water while he released his friend and took a better purchase on him. Holding the tree trunk tightly between his knees, he hauled Utliff up beside him.

He and Semary rested the body along the trunk for a moment and then dragged it to the bank between them.

Utliff was dead.

Just for a moment, he shuddered violently. His eyes came open and his knees jerked up. Then he slumped back.

Almost at once, he began the horrible process of disintegration.

The limbs writhed as their muscles curled up. The flesh fell away. The flesh took on a greenish tinge. There came a frightening foetid smell as the insides revealed themselves; from them came a popping bubbling sound such as was never heard in the bowels of the living. In fear, Dyak and Semary rose and crept away, hand in hand. Utliff was not their kind any more. He had ceased to be Utliff.

They moved away from the river bank, hiding themselves among low trees and eventually sitting side by side on a large smooth boulder. Dyak was still dripping water, but the warmth of the rock helped to dry him and stop his shivering. Semary began to pluck leaves from an overhanging tree and stick them on his damp chest. She smiled as she did so, so sweetly that he was forced to smile back though it hurt him.

He put his arm about her and rubbed his nose in her armpit. She chuckled, and they slid down until their backs were against the boulder. Dyak began to peel the damp leaves off his chest and stick them on to her body. In his head, he was conscious of an affection for Semary. More than an affection. He had felt this thing with women of his own group, and he had felt it for Semary before this. The disturbance was at once pleasant and immeasurably sad. He did not know how to drive it away.

Semary too seemed full of the same feeling. Suddenly she said to him, “People wear out.” It was as if she wanted to hide the subject in her head.

As always when they spoke, Dyak was aware of a great gulf that could not be bridged by words. Words were so much feebler than the things they were meant to represent. He answered, feeling the inadequacy of what he said, “All people are made to wear out.”

“How do you mean? How are people made?”

“They are made to wear out. They come down new from the hills. Being new does not last. . . Their faces get strange. Then they wear out, like Utliff.”

With an effort, the girl said, “Did you come from the hills long after Utliff?”

“Many, many days. And you, dear Semary?”

“Only a few days ago did I come from the hills. I came ... I came from by the smooth thing—that black barrier by the hill.”

He did not know what barrier she meant. Under his skin, he felt a sort of strangeness, fear and excitement and other things for which he had no name. Her eyes stared, as if both of them were near to something they had not dared to allow inside their heads.

“Tell me,” he said, “tell me what it was like, the coming into being.”

Her lashes fell over her eyes. “I was on the hillside,” she said. “By the smooth black barrier.”

To kill the long silence, he took her by the waist and settled into a horizontal position. So they lay, with their faces close together, sharing the same breath, as they had done before, and as Utliff had done with her in the days before he wore out.

He felt there was something else he should do. But in his head no prompting occurred, and his body seemed inhabited only by dreams without a name, dreams either hopelessly happy or hopelessly sad. Semary’s eyes were closed. But something told him that strange though she was, she felt the same turmoil as he.

Utliff had felt it too. When they had both lain against Semary before, Dyak had been so startled by the things in his head, he had talked about it to Utliff. He was afraid that he alone felt that strange uncertain sweetness; but Utliff admitted that he had been filled with the same things, head and body. When they tried lying close to the women of their own group, the feeling had persisted. Keen to experiment, they had lain close to each other, but then the feeling had not been there, and instead they had only laughed.

The long silence closed over them again. Semary’s smell was sweet.

Dyak lay and looked up at the trees. He saw a cicada on a branch nearby, a gigantic beast that almost bent double the bough it rested on, its body at least as long as a man’s arm. They made good food, but he was full of a hunger beyond hunger just now. The sound and feel of his world cradled him and ran through him.

Unexpectedly, she said, her voice warm in his ear, “Two people have become worn out today, in different ways. Utliff was one, Artet the other. Artet is a girl of my group. The cruncher got her. You know we are near the lair of the cruncher. He dragged Artet there, but her blood was already let.”

“Did you forget to tell me before now?”

“I was coming to tell you when the foul thing overcame Utliff. Then your warmth near me made me forget.”

Sulkily, Dyak said, “The cruncher got across the river where the waters run shallow. It used to eat the quackers, for I watched it often from our hill. Now that it has come across to this side, it is too stupid to go back. Soon it will starve to death. Then we shall all be safe.”

“It will not starve until it has eaten all of us. We cannot be safe with it, Dyak. You must let its blood and wear it out.”

He sat up, and then crouched beside her, angry. “Get your men to do the work. Why me? Our group is safe up on the hill in our deep caves. The cruncher is no bother to me. Why do you say this to me, Semary?”

She too sat up and stared at him. She brushed a remaining leaf from her breast. “I want you to do the thing because I want most to lie by you. I will always lie by you and not by our stinking men, if you shed the blood of the cruncher. If you will not do this for me, I swear I will go with the other stinking men and lie by them.”

He grasped her wrist roughly. “You shall be with no men but me, Semary! You think I am afraid to let the blood of the cruncher? Of course I am not!”

Semary smiled at him, as if she enjoyed his roughness.

II

Dr. Ian Swanwick was growing increasingly bored, and growing increasingly less reluctant to show it. Several times, he lifted his face from his scanner and looked at the gray head of Graham Scarfe, with its ears and face enveloped in the next scanner. He coughed once or twice, with increasing emphasis, until Scarfe looked up.

“Oh, Dr. Swanwick. I forgot—you have a jet to catch back to Washington. Forgive me! Once I look into the scanner, I become so engrossed in their problems.”

“I’m sure it must be engrossing if you can understand their language,” Swanwick said.

“Oh, it’s an easy language to understand. Simple. Few words, you know. Few tenses, few conjugations. Not that I’m any sort of a language specialist. We have several of them dropping in on us, including the great Professor Reardon, the etymologist. . . . I’m just—well, I’m just a model maker at heart. Not a professional man at all. I started as a child of eight, making a model of the old American Acheson, Topeka and Santa Fe steam railway, as it would have been in the early years of last century.”

Chiefly because he was none too anxious to hear about that, Dr. Swanwick said, “Well, you have done a remarkable job on this tridiorama.”

Nodding, Scarfe took the theologian’s arm and led him away from the bank of scanners with their hand controls to the rail that fringed the platform on which they stood. They were high here, so high that the distant spires of New Brasilia could be seen framed between two mountain ranges. In the other direction stretched the South American continent, leaden with a heat that the air-conditioning did not entirely keep from their tower,

“If I have done a remarkable job,” Scarfe said, gazing over the rail, “I copied it from a more remarkable one. From Nature itself.”

Scarfe’s gentle old voice, and his woolly gesture as he pointed out at the landscape before them, contrasted with the urban manner and clothes and the brisk voice of Dr. Swanwick. But Swanwick was silent for a moment as he stared over the country through which a river wound. That river flowed from distant mountains now shrouded in heat and curved below the hill on which they stood. Over on the opposite bank lay a region of swamp.

“You’ve made a good copy,” he said. “The tridiorama is amazingly like the real thing.”

“I thought you would approve, Dr. Swanwick. You especially,” Scarfe said with an affectionate chuckle.

“Oh? Why’s that?”

“Come now, the Maker’s handiwork, you know ... As a theologian, I thought that angle would especially appeal to you. Mine’s a poor copy compared with His, I know.” He chuckled again, a little confused that he was not winning a responding chuckle from Swanwick.

“Theology does not necessarily imply a sentimental fondness for the Almighty. Laymen never understand that theology is simply a science that treats of the phenomena and facts of religion. As I say, I admire the skill of your modeling, and the way you have copied a real landscape; but that is not to say that I approve of it.”

Nodding his head in an old man’s fashion, Scarfe appeared to listen to the cicadas for a minute.

Then he said, “When I said I thought you would approve, perhaps you got me wrong. What I meant was that the tridiorama could present you people at the St. Benedict’s Theological College with a chance to study a controlled experiment in your own line, as it has done to anthropologists and paleontologists and zoologists and pre-historians and I don’t know who else. I mean . . .” He was a simple man, and confused by the superiority of this man who, as he began to perceive, did not greatly like him. In consequence he slipped into a more lax way of talk. “What I mean is, that the goings-on down in the tri-di are surely something to do with you people, aren’t they?”

“Sorry, I don’t get your meaning, Mr. Scarfe.”

“Like we said in the letter to you, inviting you here. These stone-age people we’ve got—don’t you want to see how they get along with religion? I admit that as yet they don’t appear to have formed any—not even myths—but that in itself may be significant.”

Turning his back on the hills, Swanwick said, “Since your little people are synthetic, their feelings are not of interest to St. Benedict’s. We study the relationship between God and man, not between men and models. That, I’m afraid, will probably be our ultimate verdict, when I give my report to the board. We may even add a rider to the effect that the experiment is unethical.”

Stung by this, Scarfe said, “We have plenty of other backers, you know, if you feel like that. People come here from all over the world. We’ve been able to synthesize life for twenty-odd years, but this is the first time the methods have been applied to this sort of environment. I’m surprised you take the attitude you do. In these enlightened days, you know. I suppose you understand how we create those Magdalenian men and women, and the iguanodons and little compsognathi and the allosaurs?”

As he began to answer, Swanwick started to pace toward the line of elevators, one of which had carried them up to the observation platform. Scarfe was forced to follow.

“After the Russo-American gamete-separation experiments in the 2070’s,” Swanwick said remotely, “it was only a short while before individual chromosomes and then individual genes and then the import of the lineal order of the genes were tagged and understood. Successful synthetic life was created a couple of decades earlier. It was possible to use these crude ‘synthlifes’ to extract the desired genetic information. It then became possible to apply this information and form ‘synthlifes’ of any required combination of genes. You see, I have read the literature.”

“That I never doubted,” Scarfe said humbly. As they stepped into the elevator, he added, “But it was Elroy’s discovery that geneanalyses of defunct species could be made from their bones—even fossil bones—that set the tridiorama project into action. It was the gene formula of an iguanodon he got first. Within a year, he was selling real live iguanodons to the world’s zoos. Do you find that unethical, Dr. Swanwick? I suppose you do.”

“No, I don’t. It was only when Elroy brought back ancient men and women by the same method that the religious bodies became interested in the question.”

They had now traveled down the outside of the chamber that housed the tridiorama. When the elevator gates opened, they stepped out, both aware and glad in their different ways that they were about to part for good.

They had started unhappily, with Swanwick teetotal, and none too good a lunch served in the canteen in his honor, and an antipathy between them that neither had quite the will to overcome.

Standing, anxious to make a final pleasantry, Scarfe said, “Well, if an offense was committed, at least we lessened it here by insisting on a smaller scale. It solves so many problems, you know!”

He chuckled again, the winning chuckle to which he knew few men failed to respond. He had learned his chuckle by heart. It was rich and fairly deep, intended to express appreciation of his own oddity as well as the wonder of the world. It never failed to disarm, but the theologian was not disarmed.

“You see what I mean—size is controlled by genes like every other physical factor,” Scarfe said, his sallow cheeks coloring slightly. “So we cut our specimens down to size. It solves a lot of problems and keeps things simple.”

“I wonder if the Magdalenian men see it quite like that?” Swanwick said. He put out a cold hand and thanked Scarfe for his hospitality. He turned and walked briskly out of the door toward the wingport where the St. Benedict trimjet lay awaiting him. With a puzzled expression on his face, Graham Scarfe stood watching him. A cold, unlovable man, he thought.

Tropez, his Chief Assistant, came up, and scanned his chief sympathetically.

“Dr. Swanwick was a tough nut,” he said.

Shaking his head, Scarfe came slowly out of his trance. “We must not speak ill of a man of God, Tropez,” he said. “And I can see that we have yet to master some little details that may upset purists like Dr. Swanwick.”

“You know we add something new every year, sir,” Tropez said. “You can’t do more than you are doing. I’ve got the attendance figures for the Open Gallery for last month and they’re up twelve point three per cent on the previous month. Though I still think we were perhaps mistaken to put in normal-size cicadas. It does spoil the illusion for some people.”

“We may have to think again about the cicadas,” Scarfe said vaguely.

“I’m sure whatever you choose will be best,” Tropez said. Saying things like that, he imagined, kept him his job.

Scarfe was not listening.

They had come to the door of the Open Gallery and pushed in. The Gallery was packed with paying customers to the tridiorama, staring from their darkness through the polaroid glass at the brightly lit scene within. Though they had a more restricted view than the specialists who, for higher prices, looked down through adjustable lenses from the observation platform above, there was a certain unique fascination at viewing that mocked-up world from ground level.

“We’ve got too few species in there for it to be a credible reproduction of a past earth,” Scarfe complained. “Only five species—the Magdalenians, the three sorts of dinosaur, the iguanodons, the compsognathi, and the allosaurs—and the mice. I don’t count those cicadas.”

“Elroy Laboratories charge too much for their synthlifes,” Tropez said. “We are building up as fast as we can. Besides, the Magdalenian people are the real attraction— that’s what the crowds come to see. We’ve got ten of them now; they cost money.”

“Eight,” Scarfe said firmly. “Two went today. One got eaten by the allosaur, the other disintegrated. You should keep in touch, Tropez. You spend too much time in the box office.”

Having thus squashed his assistant, he nodded, turned and went slowly back to the elevator.

It was the disintegration of the little figures that worried him; he could not resist a suspicion that Elroy Laboratories limited their life span deliberately to improve their turnover. Of course, the method had to be perfected as yet. The synthlifes were created full-grown and unable to age; they simply wore out suddenly, and fell into their original salts. That would no doubt be improved with time. But the Elroy people were not very cooperative about the matter, and slow to answer the letters he flashed them.

The Elroy monopoly would have to be broken before real progress was made.

Still shaking his gray head, Scarfe rode the elevator back to the peace of the observation platform. He liked to watch the scientific men at work over the scanners, taking notes or recording. They treated him with respect. All the same, life was complex, full of all sorts of knotty, nasty little problems that could never be discussed . . . like how one should really handle a man like Swanwick, the prickly idiot.

Scarfe reflected, as he had so often done in the past, how much more simple it would be to be one of the synthetic Magdalenians imprisoned in the tridiorama. Why, they hadn’t even got any sex problems! Not that he had, he hurried to reassure himself, at his age. But there had been a time . . .

Whereas the Magdalenians—

With the complex modern processes, it was possible to create life, but not life that could perpetuate itself. One day, maybe. But not yet. So down in the chamber the little Magdalenians could never know anything about reproduction, would never have to worry at all about sex.

“I suppose we’ve really created something like the garden of Eden here,” Scarfe muttered to himself, peering into the nearest vacant scanner. In his crafty old mind, he began to devise a new and more alluring advertisement for his establishment, one that would not offend his scientific customers, but would rope in the sensation-loving public. “Lost Tribes in the Pocket-Size Garden of Eden . . . They’re All Together in the Altogether . . .”

He adjusted the binocular vision, checking to see where the little girl was that he particularly fancied. Watching her through the lenses, picking up her tiny voice in the headphones, you would almost imagine . . .

III

The artificial sun was sinking over the tridiorama world.

Dyak and Semary had eaten. They had come across one of the giant cicadas lumbering along the ground, and Dyak had cut its head off. When they had eaten enough, they jumped in the river to remove the stickiness from their bodies. Now they were on the move again, more quietly, for they were near the lair of the big cruncher.

In the distance ahead of them, Dyak saw the barrier. That was the end of the world; tomorrow, the sun would rise from it. Now that the light was less intense, he could almost imagine that he saw giant human-like faces through the barrier.

He scoffed at the silly things that his head let happen inside it.

Their path was less easy now, and huge boulders towered above them, twice or three times their height. The fleet cruncher could easily pounce on them in such a situation. Dyak halted and took Semary’s hand.

“Semary, you must wait here. I will go on. I will find the big cruncher and kill him with my knife. Then I will return to you.”

“I am frightened, Dyak!”

“Don’t be frightened. Hug yourself to keep happy. If the thing runs away in your direction, I will call, and you must crawl into the cleft between these two rocks where he cannot get you.”

“I am frightened more for you than for me.”

He laughed. “When I come back, I will take hold of you and . . . and I will hug you very closely.” He did it to her then in parting, clutching her naked body against his and feeling the warm missing thing that was at once there and lacking. Then he turned lightly and ran in among the big boulders.

It took him only a few minutes to locate the dinosaur. Dyak knew the ways of the animals in his world. They were always restless at sunrise and in the evening.

He heard the creature moving in the bush. When he caught a glimpse of its greenish hide, he climbed, toe and finger, up one of the large boulders, and peered over the top at it.

The cruncher lay on an exposed slab of rock, moving its tail slowly back and forth. To Dyak, it seemed a vast beast, three times his length. Its head was large and cruel, built chiefly to accommodate its massive jaws. Its body, pressed now against the rock, was a beautiful functional shape. It had two pairs of legs, the great back legs on which it ran at speed, and the forelegs, which functioned as a pair of arms and ended in powerful talons. It was a formidable creature enough, even when its jaws were closed and you could not see its teeth!

At present, the cruncher was not easy. It lay on one flank, its great legs hunched awkwardly, its yellow belly partly exposed to the rays of the sun. After a moment, it exposed its rump to the sun. Then it shuffled again and again lay supine. Its jaw opened and it began to pant, exposing its great fangs. Still uncomfortable, it finally moved into the shade and lay there absolutely still, only a pulse throbbing like an unswallowed boulder in its throat.

Dyak knew it would not lie still for long. The creature was basking.

Having spent most of the day getting its body heat down, it was now in the process of getting it up again, against the comparative coolness of the night. In the morning, it would bask to get its heat up again, coming slowly from torpor to full activity, and then setting out on the day’s hunt. Like all cold-blooded creatures, the allosaur’s metabolism was closely linked with external conditions; it was little more than a thermometer with legs and teeth. To Dyak, the matter appeared more simply: the thing got restless toward sunset.

After a brief sprawl in the shade, the cruncher moved back onto its rock, into the heat. As it went, Dyak slid off his rock. He had seen what he wanted. The cruncher often grew kittenish and accidentally felled trees and branches with its tail. There was a good sturdy length of branch lying in the other side of the clearing. Using all cover, Dyak worked his way round toward it. He trimmed it with his knife. It was crude, but it was what he needed.

He tucked it into the plaited belt he wore about his middle.

Encumbered by his armory, he now climbed a tree and crept along a branch that left him suspended almost directly over the cruncher. The only drawback with this position was that the sun was almost in his eyes.

He had not reckoned for this factor. The sun was lower than he had thought, and he must hurry. Pulling out his knife, he looked down at the cruncher—to find it looking up at him.

The big animal had finally maneuvered itself into a position of comfort, and was huddled on the rock on its belly and its head resting on its forelegs. A sound in the tree had caught its attention, and it swiveled its gaze upwards, scanning the foliage with two baleful yellow eyes.

Though it was fast on the run, Dyak knew that its reflexes in other respects were slow. Before it could move, he jumped down at it.

He landed on the rock, on the balls of his feet, just by its neck. As it moved to get up, its head came forward and it opened its savage mouth. Dyak thrust forward with the broken branch, punching forward with all his weight, holding the branch out like a shield. He jammed it between the open jaws, hard.

Instantly he ducked. The talons were coming up for him. And with the same movement, the cruncher was rising to its feet. Dyak slithered a couple of paces and jumped. He grabbed the creature’s neck and swung himself onto it. It began at once to rear and plunge, growling savagely deep in its throat, so that he could feel the vibration under his clenched hands. The world spun about him, but he clung tight hoping only that the wicked tail would not sweep him from his perch.

For all the terror of those moments, when he knew that if he fell he was lost, Dyak had chance enough to see that his branch had done what it was intended to do. The cruncher’s jaws were wedged open; the branch was jammed behind its teeth, and half its efforts were devoted to removing the wedge. Its forelegs were clawing its face dreadfully, drawing blood.

Keeping his hands linked, Dyak wormed his way to a better position up the neck of his bucking mount. Roaring now with its fury, the cruncher reared up, lost its balance on the slippery rock and slipped sideways, falling on its haunches among bush.

Dyak was almost flung clear, but he used the moment to grasp the creature’s throat tightly with one arm and draw his knife. He struck just as it leaped up and plunged anew into the undergrowth. The blade burst down through one of those glaring yellow eyes.

He was at once thrown free, as all the muscles of the creature’s body were galvanized with pain. He lay half-stunned in the middle of a bush, all the wind knocked out of him. The cruncher screamed with agony and anger, and began thumping the wounded side of its head against a rock.

Feeling that if he did not move at this movement, he would never be able to move again in his life, Dyak tore himself from the bush, dodged in past that murderous flailing tail and once more hurled himself at the monster’s skull. He mistrusted his ability to pierce the armored flesh of the cruncher, but the eyes were a safe target.

With something like a dive, he hurled himself at the cruncher’s good eye. Using all the strength in his right arm, he brought down the weapon, down, down, deep into the squelching eye, pushing in deep through pulp and blood with all the fury of his life behind the blow. Then the great tail came around and knocked him flying.

When he regained consciousness, it was to find himself stuck head foremost in a rhododendron bush. It was a while before he could bring himself to move and drag himself out. He was scratched from head to foot, and soreness filled his left shoulder where the creature’s armored tail had struck him. It was growing dark, and he was alive.

The cruncher lay in the center of a wide area of broken vegetation and churned-up soil. Its tail still slapped the ground, but it was to all intents and purposes finished. He had pierced it to the brain.

Slowly, he climbed to the top of a nearby boulder. The sky was stained red with sunset, just as it was every night, and the red was reflected in the river, so that the water looked like blood. He put his right hand to his mouth and began to call Semary.

At first his call was quiet and directed to her. Then life began to return fully to his veins, and he looked down at the mighty creature that he—he, alone!—had destroyed. Triumph filled him. Ignoring the ache, he raised his left hand too to his open mouth, and began a series of whooping calls that spread out across the valley. Louder and louder they grew, and more piercing. His lungs were inspired.

Nor did he stop when Semary ran into the clearing and stood to marvel at the defeated beast.

The world should know his prowess! It was a mighty tabletop victory.