The Legacy of Heorot

by Larry Niven

  Another hand touched him from behind, and Cadmann wheeled, the butt of his rifle raised to strike.

  “Get a—”

  Mary Ann’s eyes flew wide open as the butt stopped inches from her chest. “Cadmann . . . ?”

  He wiped his hand across his forehead. She reached out a hand, and when he didn’t take it, she grabbed him, ignoring his feeble attempts to push her away.

  “Cadmann, please . . . give me the rifle.”

  “No.”

  The pitiful bundle from the passenger seat was unwrapped. Jean Patterson turned away and bent over, gagging hollowly. Hendrick tried to comfort her and she heaved again, staining his pants.

  Cadmann took a few steps, stumbled, caught himself. He reached out for Mary Ann this time. She sagged under his weight, then pushed with her strong runner’s legs until he was braced against the infirmary wall. “It was . . . it was the monster. It’s big. Bigger than a Komodo. Fast, like a racing motorcycle! Turns better.”

  Sylvia knelt to look at the corpse. Terry was behind her, peering over her shoulder, and hissing in disgust. “Komodo, Weyland?” he said incredulously. “Shit. It was sure as hell a dragon, anyway.”

  She had never seen a human body damaged so badly.

  Cadmann’s eyes met hers, and there was a naked plea in them. Please. You believe now, don’t you? Don’t you?

  “You’re hurt. You’ve lost a lot of blood,” she whispered. “We’ve got to treat those burns.”

  “Not yet. No sedatives until you believe me.” He waved one blackened hand weakly. “Go ahead. There’s a tarp on the floor of the Skeeter. In it you’ll find a chunk of that goddamned thing. If you can’t believe me, you can believe that.” He waved them away. “Go ahead—get it. Take it into the lab and for God’s sake analyze it.”

  Two of the lab techs unloaded the chopper. The package was bulky and clumsily wrapped and weighed about two kilos. Sylvia didn’t want to unwrap it.

  “All right, Cad,” she said. “Let’s go in and take a look—but you come in and sit down. We can’t afford to lose you.”

  Zack was watching Cadmann’s eyes carefully, chewing at the corner of his mustache. Carlos pushed his way through to stand next to Sylvia.

  “Carlos,” Cadmann said weakly, trying to smile. He moved his mouth as if his lips were half-frozen.

  “Amigo.” There was confusion and mistrust mingled in Carlos’s face, and his dark eyes kept straying to Cadmann’s makeshift crutch. “We’ve had a lot of trouble here.”

  Cadmann was having trouble keeping his eyelids high. “Yeah. Tell me something I don’t know.”

  Several of the colonists had edged almost imperceptibly nearer, and the tension left a metallic taste in Sylvia’s mouth. Something ugly was going to happen.

  She broke the spell by clearing her throat. “I’m taking this into the lab. I’d like you, Zack, Terry, and Mary Ann and Carlos. Except for lab personnel, I’d like the rest of you to wait, or go back to bed. There’s nothing more to be done tonight, and we’re going to need clear, rested minds in the morning.”

  Without another word she turned and entered the lab. She didn’t look behind her, didn’t want to, because she didn’t want Cadmann to see her confusion. No matter what happened here, and what she found out, they had to get the rifle away from him.

  He was mumbling as Carlos arid Mary Ann helped him through the door. “Absolutely. Blew off of it when Ernst’s fuel pack exploded. Shrapnel must have . . . ” He shook his head woozily. Hysterical laughter was bubbling up through the fatigue. “It got a mouthful all right, a real mouthful, and I wish that I’d blown its fucking head clean off—”

  “Cad—”

  “Stay back.” There was still iron in his voice.

  “Cadmann,” Zack said quietly, watching with eyes that missed nothing, “Alicia is dead. Her baby is gone.”

  Cadmann said nothing, swallowing hard. “How . . . no . . . when?”

  “Right after you left. Something got through all of our defenses. Broke through her window. We need your help. But the first thing you’ve got to do is to put that rifle down.”

  Sylvia forced her mind to the table in front of her. There was a raging headache coming on, and it was splitting her attention when she needed it most. The only thing she could do for Cadmann now was prove the truth of his claims. The truth, or—

  She cut that thought off before it had a chance to take root. He was telling the truth. There simply wasn’t any other answer.

  Not even Terry had accused Cadmann of killing Alicia and her baby. There is a big difference between a calf and a human being—

  She sneaked a peek over her shoulder at Cadmann. He was staring at her, eyes dark-rimmed with exhaustion, and she was suddenly afraid.

  “I’m cold,” Cadmann giggled almost to himself. “A floating anvil. That’s a nice image.”

  “Cadmann—” Sylvia and Mary Ann exchanged looks. “You need rest.”

  “Not until you look at that sample, damn it. But . . . I’ll go into the veterinary room. I’ll sit down.”

  Mary Ann, yellow curls flattening against Cadmann’s shirt, his blood staining her nightgown, motioned to Carlos. Together, they helped him into the veterinary clinic and to an examination table. He sat, clutching the rifle.

  Sylvia turned from the magnascope screen. “You need plasma, Cadmann. I’m not going on with this until you let us start working on you. You don’t want a sedative or anesthetic, fine—macho it out. But I’m damned if you’re going to die on me.”

  “All right, all right.”

  Jerry grunted relief and prepared a plasma bottle. Carlos peeled Cadmann’s blackened shirt away from his right arm.

  Cadmann winced, clutching the rifle more tightly. “You should have seen it,” he muttered. “If you could see it, you’d understand. It’s fast. God, it’s fast. I swear it’s faster than any animal on Earth. Nothing can move that fast, but it did. Be damned if it didn’t.”

  “Come on, Cad,” Mary Ann wheedled. “Put the rifle down for a minute, so that we can get—”

  “The hell with that!” he screamed weakly. “I’m not letting this out of my hands until that thing is dead, do you hear me? Dead.”

  Zack whispered to Jerry just before the veterinarian slipped the needle into Cadmann’s arm, and set the control on the rectangular box of the plasma pump. It hummed gently, sending healing fluid into Cadmann’s veins.

  “Don’t look at me that way—” Cadmann’s voice was pleading, slurred and drunken. He tried to raise his head but it seemed monstrously heavy. It thumped back to the table. The rifle slipped in his grasp a little, and he groaned, tightening his grip.

  “Ernst had a bullet hole in him, Cad. We were hoping you could help us with that.”

  Cadmann, slipping further toward unconsciousness, didn’t really hear the irony in Zack’s voice. “The monster. It was eating him.” He yawned deeply. “Must have hit Ernst. Maybe even tried to. He screamed, Zack. Screamed like a woman. He wanted to die—”

  Zack made his move, snatching at the rifle. Cadmann twisted the stock and with a short, choppy movement drove the butt into Zack’s stomach. Zack staggered back, grunting, face whey-colored.

  Cadmann tried to roll from the table and stand, but fell heavily, ripping the IV from his arm. Dark fluid drained from the needle and dribbled onto the white tile of the clinic floor. He struggled to gain his feet, make it to his knees before Carlos landed on his shoulders, pinning him down. Zack stumbled back in, wresting the rifle away as Cadmann sobbed and collapsed to the floor.

  “Please. Don’t . . . just trying . . . ” His head sank back to the ground, and he was unconscious.

  “Jesus Christ,” Carlos whispered, for once his accent forgotten. “What kind of man is he? How much somazine did you pump into that plasma, Jerry?”

  “I didn’t want to overdo it. Come on. Help me get him on the table.”

  Sylvia watched Carlos and Terry tie him down. Terry tightened the shackle loop until Cadma
nn’s skin creased.

  “Why so tight, Terry?”

  “You haven’t told us yet,” he said nastily. “Is that a piece of Ernst or isn’t it?”

  “No.” Sylvia shook her head, more from fatigue than relief. “I’ve tried human antigens. It’s not calf meat, it’s not dog. It reacts to all of them. It’s not turkey or chicken, and it’s not catfish. So it’s alien.”

  “So he killed a pterodon. So what?”

  “I’m tired, Terry. Back off.” Her voice was numb. “Jerry—get the liquid nitrogen, would you?”

  She tweezed a piece of the meat to a dissection tray, and sliced a quarter-inch piece away. Jerry carried over a ceramic thermos and tipped the lid. The liquid nitrogen, boiling at the touch of room temperature air, foamed white vapor. Sylvia slipped the sample into the pot.

  “We’re going to do this right. Cassandra has a complete analysis of every life-form we’ve found on this planet. I’m going to run a gene analysis. It will take about ninety minutes, and we’ll have our answer. Is that all right with you, Terry?”

  “Don’t make me out for a villain,” Terry said flatly. “Something terrible just happened here, and I want the truth.”

  Sylvia removed the frozen section of flesh, and Jerry started up the automated apparatus. A conveyer belt hummed, trundling into a rectangular box of chrome and white enamel. She placed the smoking sample gingerly on its tray, and it disappeared inside. There was a tiny, high-pitched hum as the laser saw sliced the meat into specimens only a few cells thick.

  Cassandra would build a holographic model and then compare it in depth with the others in her memory banks. Then they would know. Sylvia wasn’t sure that she wanted to.

  She turned back to the magnascope, to the tissue sample displayed in a quilt of reds and pale browns. She looked disgusted, tired, heartbroken. “It could be anything. Pterodon. Samlon. Or something we never even dreamed of.” It may have only been the terrible fatigue, but a tear welled at the bottom of her eye, and she wiped it away harshly.

  “What are we doing here?” She snatched the sample tray from under the scope and hurled it across the room. It broke with a tinkle of crystal, and a spatter of clear fluid against the yellow plaster. “Just why the hell did we come?”

  “We’re all tired,” Zack said. “It’s going to be a couple of hours before we have answers?”

  “Close enough,” Jerry agreed.

  “Then let’s get some rest. Before this is over, we’ll need every bit of it we can get. All right?”

  Carlos looked at the wall, at the still form of his friend, strapped now to the table. “What about Cadmann?”

  “I honestly don’t know,” Zack said wearily. “But I know that I’m too tired and sore to think. I need some rest. He’ll keep.”

  “Everyone but Jerry out of here,” Sylvia said.

  “I want to stay.” Mary Ann stood against the wall, her arms folded, eyes fixed on Cadmann.

  Zack was still massaging his stomach, feeling for bruised ribs. Every few seconds he wheezed in pain. He said, “Carlos, take care of Mary Ann. We need to clear out so that Syl and Jerry can work.”

  “No, I’m not—”

  Sylvia closed her mind to the sound until she heard the door close behind them.

  Then she and Jerry methodically stripped Cadmann, sprayed his burns and minor wounds and covered them with gel. When they were done with the hemostats and the dissolving thread and the unguents, they slipped him into a clean smock and refastened the straps. Then they turned out the lights and left.

  She shivered in the fog. Jerry turned to her. “What do you think happened out there? You don’t really think Cadmann did that damage to himself?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know anything right now. We’ll know in a little over an hour. Just let me close my eyes for a few minutes.”

  Jerry nodded and started back to his cottage, to the dubious, transitory comfort of a warm bed, when Sylvia’s voice stopped him.

  “I can tell you one thing, Jerry. No matter what we find out, we’re not going to like it. I promise you that there aren’t going to be any comforting answers.”

  “Yeah.” Jerry hunched his shoulders against the chill. He turned to speak again, but Sylvia had already disappeared around a corner, or into the fog, and he was alone.

  ♦ChaptEr 9♦

  contact

  A man that studieth revenge keeps his own wounds green.

  —Francis Bacon

  In the shadows beyond the fence, something watched. Something alive, silent, almost motionless save for the rise and fall of its torn and bleeding flanks.

  The creature was badly hurt. It had passed the horizon of pain into territory that was strange indeed. Irreversible changes had taken place in its body. In a distant way, it even understood that it was dying. But first there was an obligation.

  It hid in the shadowed fields beyond the reach of the searchlights. When it concentrated, it could smell the man, the one who had hurt it. This one, whom it had badly underestimated, was the real threat. And every instinct screamed for it to get to him, to find and kill him.

  It began to wiggle forward. It lay between rows of corn, just a few dozen meters southwest of the colony. The searchlights still swept across the ground, and the men still walked the edge of the camp.

  How to get past the firevines? It moaned hungrily.

  In the next instant, the solution presented itself. One of the men ran his forepaw along a section of vine. He touched it—leaned on it. It recognized the section. This was the same stretch of firevine that had bitten it before. It seemed safe now. Perhaps firevines could only bite once . . .

  The man was alone and not even looking in its direction. Now. Now, as the searchlights crisscrossed, there was a moment in which darkness was almost total, when shadow licked the fence, the man, and a stretch leading almost to the fields.

  It moved.

  It moved as fast as a Skeeter skimming at low altitude, moved so fast that the man at the fence hardly had time to look up, had no time to scream before it hit the fence with such momentum that the aluminum fencepost buckled and the lines snapped, that its impact slammed him back into the wall of the veterinary clinic.

  His head dimpled the sheet metal and rebounded directly into the creature’s flailing spiked tail. It shook the man’s head free of the spikes, let the corpse slide to the ground.

  It flowed onward, a quarter ton of rippling muscle and bone, black as a shadow, as dark and fluid as the river flowing behind and beneath the bluff, as much a part of the night as the stars or the twin moons.

  The creature nudged the door open. It sniffed tentatively at first, then entered.

  There was little light inside, but it needed less than it found. Animals were caged along the walls. Curiosity was almost as intense as the pain and resolve, and it stopped for a moment to peer up into one of the cages. A small white shape curled up in the corner, hidden in a mass of wood shavings. The tiny alien stirred slowly, then jerked to wakefulness, staring, blinking its tiny red eyes.

  The creature had seen that look before, many times before. Total submission. A trembling readiness, the prey’s acknowledgement that it was ready to be food. No running. No fighting, its heart ready to burst before it was ever touched.

  Not now. The creature could smell the man, and it turned toward the smell.

  The man lay on a table. He moaned softly, and moved limbs that seemed tangled in short vines. That was just as well. It had no urge to play with this one.

  It braced its paws on the table, stretching, feeling the hurts in its body, the pain along its sides where it was burned and torn. The long wound in its flank opened again, trickling fluid. It braced itself and tried to jump up onto the table. The table was not a boulder. It tilted. The safety blocks on the wheels popped free, and the table skidded across the room, tubes ripping free of the man’s forelimb, dark fluid spraying as they crashed into the wall and the table flipped onto its side.

  As the table th
udded to the floor, the man’s eyes fluttered open.

  Their eyes met.

  Here it was. Here was the moment it craved. Here was the moment when the hunger and the pain and the anger vanished, and it saw into those eyes as down a deep, chill waterhole, a bottomless grotto. The man’s eyes grew wide, wide enough to sink in, to swim in. The creature drew closer.

  This was the deadly one. His skin was so soft, so fragile. It pawed experimentally, raking away flesh. Blood streamed from pinkish pulp beneath. The man grimaced, showed his teeth. Small teeth, flat and harmless.

  The man was so weak! and yet he had hurt it as nothing else in its short life. The man was at the moment of death, his limbs bound, drawing back as far as he could, shrinking against the table, but his eyes held nothing of submission. His sluggish muscles struggled in the bonds.

  So much had changed so quickly in its life. And this one man had been at the center of so much of it. End it now.

  But his eyes. They met its own so steadily. Helpless, bound, about to die—and yet . . .

  And yet . . .

  There was a scream from outside, and a sound of pounding feet. Its attention was split by confusion and uncertainty. It turned back to the man and saw triumph in his eyes, and it knew that somehow he had won, they would win, and that its life was over.

  Pain bit into the back of its head, and it spun as a second bullet missed it by inches. It charged directly at the man holding a long stick which spat fire.

  It felt another, awful pain, and then it was on him, his head in its mouth. There was a moment of bony resistance to its jaw muscles, then splintering collapse and softness. It spat him out and rushed for the door.

  If it could reach the river . . .

  But the doorway was crowded with men and their firesticks. It howled its agony, reversed directions, flailing its tail at them, feeling the pain bite deep until the thing in its body triggered, and the entire world seemed made of blood.