The Star Beast (2 page)

He paused and raised up like a caterpillar, lifting legs one and three, two and four, off the ground, and looked around. It was certainly nice to be outside; he wondered why he had not done it sooner. It had been a long time since John Thomas had taken him out, even for a short walk.

He was still looking around, sniffing free air, when an unfriendly character charged at him, yapping and barking furiously. Lummox recognized him, an oversized and heavily muscled mastiff that ran ownerless and free in the neighborhood; they had often exchanged insults through the grating. Lummox had nothing against dogs; in the course of his long career with the Stuart family he had known several socially and had found them pretty fair company in the absence of John Thomas. But this mastiff was another matter. He fancied himself boss of the neighborhood, bullied other dogs, terrorized cats, and repeatedly challenged Lummox to come out and fight like a dog.

Nevertheless Lummox smiled at him, opened his mouth wide and, in a lisping, baby-girl voice from somewhere far back inside him, called the mastiff a very bad name. The dog gasped. it is likely that he did not comprehend what Lummox had said, but he did know that he had been insulted. He recovered himself and renewed the attack, barking louder than ever and raising an unholy ruckus while dashing around Lummox and making swift sorties at his flanks to nip at Lummox’s legs.

Lummox remained reared up, watching the dog but making no move. He did add to his earlier remark a truthful statement about the dog’s ancestry and an untruthful one about his habits; they helped to keep the mastiff berserk. But on the dog’s seventh round trip he cut fairly close to where Lummox’s first pair of legs would have been had Lummox had all eight feet on the ground; Lummox ducked his head the way a frog strikes at a fly. His mouth opened like a wardrobe trunk and gobbled the mastiff.

Not bad, Lummox decided as he chewed and swallowed. Not bad at all…and the collar made a crunchy tidbit. He considered whether or not to go back through the grating, now that he had had a little snack, and pretend that he had never been outside at all. However, there were still those ownerless rose bushes…and no doubt John Thomas would make it inconvenient for him to get out again soon. He ambled away parallel to the Stuart’s rear wall, then swung around the end onto the Donahue land.

John Thomas Stuart
XI
got home shortly before dinner time, having already dropped Betty Sorensen at her home. He noticed, as he landed, that Lummox was not in sight, but he assumed that his pet was in his shed. His mind was not on Lummox, but on the age-old fact that females do not operate by logic, at least as logic is understood by males.

He was planning to enter Western Tech; Betty wanted them both to attend the state university. He had pointed out that he could not get the courses he wanted at State U.; Betty had insisted that he could and had looked up references to prove her point. He had rebutted by saying that it was not the name of a course that mattered, but who taught it. The discussion had fallen to pieces when she had refused to concede that he was an authority.

He had absent-mindedly unstrapped his harness copter, while dwelling on the illogic of the feminine mind, and was racking it in the hallway, when his mother burst into his presence. “John Thomas!
Where
have you been?”

He tried to think what he could have slipped on now. It was a bad sign when she called him “John Thomas”…“John” or “Johnnie” was okay, or even “Johnnie Boy.” But “John Thomas” usually meant that he had been accused, tried, and convicted in absentia. “Huh? Why, I told you at lunch, Mum. Out hopping with Betty. We flew over to…”

“Never mind that! Do you know what
that beast
has done?”

Now he had it. Lummox. He hoped it wasn’t Mum’s garden. Maybe Lum had just knocked over his own house again. If so, Mum would level off presently. Maybe he had better build a new one, bigger. “What’s the trouble?” he asked cautiously.

“‘What’s the trouble?’ What isn’t the trouble? John Thomas, this time you simply will have to get rid of it. This is the last straw.”

“Take it easy, Mum,” he said hastily. “We can’t get rid of Lum. You promised Dad.”

She made no direct answer. “With the police calling every ten minutes and that great dangerous beast rampaging around and…”

“
Huh?
Wait a minute, Mum, Lum isn’t dangerous; he’s gentle as a kitten. What happened?”

“Everything!”

He gradually drew out of her some of the details. Lummox had gone for a stroll; that much was clear. John Thomas hoped without conviction that Lummox had not got any iron or steel while he was out; iron had such an explosive effect on his metabolism. There was the time Lummox had eaten that second-hand Buick…

His thoughts were interrupted by his mother’s words. “…and Mrs. Donahue is simply furious! And well she might be…her prize roses.”

Oh oh, that was bad. He tried to recall the exact amount in his savings account. He would have to apologize, too, and think of ways to butter up the old biddy. In the meantime he would beat Lummox’s ears with an ax; Lummox knew about roses, there was no excuse.

“Look, Mum, I’m awfully sorry. I’ll go right out and pound some sense into his thick head. When I get through with him, he won’t dare sneeze without permission.” John Thomas started edging around her.

“Where are you going?” she demanded.

“Huh? Out to talk with Lum, of course. When I get through with him…”

“Don’t be silly. He isn’t here.”

“Huh? Where is he?” John Thomas swiftly rearranged his prayers to hope that Lummox hadn’t found very much iron. The Buick hadn’t really been Lummox’s fault and anyhow it had belonged to John Thomas, but…

“No telling where he is now. Chief Dreiser said…”

“The
police
are after Lummox?”

“You can just bet they are, young man! The entire safety patrol is after him. Mr. Dreiser wanted me to come downtown and take him home, but I told him we would have to get you to handle that beast.”

“But Mother, Lummox would have obeyed you. He always does. Why did Mr. Dreiser take him downtown? He knows Lum belongs here. Being taken downtown would frighten Lum. The poor baby is timid; he wouldn’t like…”

“Poor baby indeed! He wasn’t taken downtown.”

“But you said he was.”

“I said no such thing. If you’ll be quiet, I’ll tell you what happened.”

It appeared that Mrs. Donahue had surprised Lummox when he had eaten only four or five of her rose bushes. With much courage and little sense she had run at him with a broom, to scream and belabor him about the head. She had not followed the mastiff, though he could have managed her with one gulp; Lummox had a sense of property as nice as that of any house cat. People were not food; in fact, people were almost invariably friendly.

So his feelings were hurt. He had lumbered away from there, pouting.

The next action report on Lummox was for a point two miles away and about thirty minutes later. The Stuarts lived in a suburban area of Westville; open country separated it from the main part of town. Mr. Ito had a small farm in this interval, where he hand-raised vegetables for the tables of gourmets. Mr. Ito apparently had not known what it was that he had found pulling up his cabbages and gulping them down. Lummox’s long residence in the vicinity was certainly no secret, but Mr. Ito had no interest in other people’s business and had never seen Lummox before.

But he showed no more hesitation than had Mrs. Donahue. He dashed into his house and came out with a gun that had been handed down to him from his grandfather—a relic of the Fourth World War of the sort known affectionately as a “tank killer.”

Mr. Ito steadied the gun on a potting bench and let Lummox have it where he would have sat down had Lummox been constructed for such. The noise scared Mr. Ito (he had never heard the weapon fired) and the flash momentarily blinded him. When he blinked his eyes and recovered, the thing had gone.

But it was easy to tell the direction in which it had gone. This encounter had not humiliated Lummox as had the brush with Mrs. Donahue; this frightened him almost out of his wits. While busy with his fresh green salad he had been faced toward a triplet of Mr. Ito’s greenhouses. When the explosion ticked him and the blast assailed his hearing, Lummox shifted into high gear and got underway in the direction he was heading. Ordinarily he used a leg firing order of 1,4,5,8,2,3,6,7 and repeat, good for speeds from a slow crawl to fast as a trotting horse; he now broke from a standing start into a double-ended gallop, moving legs 1 & 2 & 5 & 6 together, alternated with 3 & 4 & 7 & 8.

Lummox was through the three greenhouses before he had time to notice them, leaving a tunnel suitable for a medium truck. Straight ahead, three miles away, lay downtown Westville. It might have been better if he had been headed in the opposite direction toward the mountains.

John Thomas Stuart listened to his mother’s confused account with growing apprehension. When he heard about Mr. Ito’s greenhouses, he stopped thinking about his savings account and started wondering what assets he could convert into cash. His jump harness was almost new…but shucks! it wouldn’t pay the damage. He wondered if there was any kind of a dicker he could work with the bank? One sure thing: Mum wouldn’t help him out, not the state she was in.

Later reports were spotty. Lummox seemed to have gone across country until he hit the highway leading into town. A transcontinental trucker had complained to a traffic officer, over a cup of coffee, that he had just seen a robot pedatruck with no license plates and that the durned thing had been paying no attention to traffic lanes. But the trucker had used it as an excuse to launch a diatribe about the danger of robot drivers and how there was no substitute for a human driver, sitting in the cab and keeping his eyes open for emergencies. The traffic patrolman had not seen Lummox, being already at his coffee when Lummox passed, and had not been impressed since the trucker was obviously prejudiced. Nevertheless he had phoned in.

Traffic control center in Westville paid no attention to the report; control was fully occupied with a reign of terror.

John Thomas interrupted his mother. “Has anybody been hurt?”

“Hurt? I don’t know. Probably. John Thomas, you’ve got to get rid of that beast at once.”

He ignored that statement; it seemed the wrong time to argue it. “What else happened?”

Mrs. Stuart did not know in detail. Near the middle of town Lummox came down a local chute from the overhead freeway. He was moving slowly now and with hesitation; traffic and large numbers of people confused him. He stepped off the street onto a slidewalk. The walk ground to a stop, not being designed for six tons of concentrated load; fuses had blown, circuit breakers had opened, and pedestrian traffic at the busiest time of day was thrown into confusion for twenty blocks of the shopping district.

Women had screamed, children and dogs had added to the excitement, safety officers had tried to restore order, and poor Lummox, who had not meant any harm and had not intended to visit the shopping district anyway, made a perfectly natural mistake…the big display windows of the Bon Marché looked like a refuge where he could get away from it all. The duraglass of the windows was supposed to be unbreakable, but the architect had not counted on Lummox mistaking it for empty air. Lummox went in and tried to hide in a model bedroom display. He was not very successful.

John Thomas’s next question was cut short by a thump on the roof; someone had landed. He looked up. “You expecting anyone, Mum?”

“It’s probably the police. They said they would…”

“The police? Oh, my!”

“Don’t go away…you’ve got to see them.”

“I wasn’t going anywhere,” he answered miserably and punched a button to unlock the roof entrance.

Moments later the lazy lift from the roof creaked to a stop and the door opened; a safety sergeant and a patrolman stepped out. “Mrs. Stuart?” the sergeant began formally. “‘In your service, ma’am.’ We…” He caught sight of John Thomas, who was trying not to be noticed. “Are you John T. Stuart?”

John gulped. “Yessir.”

“Then come along, right away. ’Scuse us, ma’am. Or do you want to come too?”

“Me? Oh, no, I’d just be in the way.”

The sergeant nodded relieved agreement. “Yes, ma’am. Come along, youngster. Minutes count.” He took John by the arm.

John tried to shrug away. “Hey, what is this? You got a warrant or something?”

The police officer stopped, seemed to count ten, then said slowly, “Son, I do not have a warrant. But if you are the John T. Stuart I’m looking for…and I know you are…then unless you want something drastic and final to happen to that deep-space what-is-it you’ve been harboring, you’d better snap to and come with us.”

“Oh, I’ll come,” John said hastily.

“Okay. Don’t give me any more trouble.”

John Thomas Stuart kept quiet and went with him.

In the three minutes it took the patrol car to fly downtown John Thomas tried to find out the worst. “Uh, Mister Patrol Officer? There hasn’t been anybody hurt? Has there?”

“Sergeant Mendoza,” the sergeant answered. “I hope not. I don’t know.”

John considered this bleak answer. “Well… Lummox is still in the Bon Marché?”

“Is that what you call it?—Lummox? It doesn’t seem strong enough. No, we got it out of there. It’s under the West Arroyo viaduct… I hope.”

The answer sounded ominous. “What do you mean: ‘you hope’?”

“Well, first we blocked off Main and Hamilton, then we chivvied it out of the store with fire extinguishers. Nothing else seemed to bother it; solid slugs just bounced off. Say, what’s that beast’s hide made of? Ten-point steel?”

“Uh, not exactly.” Sergeant Mendoza’s satire was closer to fact than John Thomas cared to discuss; he still was wondering if Lummox had eaten any iron. After the mishap of the digested Buick Lummox’s growth had taken an enormous spurt; in two weeks he had jumped from the size of a misshapen hippopotamus to his present unlikely dimensions, more growth than he had shown in the preceding generation. It had made him extremely gaunt, like a canvas tarpaulin draped over a scaffolding, his quite unearthly skeleton pushing through his skin; it had taken three years of a high-caloric diet to make him chubby again. Since that time John Thomas had tried to keep metal away from Lummox, most especially iron, even though his father and his grandfather had always fed him tidbits of scrap metal.