Big Book of Science Fiction (13 page)

That took time, because whenever
Salazar’s legs touched ground he used the purchase to shake the throat
savagely. In fact, Antonio was within twenty yards when the being from the ship
got its vehicle upright. It held the mechanical head high, then, to keep
Salazar dangling while it considered how to dislodge him.

And it saw Antonio. For an
instant, perhaps, the Qul-En was alarmed. But Antonio did not kneel; he made no
motion which the pilot—seeing through infra-red sensitive photocells in the
lion’s eyeballs—could interpret as offensive. So the machine moved boldly
toward him. The dog dangling from its throat could be disregarded for the
moment. The killing-ray was absolutely effective, but it did spread, and it did
destroy the finer anatomical features of tissues it hit. Especially, it
destroyed nerve-tissue outright. So the closer a specimen was when killed, the
smaller the damaged area.

The being inside the mountain
lion was pleasantly excited and very much elated. The biped stood stock-still,
frozen by the spectacle of a mountain lion moving toward it with a snarling dog
hanging disregarded at its throat. The biped would be a most interesting
subject for dissection, and its means of offense would be most fascinating to
analyze. . . .

Antonio’s fingers, contracting as
the shape from the ship moved toward him, did an involuntary thing. Quite
without intention, they pulled the trigger of the rifle. The deeply crosscut
bullet seared Salazar’s flank, removing a quarter-inch patch of plastic and
metal, hit a foreleg. Although that leg was largely plastic, what metal it
contained being mostly magnesium for lightness, there were steel wires imbedded
for magnetic purposes. The bullet smashed through plastic and magnesium, struck
a spark upon the steel.

There was a flaring, sun-bright
flash of flame, a dense cloud of smoke. The mountain-lion shape leaped
furiously and the jerk dislodged the slightly singed Salazar and sent him
rolling. The mountain-lion vehicle landed and rolled over and over, one leg
useless and spouting monstrous, white, actinic fire. The being inside knew an
instant’s panic; then it felt yielding sheep-bodies below it, thrashed about
violently and crazily, and at last the Qul-En jammed the flame-spurting limb
deep into soft earth. The fire went out; but that leg of its vehicle was almost
useless.

For an instant deadly rage filled
the tiny occupant of the cabin where a mountain-lion’s lungs should have been.
Almost, it turned and opened the mouth of its steed and poured out the
killing-beam. Almost. The flock would have died instantly, and the man and the
dog, and all the things in the wild for miles. But that would not have been
scientific; after all, this mission should be secret. And the biped . . .

~ * ~

The
Qul-En ceased the thrashings of its vehicle. It thought coldly. Salazar raced
up to it, barking with a shrillness that told of terror valorously combatted;
he danced about, barking.

The Qul-En found a solution. Its
vehicle rose on its hind legs and raced up the hillside. It was an emergency
method of locomotion for which this particular vehicle was not designed, and it
required almost inspired handling of the controls to achieve it. But the Qul-En
inside was wholly competent; it guided the vehicle safely over the hilltop
while Salazar made only feigned dashes after it. Safely away, the Qul-En
stopped and deliberately experimented until the process of running on three
legs developed. Then the mountain lion, which was not a mountain lion, went
bounding through the night toward its hidden ship.

Within an hour, it clawed away
the brush from the exit-port, crawled inside, and closed the port after it. As
a matter of pure precaution, it touched the “take-off” control before it even
came out of its vehicle.

The ventilation-opening
closed—very nearly. The ship rose quietly and swiftly toward the skies. Its
arrival had not been noted; its departure was quite unsuspected.

It wasn’t until the Qul-En
touched the switch for the ship’s system of internal illumination to go on that
anything appeared to be wrong. There was a momentary arc, and darkness. There
was no interior illumination; ants had stripped insulation from essential
wires. The lights were shorted. The Qul-En was bewildered; it climbed back into
the mountain-lion shape to use the infra-red-sensitive scanning-cells.

The interior of the ship was a
crawling mass of insect life. There were ants and earwigs, silverfish and
mites, spiders and centipedes, mantises and beetles. There were moths, larvae,
grubs, midges, gnats and flies. The recording-instrument was shrouded in cobweb
and hooded in dust which was fragments of the bodies of the spiders’ tiny
victims. The air-refresher chemicals were riddled with the tunnels of beetles.
Crickets devoured plastic parts of the ship and chirped loudly. And the
controls—ah! the controls! Insulation stripped off here; brackets riddled or
weakened or turned to powder there. The ship could rise, and it did. But there
were no controls at all.

The Qul-En went into a rage
deadly enough to destroy the insects of itself. The whole future of its race
depended on the discovery of an adequate source of a certain hormone. That
source had been found. Only the return of this one small ship—fifteen feet in
diameter—was needed to secure the future of a hundred-thousand-year-old
civilization. And it was impeded by the insect-life of the planet left behind!
Insect-life so low in nervous organization that the Qul-En had ignored it!

~ * ~

The
ship was twenty thousand miles out from earth when the occupant of the mountain
lion used its ray-beam gun to destroy all the miniature enemies of its race.
The killing beam swept about the ship. Mites, spiders, beetles, larvae,
silverfish and flies—everything died. Then the Qul-En crawled out and began to
make repairs furiously. The technical skill needed was not lacking; in hours,
this same being had made a perfect counterfeit of a mountain lion to serve it
as a vehicle. Tracing and replacing gnawed-away insulation would be merely a
tedious task. The ship would return to its home planet; the future of the
Qul-En race would be secure. Great ships, many times the size of this, would
flash through emptiness and come to this planet with instruments specially
designed for collecting specimens of the local fauna. The cities of the
civilized race would be the simplest and most ample sources of the
so-desperately-needed hormone, no doubt. The inhabitants of even one city would
furnish a stop-gap supply. In time—why—it would become systematic. The hormone
would be gathered from this continent at this time, and from that continent at
that, allowing the animals and the civilized race to breed for a few years in
between collections. Yes . . .

The Qul-En worked feverishly.
Presently it felt a vague discomfort; it worked on. The discomfort increased;
it could discover no reason for it. It worked on, feverishly. . . .

Back on Earth, morning came. The
sun rose slowly and the dew lay heavy on the mountain grasses. Faraway peaks
were just beginning to be visible through clouds that had lain on them
overnight. Antonio still trembled, but Salazar slept. When the sun was fully
risen he arose and shook himself; he stretched elaborately, scratched
thoroughly, shook himself again and was ready for a new day. When Antonio
tremblingly insisted that they drive the flock on toward the lowlands, Salazar
assisted. He trotted after the flock and kept them moving; that was his
business.

Out in space, the silvery ship
suddenly winked out of existence. Enough of its circuits had been repaired to
put it in overdrive. The Qul-En was desperate, by that time. It felt itself
growing weaker, and it was utterly necessary to reach its own race and report
the salvation it had found for them. The record of the flickering flame was
ruined. The Qul-En felt that itself was dying. But if it could get near enough
to any of the planetary systems inhabited by its race, it could signal them and
all would be well.

Moving even more feebly, the
Qul-En managed to get lights on within the ship again. Then it found what it
considered the cause of its increasing weakness and spasmodic, gasping breaths.
In using the killing-ray it had swept all the interior of the ship. But not the
mountain-lion shape. Naturally! And the mountain-lion shape had killed
specimens and carried them about. While its foreleg flamed, it had even rolled
on startled, stupid sheep. It had acquired fleas—perhaps some from Salazar—and
ticks. The fleas and ticks had not been killed; they now happily inhabited the
Qul-En.

The Qul-En tried desperately to
remain alive until a message could be given to its people, but it was not
possible. There was a slight matter the returning explorer was too much wrought
up to perceive, and the instruments that would have reported it were out of
action because of destroyed insulation. When the ventilation-slit was closed as
the ship took off, it did not close completely; a large beetle was in the way.
There was a most tiny but continuous leakage of air past the crushed chitinous
armor. The Qul-En in the ship died of oxygen-starvation without realizing what
had happened, just as human pilots sometimes black out from the same cause before
they know what is the matter. So the little silvery ship never came out of
overdrive. It went on forever, or until its source of power failed.

The fleas and ticks, too, died in
time; they died very happily, very full of Qul-En body-fluid. And they never
had a chance to report to their fellows that the Qul-En were very superior
hosts.

The only entity who could report
told this story and was laughed at. Only his cronies, ignorant and
superstitious men like himself, could believe in the existence of a thing not
of earth, in the shape of a mountain lion that leaped hundreds of feet at a
time, which dissected wild creatures and made magic over them, but fled from
bullets marked with a cross and bled flame and smoke when such a bullet wounded
it.

Such a thing, of course, was
absurd!

<>

~ * ~

THE WINGS OF NIGHT

by Lester del Rey

“DAMN
ALL MARTIANS!” Fats Welch’s thin mouth bit out the words with all the malice of
an offended member of a superior race. “Here we are, loaded down with as sweet
a high-rate cargo of iridium as ever came out of the asteroids, just barely
over the moon, and that injector starts mismetering again. If I ever see that
bulbous Marshy—”

“Yeah.” Slim Lane groped back
with his right hand for the flexible-shaft wrench, found it, and began
wriggling and grunting forward into the mess of machinery again. “Yeah. I know.
You’ll make mince meat out of him. Did you ever figure that maybe you were
making your own trouble? That maybe Martians are people after all? Lyro Bmachis
told you it would take two days to make the overhaul of the injector control
hookup, so you knocked him across the field, called his ancestors dirty dogs,
and gave him just eight hours to finish repairs. Now you expect his rush job to
be a labor of love for you—Oh, skip it, Fats, and give me the screwdriver.”

What was the use? He’d been over
it all with Fats a dozen times before, and it never got him anywhere. Fats was
a good rocket man, but he couldn’t stretch his imagination far enough to forget
the hogwash the Reconstruction Empire was dishing out about the Destiny of Man
and the Divine Plan whereby humans were created to exploit all other races. Not
that it would do Fats much good if he did. Slim knew the value of idealism—none
better.

He’d come out of college with a
bad dose of it and an inherited fortune big enough for three men, filled with
the old crusading spirit. He’d written and published books, made speeches,
interviewed administrators, lobbied, joined and organized societies, and been
called things that weren’t complimentary. Now he was pushing freight from Mars
to Earth for a living, quarter owner of a space-worn freighter. And Fats, who’d
come up from a tube cleaner without the help of ideals, owned the other three
quarters.

Fats watched him climb out of the
hold. “Well?”

“Nothing. I can’t fix it—don’t
know enough about electronics. There’s something wrong with the relays that
control the time interval, but the indicators don’t show where, and I’d hate to
experiment out here.”

“Make it to Earth—maybe?”

Slim shook his head. “I doubt it,
Fats. Better set us down on Luna somewhere, if you can handle her that far.
Then maybe we can find out what’s wrong before we run out of air.”