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 antic.i.p.ate 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 a.s.sured of victory, now jubilant. Several sticky strands lashed around me, pinning my arms to my chest. More. Still more. I was being coc.o.o.ned. 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 appet.i.tes.
"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 rea.s.sure 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 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." 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 rea.s.sure 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 pa.s.sed 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 pa.s.sed 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 amus.e.m.e.nt 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."