Here Comes Civilization: The Complete Science Fiction of William Tenn Volume II (33 page)

Behind him, he heard the doctors wheezing under the weight of the cartridges. "Did you notice the peculiar manifestation of the color red in that monster, Risbummer?" Dr. Pertinnet was saying. "Remember what Piscoodberry says about the occurrence of red in dreams of the mentally unstable?"

"Do you mean Piscoodberry
On Simulated Hypnotism
or the Piscoodberry monograph on
The Primary Colors and the Subconscious
?"

"The monograph, of course! Where are your thoughts, Risbummer? What else could I mean but the monograph? Now, according to Piscoodberry..."

Their voices became low and professionally confidential. Ransom and Nila grinned at each other. They felt better as they moved along behind Hallock.

The number of distorted creatures around them seemed to increase, but nothing moved out to disturb them. They were watched by hundreds of crazy eyes in all kinds of fantastic faces.

An odor, perceptible for the last few minutes, became suddenly stronger. It was something which could only be described as a stink. "Although," said Ransom, "it smells like the great grand-daddy of all stinks. Like everything filthy and foul concentrated in one place." The light had grown until there was almost perfect visibility.

The cat had been moving stiffly in front of their group. It stopped, stared ahead, and began to hump its back. A violent, hating hiss shot from its teeth. Then it slowly retreated until it backed into Hallock's legs. It crawled behind him.

Hallock stopped and peered ahead. "This is it," he said in a low, frightened voice. "The Brood Mother. Load up and get ready."

—|—

The two men saw to their weapons, made certain their grenades were easily detachable and would not catch on any part of their clothing. They stuck the machetes through their belts. Nila helped with the clips of cartridges.

"You stay here," Ransom whispered. He turned to the doctors, who were standing near him in wistful helplessness. He gave Pertinnet one of his grenades. "Take care of her." Then as Hallock squared his shoulders and sighed, he moved up beside him.

"
Götterdämmerung
," Hallock said. "The last big battle."

They walked forward gingerly, in step, a foot moving slowly ahead after the other one had found firm purchase. The cat padded at their side, its belly hugging the ground.

The stench tore at their nostrils. Solid waves of odor came at them in stronger and stronger layers. Ransom scratched at the stock of his Winchester, trying desperately to see what lay ahead.

Then they saw it.

An immense carpet of living flesh, cradled in its own slime, lay before them. Miles long—and miles wide. A great expanse of flat, undulating tissue, green and yellow and sickly orange. Every now and then, some monstrosity would float up to the side of the organic carpet and move away from it. It was breeding before their unbelieving eyes.

Back and forth it soughed in the thick goo, and the odor arising from it was indescribable. And then, Ransom saw it was not entirely flat: at regular intervals, there were gaping mouths set flush with the surface, opening and closing spasmodically.

Hallock rushed forward, and Ransom, licking lips that tasted like dehydrated cardboard, moved with him. He knew they should go slowly, stalk it and not fire until they knew just where to strike. But he was hypnotized by the horror of the thing, by Hallock, and he ran at it like a madman.

Hallock stopped at the edge of the slime and tore the grenades off his belt. He pulled the pins and threw them in long looping arcs far into the monster. There were explosions and bits of awful flesh splattered about them.

Then Hallock was on his knees, screaming curses and laughter and spraying bullets into the expanse of living matter.

There was an answering scream from ten thousand throats. A vast ripple ran across the blanket of flesh, from mouth to mouth. Then—the far side lifted. Higher and higher—the monster was rearing from the slime!

Ransom got off a grenade as he saw it come up. One mouth winked out into a dripping hole. Then he was beside Hallock, firing into it as it rose.

Those mouths—they weren't only mouths, they were part of individual faces with discernible eyes and noses—they were gaping red mouths and horrible faces, but they reminded Ransom of something he couldn't quite remember.

"Get that center bulge," Hallock was gasping. "Looks like a vital spot!"

Ransom squeezed off a shot right into the palpitating scarlet blob at the exact middle of the creature. It ricocheted! Armor!

He pulled the pin out of his last grenade. Slime dripped down on them. He threw the grenade. It exploded far above the red spot.

They cursed in unison and began to stumble backward, firing as they went. The monster undulated forward, the gaping mouths at the top swinging down closer.

Ransom remembered the grenade he had given Pertinnet. He turned and ran back to where he had left Nila and the two doctors. He dropped his Winchester as he ran, not bothering to retrieve it.

Nila stared over his head at the awful thing coming down and forward. "Ran, oh, Ran," she moaned.

Pertinnet was examining the grenade, turning it over and over in his hands. "Strange device," he observed. "No discernible trigger mechanism. Simplicity should be one of the chief factors—"

Ransom plucked the grenade from his hands and whirled. Hallock was firing straight up now, burst after burst of bullets that had as little effect as wads of paper. He ran out of ammunition or the gun jammed, and he dropped it. He swept the machete from his belt.

"Back, Hallock," Ransom called. "Get back!" The older explorer didn't seem to hear him, but moved ankle-deep into the slime.

Ransom pulled the pin, took dead aim at the red spot and threw. The entire red bulge seemed to open outward as the grenade hit it. The monster screamed again, a perfect chord of screams. It folded back, and in upon itself.

As it rolled back, Hallock stepped onto the surface, swinging his machete like a lunatic. He sliced great hunks out of it before the edge behind him curled inward, carrying him with it—shrieking in horrible pain—wrapped in huge agonizing mouths.

The world cracked. Millions of unmatched cymbals clashed against each other in a discordant rattle of sound. Great splinters of grayness came smashing down all around them.

Ransom grabbed at Nila as he felt himself fall. They turned and twisted down through a dissolving murk. On both sides, he could see fragments of bloated green bodies floating off into spiralling vapor, red and violet areas writhing off into nothingness. Pertinnet and Risbummer, also clutching each other, were floating down slowly some distance away.

Nila huddled her warm and frightened body closer to his. "Those faces," she whimpered. "Those faces! Do you know whose they were? Hallock! Awful! How unbelievably awful!"

They
were
Hallock, Ransom remembered now. Ten thousand infernally grotesque caricatures—all the faces of the Brood Mother—were Wells W. Hallock's own face. And in that last moment, as he stepped into the creature, Hallock must have known it!

They came to rest in the midst of dazzling whiteness. They shut their eyes against the glare, opened them cautiously again. The glare subsided. Objects appeared indistinctly, became clearer, resolved into the sharp outlines of reality.

Then—no more obscene shapings, no more distorted vision. They were back in the hospital room, all of them, Ransom and Nila still shuddering with excitement. Dr. Pertinnet was unbuttoning the restraining blanket. He placed it carefully around the gory, broken mess on the bed.

"I—I'll get some sedatives for all of us," he said at last. Risbummer followed him through the door.

"Dr. Pertinnet and his sedatives!" Nila cried hysterically.

Ransom crossed to the table and lifted the small ivory chest. "This may not be in the best interests of scientific investigation, Nila, but I think we should destroy what's left of this stuff."

She grabbed the chest from him. "We certainly should," she agreed. "I'll dump it into the hospital incinerator. I'm through with dates for the rest of my life. But—of course—I'll settle for rice."

"A deal." He grinned at her. "If anyone should ask, a character by the name of Ransom Morrow has now had enough adventure to last clear through his grandchildren!"

She walked unsteadily through the door. A moment later Ransom heard the incinerator door open. He lit a cigarette and smiled at the cat. It was lucky not to have a human memory.

Then he stopped smiling. Because the cat had something round and black in its teeth.
And it wasn't a mouse.

Graff Dingle stolidly watched yellow mold form around the stiletto hole in his arm. He smelled the first faint jasmine odor of the disease and glanced up to where the sun glowed unhappily behind a mass of dirty clouds and wind-driven rain.

Dingle kicked morosely at the Heatwave thug left behind to ambush him, and the charred body turned soughingly in the mud. "Be seeing you, bully-boy, in about five and a half hours. Your electroblast may have missed me, but it cooked my antiseptic pouch into soup. It made that last knife-thrust really rate."

There was a dumb dryhorn blunder, Graff reflected, sneering at himself out of a face that was dark from life-long exposure to a huge sun. Bending over an enemy before making certain he was burned to a crisp.

But he'd had to search the man's clothing for a clue to the disappearance of Greta and Dr. Bergenson and—even above Greta—the unspeakably precious cargo of lobodin they'd been flying in from Earth.

So I'll pay for my hurry,
he thought.
Like you always do in the Venusian jungle.

Ricardo's Virus was viciously prompt: six hours after its light, saffron globules had formed in an open wound, you were dead. And no frantic surgery, no pathetic attempts at drainage, could save you. Graff should know. His parents, his brothers and sisters had been a small fraction of the New Kalamazoo death totals due to cuts and scratches observed too late for antisepsis. The virus had accounted for most of three generations of Venusian colonists, including Vilfredo Ricardo himself, the first man to set hesitant foot on the swampy planet. Ricardo had merely skinned his hand on his new flagpole.

Nasty to die of the filthy mold before he knew what had happened to the Bergensons. Not that he had a personal interest in the matter any more, for Greta wouldn't be marrying a corpse when she could pick any one of a hundred extremely live and woman-hungry pioneers. But her father was the only doctor in the tiny settlement. And the loss of the lobodin meant Ricardo's Virus would tuck many more New Kalamazoo colonists into seepy graves before the year was out.

A speck grew large in the sky. Graff involuntarily moved into the shade of a giant rosebush as his oversharp instincts asserted themselves.

Yes, it was a terry all right. Friendly?

The pterodactyl landed lightly on a frond of the opposite fern. Its absurd, leathery forehead wrinkled at him. Graff noted that it was barely out of range of his electroblast. Intelligent, sure enough, and an unusually fearless specimen to perch this close to man.

At any other time, he would have been intrigued by the opportunity of making friends with one of the intelligent winged reptiles who had learned to speak man's languages and, with good reason, shun his works. Now, he had other things on his mind.

Like dying painfully in a few hours.

Graff looked up sharply as enormous bat-like wings ceased their rustle.

The lizard-bird's long, sloping forehead wrinkled even further. Its beak opened and closed several times. It cleared its throat.

"City?"

Then it was civilized, too. What had induced it to leave its communal eyrie in the San Mountains? The terries had avoided men for over fifty years. Many was the time that Graff, intent on stalking meat for the colonists, had been startled by a flock of pterodactyls winging overhead and shouting curses down at him in the three languages of the early settlers.

"City?" the question was repeated more insistently. "Heatwave or New Kalamazoo?"

"New Kalamazoo."

A relieved nod of the triangular head. "This I thought. You wish knowledge which Heatwave man has man and girl from shif?"

Graff's whole body tensed. "Yes! Do you know?"

Another nod. "This I know. Name is Fuvina."

"Fuvina?" The hunter repeated it with a frown. He knew the names of most of Heatwave's big shots; some were political criminals, escaped from Earth. Others were former residents of his own town who had left in search of an easier living than the continual struggle with marshy soil and carnivorous jungle.

But he couldn't recall any Fuvina. Possibly a new arrival; possibly one of the smaller fry who had recently killed and looted his way to the top of bloody Heatwave society. Fuvina? Fuv—

Of course! The not-quite-flexible pterodactyl beak was incapable of labial sounds like
p
and
b
, and transformed them into the labiodentals
f
and
v
. Pubina! Max Pubina had left New Kalamazoo in a hurry three years ago after cutting some farmer's throat in a boundary dispute and, by combining organized raids on isolated families with the smuggling of the illicit Venusian dunging drug to Earth, had become a power of sorts.

"You mean Pubina?"

"This I said. Fuvina. He and other Heatwave men took man and girl from shif and placed them in own shif. Also took vig green vottle. Left one Heatwave man hidden here. Then flew that way in own shif." A fantastically large and fleshy wing gestured south. "Them I follow. Where Heatwave men stof, I see. Then I come vack."

The terry drew an immense swallow of air to compensate for his long speech and shook himself. The great fern trembled in sympathy.

Graff stepped forward from the rosebush and inspected his informant closely. "Thanks. But I don't see why you're interested."

The toothed beak, which was half as long as a man, opened uncertainly. "Vecause," the lizard-bird explained in a low voice, "Heatwave men have caftured my mate vefore attacking New Kalamazoo sky-shif. In cage they fut her for shivment to Earth. This I can do nothing about fy myself. Vut them I follow, hofing to find way to rescue her."