Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction (497 page)

Bowman’s grin faded. “That’s impossible. We’ve examined, not to mention eaten, hundreds of muffins since we’ve been here. Not one of them had sharp teeth. Their chewing mechanism is strictly molaric dentition, for grinding up and processing vegetation.”

His partner shook his head slowly. “I saw them, Jamie. Sharp and pointed. Saw them and felt them. And there was something funny about its eyes, too.”

“That’s a description that’ll look nice and scientific in the record. Funny how?”

Clearly distressed, LeCleur pursed his lips. “I don’t know. I didn’t get a good look. They just struck me as funny.” He tapped his leg above the now hermetized bite. “This didn’t.”

“Well, we know they’re not poisonous.” Bowman turned back to his work. “So it was a freak muffin. A break in the muffin routine. An eclectic muffin. I’m sure it was an isolated incident and won’t happen again.”

“It sure won’t.” LeCleur rose and extended his mended leg. “Because next time, you do the arthropod survey.”

It was a week later when Bowman, holding his coffee, walked out onto the porch, sat down in one of the chairs, and had the mug halfway to his lips when he paused. Lowering the container, he stared for a long moment before activating the com button attached to the collar of his shirt.

“Gerard, I think you’d better come here. I’m on the porch.”

A drozy mumble responded. The other agent was sleeping in. Bowman continued to nag him until he finally appeared, rubbing at his eyes and grumbling. His vision and mind cleared quickly enough as soon as he was able to share his partner’s view.

On the far edge of the ravine, muffins were gathering. Not in the familiar, tidily spaced herd cluster in which they spent the night for protection from roving carnivores, nor in the irregular pattern they employed for browsing, but in dense knots of wall-to-wall brown fur. More muffins were arriving every minute, filling in the gaps. And from the hundreds going on thousands rose an unexpectedly steady, repetitive peep-peeping that was somehow intimidating in its idiosyncratic sonority.

“What the hell is going on?” LeCleur finally murmured.

Bowman remembered to take a drink of his coffee before pulling the scope from its pocket on the side of the chair. What he saw through the lens was anything but reassuring. He passed it to his partner. “Take a look for yourself.”

LeCleur raised the instrument. The view it displayed resolved into groups of two to three muffins, bunched so tightly together it seemed impossible they could breathe, much less peep. They had swollen slightly, their compact bodies puffed up about an additional ten percent, brown hair bristling. Their eyes—LeCleur had seen harbingers of that wild, collective red glare in the countenance of the one that had bit him a week ago. When they opened their mouths to peep, the change that had taken place within was immediately apparent. Instead of a succession of smooth, white eruptions of bone, the diminutive jaws were now filled with a mixture of grinding projections and triangular, assertively sharp-edged canines.

He lowered the scope. “Christ—they’re metamorphosing. And moving. I wonder how much?”

Bowman already had the command headsup in place. A few verbal directives were sufficient to materialize an image. Atop the single-story station, remote instrumentation was responding efficiently.

The surface around the outpost was swarming with rustling, stirring movement. By mid-day, they no longer needed the instruments to show them what was happening. The two men stood on the porch, observing manually.

All around them, as far as they could see and beyond, the grass was coming down, mown flat by a suddenly ravenous, insatiable hoard. Within that seething ocean of brown fur, red eyes, and snapping teeth, nothing survived. Grass, other plants, anything living was overwhelmed, to disappear down a sea of brown gullets. From the depths of the feeding frenzy arose a relentless, ostinato peeping that drowned out everything from the wind to the soft hum of the outpost’s hydrogen generator.

Bowman and LeCleur watched, recorded, and made notes, usually without saying a word. By evening the entire boundless mass of muffins, like a moving carpet, had begun advancing as one being in a southeasterly direction. The Akoe, Bowman recalled, had gone north. The two agents needed no explanation of the phenomenon they were observing.

The migration was under way.

“I suppose we could have offered to let the Akoe stay here,” he commented to his partner.

LeCleur was tired from work and looking forward to a good night’s sleep. It had been a busy day. “Don’t believe it would’ve mattered. I think they would’ve gone anyway. Besides, such an offer would have constituted unsupported interference with native ritual. Expressly forbidden by the xenological protocols.”

Bowman nodded. “You check the systems?”

His friend smiled. “Everything’s working normally. Wake-up alarm the same time tomorrow?”

Bowman shrugged. “That works for me.” He glanced out at the heaving, rippling sea of brown. “They’ll still be here. How long you estimate it will take them to move on through?”

LeCleur considered. “Depends how widespread the migration is.” Raising a hand, he pointed. “Check that out.”

So dense had the swarm become that a number of the muffins at its edge were being jostled off into the ravine. The protective excavation was thirty feet deep, with walls that had been heat-treated to unclimbable slickness. A spider would have had trouble ascending those artificial perpendicularities. The agents retired, grateful for the outpost sound-proofing that shut out all but the faintest trace of mass peeping.

The station’s pleasant, synthesized female voice woke Bowman slightly before his partner.

“Wha…?” he mumbled. “What’s going on?”

“Perimeter violation,” the outpost replied, in the same tone of voice it used to announce when a tridee recording was winding up, or when mechanical food pre-prep had been completed. “You are advised to observe and react.”

“Observe and react, hell,” Bowman bawled as he struggled into a sitting position. Save for the dim light provided by widely-spaced night illuminators, it was dark in his room. “What time is it, anyway?”

“Four a.m., corrected Hedris time.” The outpost voice was not abashed by this pronouncement.

Muttering under his breath, Bowman shoved himself into shorts and shirt. LeCleur was waiting for him in the hall.

“I don’t know. I just got out of bed myself,” he mumbled in response to his partner’s querulous gaze.

As they made their way toward outpost central, Bowman queried the voice. “What kind of perimeter violation? Elaborate.”

“Why don’t you just look outside?” soft artificial tones responded. “I’ve put on the lights.”

Both men headed for the main entrance. As soon as the door opened, Bowman had to shield his eyes. LeCleur adapted faster. What he exclaimed was not scientific, but it was descriptive.

Bathed in the bright automated beams positioned atop the roof of the outpost was a Dantean vision of glaring red eyes, gnashing teeth, and spattering blood; a boiling brown stew of muffins whole, bleeding, dismembering, and scrambling with their two tiny legs for a foothold among their seething brethren. Presumably the rest of the darkened plain concealed a similar vision straight from Hell. Presumably, because the astounded agents could not see it. Their view was blocked by the thousands upon thousands of dead, dying, and frenetic muffins that had filled the outpost-encircling ravine to the brim with their bodies. At the same time, the reason for the transformation in the aliens’ dentition was immediately apparent.

Having consumed everything green that grew on the plains, they had turned to eating flesh. And each other.

Bulging eyes flared, tiny feet kicked, razor-sharp teeth flashed and tore. The curdling miasma of gore, eviscerated organs, and engorged muffin musk verged on overpowering. Rising above it all was the odor of cooked meat. Holding his hand over mouth and nose, LeCleur saw the reason why the outpost had awakened them.

Lining the interior wall of the artificial ravine was a double fence of waved air. Frenzied with instinct, the muffins were throwing themselves heedlessly onto the lethal barrier, moving always in a southeasterly direction. The instant it contacted the electrically waved air, a scrambling muffin body was immediately electrocuted. As was the one following behind it, and the next, and the next. In their dozens, in their hundreds, their wee corpses were piling up at such a rate that those advancing from behind would soon be able to cross unhindered into the compound. Those that didn’t pause to feast on the bodies of their own dead, that is.

“I think we’d better get inside and lock down until this is over,” LeCleur murmured quietly as he stood surveying the surging sea of southward-flowing carnage.

An angry Bowman was already heading for the master console. Though it held an unmistakable gruesome fascination, the migration would mean extra work for him and his partner. The perimeter fence would have to be repaired, and even with mechanical help it would take weeks to clear out and dispose of the tens of thousands of muffin corpses that filled the ravine, turning it into a moat full of meat. They would have to do all that while keeping up with their regular work schedule. He was more than a little pissed.

Oh well, he calmed himself. Everything had gone so smoothly, Hedris had been so accommodating, from the first day they had occupied the outpost, that it would be churlish of him to gripe about one small, unforeseen difficulty. They would deal with it in the morning. Which wasn’t that far off, he noted irritably. As soon as the greater part of the migration had passed them by, or settled down to a more manageable frenzy, he and LeCleur could retire for an extended rest and leave the cleaning-up to the automatics. Surely, despite the muffins’ numbers, such furious activity could not be sustained for more than a day or two.

His lack of concern stemmed from detailed knowledge of the station’s construction. It had been designed, and built, to handle and ride out anything from three hundred mile-an-hour winds, to temperatures down to a hundred and fifty below and the same above. The prefab duralloy walls and metallic glass ports were impervious to wind-blown grit, flying acid, ordinary laser cutters, micrometeorites up to a diameter of one inch, and solid stone avalanches. The interior was sealed against smoke, toxic gases, volcanic emissions, and flash floods of water, liquid methane, and anything else a planet could puke up.

Moving to a port, he watched as the first wave of migrating muffins to crest the wave fence raced toward the now impervious sealed structure. Their small feet, adapted for running and darting about on the flat plains, did not allow them to climb very well, but before long sufficient dead and dying bodies had piled high enough against the north side of the outpost to reach the port. Raging, berserk little faces gazed hungrily in at him. Metamorphosed teeth gnawed and bit at the port, their frantic scratching sounds penetrating only faintly. They were unable even to scratch the high-tech transparency. He watched as dozens of muffins smothered one another in their haste to sustain their southeasterly progress, stared as tiny teeth snapped and broke off in futile attempts to penetrate the glass and get at the food within.

Once again, LeCleur made breakfast, taking more time than usual. The sun was rising, casting its familiar benign light over a panorama of devastation and death the two team members could not have imagined at the height of the worst day during past four halcyon, pastoral months. As for the migration itself, it gave no indication of abating, or of even slowing down.

“I don’t care how many millions of muffins there are inhabiting this part of the world.” Seated on the opposite side of the table, LeCleur betrayed an uncharacteristic nervousness no doubt abetted by his lack of sleep. “It has to slow down soon.”

Bowman nodded absently. He ate mechanically, without his usual delight in the other man’s cooking. “It’s pitiful, watching the little critters mass asphyxiate themselves like this, and then to be reduced to feeding on each other’s corpses.” He remembered cuddling and taking the measurements of baby muffins while others looked on, curious but only mildly agitated, peeping querulously. Now that peeping had risen to a tyrannical, pestilential drone not even the outpost’s soundproofing could mute entirely.

“It’s not pitiful to me.” Eyes swollen from lack of sleep, LeCleur scratched his right leg where he had been assaulted. “You didn’t get bit.”

Holding his coffee, Bowman glanced to his right, in the direction of the nearest port. Instruments and the time told them the sun was up. They could not observe it directly because every port was now completely blocked by a mass of accumulated muffin cadavers.

Still, both men were capable of surprise when the voice of the outpost announced that evening that it was switching over to canned air. Neither man had to ask why, though Bowman did so, just to confirm.

The station was now buried beneath a growing mountain of dead muffins. Their accumulated tiny bodies had blocked every one of the shielded air intakes.

Still, neither agent was worried. They had enough bottled air for weeks, ample food, and could recycle their waste water. In an emergency, the station was almost as self-sufficient a closed system as a starship, though quite immobile. Their only real regret was the absence of information, since the swarming bodies now obstructed all the outpost’s external sensors.

Three days later a frustrated LeCleur suggested cracking one of the doors to see if the migration had finally run its course. Bowman was less taken with the idea.

“What if it’s not?” he argued.

“Then we use the emergency door close. That’ll shut it by itself. How else are we going to tell if the migration’s finally moved on and passed us by?” He gestured broadly. “Until we can get up top with some of the cleaning gear and clear off the bodies, we’re sitting blind in here.”

“I know.” Bowman found himself succumbing to his partner’s enticing logic. Not that his own objections were vociferous. He knew they would have to try and look outside sooner or later. He just wasn’t enthusiastic about the idea. “I don’t like the thought of letting any of the little monsters get inside.”