by Larry Niven
Cadmann fired. The spear hit the monster precisely in the throat, and the explosion nearly decapitated it. Blood and bone and bits of flesh foamed from the water and showered on them. The water smoked as the shattered body rolled twice, then sank.
For a long moment, there was silence. Jerry couldn’t help shining his flashlight in Cadmann’s face. There was an expression that frightened him there. Satisfaction, and vindication, and something else. Something primal, and terribly strong. Then it faded, and Cadmann was himself again.
He spoke slowly. “All right. All clear. We need a net in here, and medical care. Who’s got a med kit?”
Mits raised a weary arm.
“Good. All right. Let’s get it moving.”
Cadmann pulled himself out of the water and sat on the shelf, feet dangling. His breath rasped in the throat mike. He slipped a re-breather cartridge from his backpack and clicked it into the front unit. He turned to look at Jerry, and his expression was indecipherable.
“Are you all right?” Jerry asked. Why am I nervous?
Cadmann smiled almost paternally. There was an edge to that smile, cold and sharp.
“Never better.”
♦ChaptEr 20♦
autopsy ii
To stand still on the summit of reflection is difficult,
and in the natural course of things,
who cannot go forward steps back.
—Gaius Velleius Paterculus (20 B.C. to 30 A.D.)
The corpse stretched almost fourteen feet from the tip of a rounded snout to the spiked ankylosaur tail. Its bulk filled two veterinary tables: its sour wet smell hung in the air like a curtain of flies. Its grayish-green hide was rent in a score of places. Ribs poked through in rows of stained ivory, denser and more roughly surfaced than human bone. Its webbed feet were torn and broken. The eyes, once golden, shone dull copper in the unwavering overhead light.
Sylvia noticed half a dozen gawking colonists still crowded in the door. Triumph. They weren’t there. They had laughed at Cadmann. Now they gloat. Unfair, and she knew it, but she savored the taste of malice. You have your triumphs. I have mine. She looked to the corner where Cadmann stood erect, not bothering to lean against the wall. Cadmann has both. It was his radio message—
Grendel is dead!
Grim humor that; grim but oddly appropriate even so minutely removed from the horror of Year Day. In death the creature ceased to menace their future, and thus assumed an oddly mythic quality. Grendel is dead.
It was funny. Even now, so soon after Bobbi’s death, she knew it was funny. God, she wished she could laugh.
Carlos sat slumped in the corner, trying desperately to get drunk enough to cry.
“Grendel is dead,” Sylvia said dully. “In the old legend, they nailed Grendel’s arm above the entrance to Heorot.” She swept her hand to indicate the quarter-ton of quiescent monster flesh. “We mutilate corpses too—”
Jerry paused in the act of pulling on surgeon’s gloves. “For answers, I hope.”
“Damn right you’ll get answers,” Cadmann muttered.
There are so many questions.
Life? Death? Is the nightmare over? Or just beginning?
“Please,” Jerry said. “I need room to work. Cadmann, Carlos, Zack—I’d appreciate it if you remained. Everyone else, please.”
The doorway cleared and the sheet-metal door closed. But Sylvia knew that their audience had not retreated far: their impatiently shuffling feet and choppy breathing hovered just beyond the threshold of perception.
Jerry inhaled deeply. The light from above shimmered around his stick-figure body like an aura. “Cassandra Program.” The jury-rigged computer hummed. Gears chugged and ground. Everyone watched. Then slowly, in jerks, the camera moved to position itself above the table. Jerry nodded thanks toward Carlos. The cameras, like everything else, had been severely damaged during the initial assault. Everything had been designed for durability, but that was on Earth, in a design laboratory, damage simulated by computer, not inflicted by monsters. Now, with Omar Isfahan’s help, Jerry was redesigning the system, restoring lost capabilities. This was the first practical test of Cassandra’s restoration. The computer hesitated another second, and then the gooseneck camera snaked down.
Carlos tore open a pouch of vodka, staring unblinkingly at the corpse. He guzzled half the pouch and coughed as it burned its way down. He handed the rest to Cadmann. There were no words.
All of Carlos’s struggle had been for nothing. Bobbi had never come out of shock. Her heart had simply given up. Carlos had not cried; he had simply smashed his fist into the wall, damaging both plaster and knuckles. Without a word, he had gone to the camp liquor supply. No one had tried to refuse him.
Now he sat with Cadmann, camp comedian and the tall, hard warrior. Both seemed cut from the same dark, dangerous cloth.
Jerry moved the scalpel carefully along the creature’s head, slitting and then peeling away the skin, exposing the skull’s smooth, barely convex arch. “I don’t see any fissures at all,” he remarked for the record.
He switched to the band drill. It whined, etching its way through the tough layer of tissue. The stench of burning bone tickled Sylvia’s nostrils through her gauze face mask.
“Thick-headed tart,” Jerry muttered. ‘This one is definitely older an uglier than the first. Might even be its mama.”
“Grendel and Grendel’s mother,” Sylvia said. “It fits.” She winked at Cadmann. He pretended to ignore her. You’re the one who sent that message, she thought.
Jerry lifted a section of skull to expose a pale layer of membrane protecting the brain. Slitting it exposed darkly pinkish jellied pulp.
“Cassandra. Watch this.”
The camera moved in closer. Jerry dictated in a carefully controlled voice. “This has to be olfactory brain tissue. It’s well defined and coterminous with nasal passages. Well penetrated with air passages. This critter had one hell of a sense of smell.
“Behind and above that is more tissue that has some similarities, but it’s also well defined, and doesn’t appear to be part of the olfactory area. If there’s any parallel with human evolution, this is the equivalent of cortex, although it sure doesn’t look much like what we use for cortex. Lots of convolutions, though. Maybe that’s a universal?
“From the size and shape, if I’m right about what this area is and does, the critter is at least as intelligent as a gorilla. Maybe more so. Better sense of smell than a dog or a cat.”
The saw whirred again.
“Moving back, there’s a whole series of enlarged ganglia complexes. Subsidiary brains, maybe? I know there are at least three more of these down in the lower spinal area. My guess is they really are subsidiary brains that control reflexes and locomotion. That’s one reason the critter can move so fast. The central brain gives orders, but they get carried out by a whole batch of brains distributed along the systems.”
Computer networks operate that way. Sylvia looked away from the monster and back to Cadmann. He was leaning forward, his teeth just showing.
Jerry continued to work. His hands moved deftly, guiding the instruments in precise motions, exposing without damaging. From time to time, he called up ultrasound and X-ray images on the computer screen, consulted them, then went back to his grisly task. An hour passed.
Presently, Jerry removed some tissue samples. “All right. Sylvia, we’ll want microscopic examinations of this. Freeze and section and—”
“And the rest. Sure,” she said, keeping her voice pleasant.
“Sorry—”
“ ’S all right.” Sylvia moved closer. “That oversized jaw. The first one was that way, too.”
“Right. Species characteristic, I’d say.”
“Yes. Jaw. Oversized feet. Webbed, but with claws, designed for fighting, but also for traction. No hands, though. It was never designed as a tool user.”
“Right on that.”
Carlos took another stiff drink, then slammed the canteen down. He
stood, stepping out of the shadow and closer to the table.
“Traction? Want to see traction? Look at Cadmann’s ribs. Damned scars haven’t healed yet.” She could see his eyes now. They were red-rimmed, bright with tears and loathing.
“That bitch ran right up the cliff. It didn’t climb, it sprinted. It just smashed into the boat, chewed it up like a grape skin. Bobbi never had a goddamned chance.”
He was shaking, and seemed to calm only when Cadmann clasped his shoulder from behind. The tension drained out of Carlos and he retreated to the shadows.
“I saw that too,” Cadmann said. “These things have two distinct gears, fast and superfast. I want some answers.”
“You and everyone else, Cad. You’ve both done your parts. Leave the rest of it to us.”
She felt a kick, a sensation of pulling, of her pelvic girdle stretching, accompanied by momentary faintness. She caught her balance and shut her mind to the fatigue.
“Sylvie? Are you all right?” Cadmann asked from the shadows.
He sees everything. “Fine.”
“No, you’re not—”
“Good enough. Look, I promise. As soon as we’re finished with the preliminaries, I’ll take a nap. I just can’t miss being in on this one.”
Saw and drills continued to sing and strip away the skin and the flesh from the thing that had haunted their nightmares, while ultrasound recorders watched and remembered. The dissection would later be computer-corrected to form an in-depth holographic template. Then the analysis could begin.
Zack spoke for the first time in hours. “I can almost feel sorry for it.” He indicated Cassandra and the other complex instruments in the room. “It couldn’t have known what it was up against.”
Carlos growled deep in his throat and stood. Before he could move, he was halted by Sylvia’s laugh. She looked to Cadmann and grinned. “No. It couldn’t.”
Carlos sat on his stool as the saw began a new song.
They peeled away the ribs. At first Sylvia concentrated on the lungs: flatter than human lungs, less a pair of bags than a webwork with blood vessels running through them. Arteries and veins were thumb-thick, oversized, capable of pumping blood and oxygen to working muscles at a fantastic rate. She could only shake her head in wonder.
She probed into the gland sacs, flattened organs perching atop the lungs. “What in the world?” she whispered. “Cassandra. Close up.” She sliced into them with the tip of her scalpel. The walls were elastic and wrinkled, shrunken to a third the size of the lungs. “Whatever this is, it can hold a lot more than it does right now.” A brilliant carmine fluid jellied in the sacs, and she spooned out a sample. “I’m going to run an analysis on this.”
Sylvia placed the sample in the spare biothermograph ferried down from Geographic. There was a faint humming sound as it pumped the air from the sample chamber.
Thank God that this apparatus, at least, had been duplicated. So much equipment had been lost; they would have a hell of a time working out this creature’s gene patterns now. Its flesh might have to be preserved for years before such apparatus could be replaced.
When the BTG had finished evacuating, the dollop of red fluid was burned in a flash, and a quick band of color flashed across the viewer. Sylvia whistled softly.
‘“Eh?” Jerry prompted. He looked to the screen where the computer analysis of the chromatography would appear.
Sylvia’s voice was pensive. “How can this stuff be biological? It looks like oxidizer for a rocket! Oxygen bonded with carbon, iron, magnesium, but mostly oxygen. I wouldn’t have believed it. What’s the structure of those sacs?”
“Honeycomb. They were filled with the fluid.” He probed with the scalpel, frowned and cut again. “Hah. Muscle bands. Here—here—yep. Set up to constrict the sacs, which would inject this stuff into the blood streams. The duct leads directly into the heart chambers—”
“Superoxygenated blood supplement,” Sylvia said. “Which means—”
“Right!” Jerry shouted. “That’s it! Supercharger! Good lord, no wonder this thing is so damned dangerous.”
“What?” Zack demanded. “What have you found?”
Jerry almost danced with excitement. “This is it, I’m sure of it.”
“How can you be so damned happy about how powerful this thing is?” Carlos demanded.
“Don’t you see?” Sylvia shouted.
“See what?”
Jerry brought calm back to his voice. “The monster depends on superoxygenation. That means it’s vulnerable. We can kill it.”
“Maybe I’m stupid,” Zack said. “But I don’t see—”
Jerry ignored him. “Cadmann. Was there, say, anything unusual about the amount of body heat from this thing? You’ve been closer than anyone.”
Cadmann paused for a moment, then spoke. “Yes, dammit, there was. When the first one killed Ernst at the blind, it was stalking the calf, and everything was fine. But as soon as we took a shot at it, the temperature went through the roof.”
“Enough to cause a flare in your infrared, as I recall.”
“Right.”
Jerry took a step back from the graying thing on the tables, the dead, cold hulk leaking blood and cloudy fluid drop by slow drop onto the stained tile floor. “And amphibian. We’ll never find these things far from water. They need it to dump the heat! Listen. There can’t be many of these things on the island—”
Carlos cursed vilely and smashed his pouch to the ground. “I swear to God. The next idiot who says that, I am going to break his face. Shit.” He kicked at the plastic skin, squirting liquid out into a puddle. Cursing again, he scooped it off the floor and stormed out of the room.
“Before, it was a guess,” Jerry said. He didn’t sound worried. “Now we know.”
“Know what?”
“There can’t be many of them. By many, I mean more than a dozen or so. Cadmann, there’s not enough for them to eat! Look at the teeth. A couple of grinders. They can crunch seeds and grass and bark in a pinch, but they’re sure as hell not evolved for eating plants. They want meat, and lots of it, and there just isn’t enough meat on this island.”
“The pterodons,” Sylvia said. “That’s why they were so scared of the water! These things hide in the water. The poor pterodons! They have to fish, but they never know, when they dive for a samlon, but what one of these will be waiting for them—”
“Right.” Jerry stepped back from the table and dropped his mask. “Look, we can wait for the computer analysis, but we don’t really need it, do we? We had a brood of them. Heck, this one might well have been the mother. Picture her swimming over, or floating over on a piece of driftwood, or any other scenario you like. She’s already pregnant, with a clutch of eggs ready to be laid. Land her ten or twenty years ago, perhaps, and they proceed to strip the island of animal protein.”
“Everything except samlon,” Sylvia said.
“Yeah.” Jerry looked thoughtful. “And there is our next big mystery. There’s no samlon in her stomach. What protects samlon? Maybe our monster only hunts on the land. And by the way—we need a name for this thing. We can’t just keep calling it ‘monster.’ ”
Sylvia forced a smile. “I think Cadmann already named it. ‘Grendel.’ ”
“Name it be damned,” Cadmann said. “You said it was vulnerable. How vulnerable?”
“In a minute,” Jerry said. “Damn. It really is a puzzle. These things eat everything. Have eaten everything, they damned near stripped this island clean—Sylvia! It all fits! Dopey Joes in the hills, none near water. Pterodons, nothing else. Everything but the samlon. All right, what keeps the grendels from eating all the samlon?”
“Poisonous?” Sylvia asked. “Or—oh, damn.”
“What?”
“Something—I have the feeling I’m forgetting something.”
“Can’t be important.”
“Maybe. Anyway, could samlon be poison to grendels?”
“Doesn’t seem reasonable. They ate cattl
e. We eat samlon.”
“Yeah—”
“Or,” Jerry said, “maybe Grendel only hunts warm-blooded creatures.”
“Given its choice, sure,” Cadmann said. “That bitch would eat her own children if she were hungry enough. Believe it.”
“I don’t know what to believe now. That’s what we’re—”
Jerry’s voice faded out, and Sylvia groped for support as the room seemed to ripple and she lost her footing. Cadmann was under her in an instant, and the last thing that she felt before darkness overwhelmed her was the comforting strength of his arms, and his whispered words: “I’m here.”
Sylvia’s eyes were open, but totally unfocused. Light and shadow mingled indeterminably. As her senses returned, she heard the slow rumble of Terry’s breathing, and finally realized that she was in her own bedroom.
Somewhere outside her window men were arguing. She recognized the voices: Stu Ellington and Carlos. Both sounded horribly drunk.
“—the hell, marica? You think you could have done better?”
“—don’t have to think. You killed her, you left her and ran, you dickless wonder—”
She heard the sharp, sudden sound of bone meeting bone, and the side of her cabin shuddered as a body slammed into it.
Briefly, the shadow of two struggling bodies fell across the window. She watched the dark, shifting shapes, overcome with an hallucinogenic sense of unreality. Another sharp crack. Gasps, a creak of tortured metal, the stifled sobs of pain and anger. A swift curse in Spanish, and a softer thud. Then Cadmann’s voice: “Break it up. All right. You’ve both had enough. We have a bigger fight than this—”
There were a few more muttered words, then the voices faded. The shadows dissolved before the sweep of the searchlight, melded into the darkness, and once again the night was still.
Sylvia rolled over and hit the light. Terry reached for the trapeze bar above his head and pulled himself upright. “You’re awake.”
