by Jerry
He couldn’t have picked a better place to meet the skybeast, he told himself.
It would not retreat inland or go to the left because of the cliffs. It could only attempt to go over him or to his right-or through him.
It came on without evidencing the slightest concern. As it drew closer Schadow was awed at its size—it was bigger than any he had ever seen.
The massive bladder, shining dull crimson in the sunlight, must have been fully forty meters across and almost a hundred long. The three hydrogen sacs inside fluttered larger and smaller as it adjusted its buoyancy in the weak on-sea winds. Sixteen airpaddles, eight along each side, swept forward like closed fists, opened to reveal strong black membranes, pushed back to provide thrust. Fishing tentacles were coiled close to the cartilage ribbing that protected two-thirds of its underside from leaping sea carnivores. The poison-celled foretentacle that flipped about the bladder to watch for predators or parasites was set just behind the head which took up the other third. And its eyes—they looked across at him—were twin pools of molten amber, the black pupils expanding and contracting to the beat of the aerial super-coelenterate’s savage life systems. They revealed a brooding intelligence that at once terrified and exhilarated Schadow.
He hovered as best he could in the skyhunter’s path.
The creature slowed, watching him. Schadow gave challenge.
“Ho! Skyhunter! I have come to tame you, to form the bond of brotherhood between us for the good of my people—or die trying.”
The eyes burned into his.
The foretentacle streaked for him.
SCHADOW swung his sword as he had practiced since he had first taken to wing as a boy, slashing the air in front of him in a series of hissing sweeps. He wanted the beast to know that he could cut the tentacle in two if it threatened him but that he didn’t want to.
The tentacle retreated. The eyes studied him, their look now unreadable. For an instant something flashed in those eyes. Then the creature was moving.
At first he thought it was retreating and the concept shocked him, for every skyhunter he had ever known or heard of would rather have suicided than run from an attacker, especially such a little attacker as a man. Then a gulping sound came to his ears. He smiled. It was increasing its buoyancy. It was going to attempt to go over him.
Schadow pushed at the almost still air with his wings and began to climb. The skybeast, airpaddles sweeping lazily to maintain equilibrium, began to ascend in front of him.
They went up and up until the clouds seemed to disappear as they melded into them and ice crystals danced about them, flickering brilliantly as they caught and broke the sunlight. Schadow’s exhaled breath began to form into puffs of frost. The tentacle again darted toward him and again he created a protective shield around him with his sword.
“Ho! You will have to do better than that, great one.”
He watched the tentacle retreat and snap in the air as if in anger.
With a mutter the coelenterate began to descend, its hydrogen already cooling and decreasing its lift. Schadow paralleled it.
The clouds re-formed above. The atmosphere became warmer.
Schadow flexed his wings to spoil his descent and was amazed to discover that this adversary was picking up downward speed. He allowed himself to fall with it until he was forced to brake.
Surely the thing wasn’t going to dash itself into the ground! He felt himself go cold in a way the high frost couldn’t have affected him.
It was indeed throwing itself at the twisted rock country. Shaken, the birdman watched it drop until it was falling away from him like a plummeting boulder. It hit the earth, narrowly missing a jagged outcropping. Dust billowed from the impact site. The crimson bladder shook, flattened, appeared to burst. Then it was rebounding back up at him.
Schadow would have laughed in relief and admiration for the creature if it had not been lofting directly at him with tremendous speed. He wheeled, pushing the air in desperation. It rushed past him. The foretentacle narrowly missed him and one of the fishing tentacles touched his left leg. He cried out in pain.
Stubbornly he wheeled again and chased it until it leveled off at four hundred meters.
He checked his leg. A thin welt was forming across his calf. Luckily he hadn’t been hooked on one of the barbs or touched by a poison capsule.
“Ho-eee!” he shouted, making the traditional sign of admiration for one’s enemy in the air with his sword. In turn, the skyhunter whipped its tentacle about in a remarkable mimicry of the sign.
They settled down to eyeing one another again.
Now perhaps the skybeast realized that it and Schadow must face each other, that each must prove to the other his courage and powers of endurance. And while they strained to endure the ordeal perhaps a bond would form between them.
The huge eyes suddenly shifted and focused behind his right shoulder.
Schadow looked around.
SEVEN armed men stared at him.
Their wings fluttered feebly, their weight being supported by antigrav units strapped to their chests. They gripped swords of the best alloy metal. On their bodies they wore glittering collections of useless ornaments and gadgets.
Fangs! Schadow remembered seeing packs of them when he had visited Starbase and he had heard many tales of their bloody raids. While they were adapted forms, the fangs preferred the sanctuary of the floating plastic city, venturing forth only for murder or pillage.
One flew slightly ahead of the others. Setting a dial on his antigrav, he hovered about ten meters from Schadow, alternately watching the lone warrior and the skyhunter.
“I am Garp,” he said.
“So?” Schadow hefted his sword and tentatively tested its edge with his thumb. He looked over his shoulder to check the beast. Though he acted calmly, he strained all the while to maintain his hovering position without appearing to tire.
“I am leader of our pack.” Garp had an artificially bronzed skin, a fat belly and shining bald head. He reminded Schadow of a Buddha idol—perhaps ancient religions were the latest fashion among the basicforms, whom the fangs always emulated, body sculpture being the dominant art form among the non-adapted men of the Confederacy.
“Then it is up to you to lead your men-if they deserve that title-away. You should know that the ordeal with a skyhunter is a private matter. You have no right here.”
Garp laughed.
“But we have come such a long way to find you. Ven here”—he swept his empty hand toward a thinner version of himself who grinned and bowed awkwardly in the air—“saw your people arrive at the base and overheard them talking about you.” Now it was Garp’s turn to test his sword edge with his thumb, though Schadow saw sky between flesh and metal. “Having nothing better to do, we decided that we should come out and help you. I mean, all that talk that you people keep giving us about living with nature and not against it to the contrary, we thought that you’d like the power of civilization behind you in this affair.” He looked at the beast, briefly meeting its eyes. His voice went softer. “I’ve never seen a man killed by one of those before.” Garp looked at his sword, then shouted. “Ven!”
“Ho?”
“The triplets will stay with me. You take the other two and go behind the thing to keep it from getting away.”
“Understood.” The three adjusted their antigravs and pushed themselves into position.
Garp looked at Schadow. “You.”
Schadow felt his jaw muscles tighten in anger.
“In my wide experience in dealing with men of action, I have usually found that even the bravest need a little push in the right direction on occasion. We watched you fighting the thing and it is our considered opinion that you keep too far from it. Right, men?”
The trio that moved in behind him answered in chorus, “Right.”
“So let’s give him the courage he needs.” Garp waited until the three were even with him before moving slowly toward the warrior, sword held out ahead of
him like a lance.
SCHADOW held his position. Garp had slowed so that two others were the first to reach him. Folding his wings, Schadow fell. He outstretched them again and regained altitude, slashing at one fang who had just set his antigrav to dive and had left the top of his head vulnerable. He felt his sword crack through the skull. The man screamed and floated away from the contestants.
He slashed at the second man, missing him by millimeters.
Garp screamed in rage. “Kill him,” he ordered.
The other two didn’t need encouraging. They rushed at Schadow.
He parried the lunging weapon of the first, ducked the second and looked for Garp. The latter proved to be a greater danger than Schadow had guessed. The fang leader held his sword before him, elbow locked, and maneuvered himself by twisting the dials on his antigrav. He flashed in and out with extreme accuracy and Schadow learned respect for the antigrav as he desperately put up a defense. The other two pressed beside him, forcing him to fall back toward the skyhunter.
“Ven,” shouted Garp. “Drive the thing this way.”
Schadow looked behind him. Ven and his companions were efficiently moving the skybeast toward him. Not that he feared the skyhunter so much—though he knew what his fate would be if it caught him—but he felt concern that the flashing blades would soon cripple the animal. It was battling with a ferocity it had not shown earlier. Its fishing tentacles lashed out as it rocked in the air. Its foretentacle hung poised to strike. Its paddles sent it spinning on an axis, making it harder to predict its next attack or parry. Even so, it didn’t have a chance against this pack. The fact that its fiery suicide—when it accepted defeat—would take its tormentors with it was little consolation.
Something nagged at the back of Schadow’s mind but the fangs gave him no time to find out what it was. His keel muscles were blazing with pain as he was forced to beat his wings to hold his position. He could feel himself weakening. For the first time in his life he envied the power the antigrav gave a flier, as his attackers pressed themselves more keenly against him. His sword of bloodied bone took the full force of a downward stroke from above and was chipped. He stabbed at Garp, who replied by smashing Schadow’s sword with a jarring blow that broke the point. Cursing, Schadow put his full fury into an offense, momentarily driving the three back. Garp lost his temper and for the first time truly led the attack. They came at him at once.
The wind shimmered and the birdman saw a brief updraft roll up to them like a pearl-gray bubble. He flexed his wings. The warm bubble enveloped them, jostling the fangs and lifting their intended victim above them. Spitting monosyllables, the trio adjusted their antigravs and shot toward him.
Schadow, momentarily relieved from battle and able to rest his burning muscles, was amazed. Had they been so busy that they hadn’t seen the thermal? But surely they must have. No matter how involved you were, you always watched the air about you. You had to if you wanted to fly.
Garp and the others were at him again. His weapon rendered useless as a foil, he was forced to slash and chop at them. He scratched Garp’s bronze belly, forcing him behind the other two.
HE SAW a second thermal bubble coming up at them. Winging over, he dived. The fangs fell beside him. When he leveled off, they leveled beside him, prepared to continue the fight. The thermal hit and again he was carried away from them.
They couldn’t see! It was a hard fact to understand but there was the proof. Any child of Schadow’s clan would have seen that bubble and yet these winged adults had looked right at it without noticing it. Was it possible? He watched them coming up at him, playing with the knobs on their antigravs.
He saw the truth and with it a possibility. These men, adapted for the air though they were, were creatures of the Starbase, where no man ever did what a mechanism could more easily do. Even though they had flown the skies all their lives, they had never really flown. Using their wings only as stabilizers, they let their antigravs do their flying for them. Not having the need to know the currents of the atmosphere, they had lost, if they had ever had, the ability to see them. In a very important way they were blind.
Again Schadow dived. This time he looped low and under the trailing tentacles of the skyhunter. The fangs reset their equipment and gave easy chase.
“Ven—” shouted Garp.
Ven looked down and peeled away from the troubled skyhunter, followed by his comrades.
The six formed a rough flock behind Schadow.
Banking to his left, he put his last dregs of energy into flying for the red cliffs.
As his pursuers closed the distance between them he regarded the bleak cliffs and the wispy blanket of air that rose up and over it. Every instinct cried out to him to veer away. .
He reached the outer edge of the blanket and soared upward, the wind brushing his face gently and with no hint of where it would take him if he stayed with it. The pack adjusted and rose behind him. Ven was leading and only five meters below, his teeth showing in a tight grin.
Ven overtook him as they reached the summit and Schadow was carried across the rough top. With one hand on his antigrav Ven threw himself at the birdman.
Schadow met sword with sword. As Ven pulled back to make a second stab, Schadow somersaulted beneath him and slashed upward. Blood spurted past his face. Ven screamed and twisted in the air, held aloft by his device.
The second attacker was luckier. His sword caught Schadow’s at an angle, breaking it just above the guard. Schadow tossed the handle into the man’s face.
Shouting in victory, Garp moved in ahead of the others for the kill.
“Die, you—” he yelled, raising his weapon. His eyes burned.
The blow never came.
They were past the cliff.
SCHADOW saw the draftfall as a glimmering mass of air that spilled over the lip of the cliff and tumbled toward the broken land. He had often seen such sights from afar but this was the first time he had been in one. Like every winged creature on every world, he normally knew better than to fly into the currents on the lee side of a mountain.
The downdraft caught him and Garp in its grip and threw them violently at the rocks. Garp howled, dropping his sword, which spun into a fang below him. Each member of the pack played frantically with his antigrav. But the air tossed them about like wood chips in a raging river. The downfall was too powerful to be beaten by the puny devices of man.
Schadow made no attempt to outfly the draft. Putting his arms next to his body in a swept-back position, straightening his legs, hitching forward at the waist and angling his aching wings close to his sides, he formed his body into an elementary airfoil, skidding through the air at an angle.
He closed his lower lids against the vicious winds and through them saw the fangs, the whole scene faded by the protective tissue so that it seemed that it happened in the depths of a faintly pink sea.
Ven’s corpse was first to hit, smashing spread-eagled atop an altar of rock not two meters from the base of the cliff. Two others hit farther out. Silently, explosively they touched the ground, their screams and the crashes coming weakly through the winds after the fact. A fourth hit a shallow pool, sending up a shower of scummed water and insects. A fifth had slowed himself a bit with his antigrav and it seemed to Schadow that his screams must have continued for a second after he had hit.
Garp was a fast learner. On seeing Schadow he had copied the airfoil design, getting added spoiling from his antigrav. But he was too late and too low. The false Buddha smashed into a jagged outcropping of volcanic glass, beheading himself.
The pink-tinted ground was getting dangerously close. Schadow felt the skeletal claws of oblivion drag along his spine.
Then he was out of the draftfall and in a turbulent but strong wave lift beyond. Extending his wings, he soared into the sky and opened his lids to its eternal blue.
He looked down. Scattered on the ground were the twisted and broken forms of the fangs. Somehow an antigrav unit had been torn loose from a
corpse and, free of its weight, clattered along under the force of the draftfall until clear and then shot through the air toward the base, perhaps on a homing signal. Three of the corpses, he noticed, were also beginning to move across the rocks, being pulled by devices that had outlasted their owners.
The skyhunter still floated where he had left it.
Did he dare to hope?
Though he was unarmed, he settled into a straightaway glide toward the beast.
It was obviously as near exhaustion as he but appeared unhurt. There was no reason for it to stay away from its sea hunting—unless it was waiting for him. It could be purposely baiting him, he told himself. Vengeance was not solely a human passion.
He slowed and circled before its massive head.
The amber eyes watched him.
Slowly, carefully the tentacle moved toward him. He stayed in his tight orbit, not moving away. The auxiliary eye at the tip of the tentacle opened—the tentacle itself touched his arm.
No poison cells opened to destroy him. The tentacle remained soft and gentle.
Laughing, Schadow grabbed the tentacle and the skybeast, tender as he remembered another of its kind, grabbed him.
It placed Schadow atop its bladder, where he could sit and rest. He didn’t mind the fact that the skin was almost unbearably hot from the sun. He laughed again. The beast moved its tentacle joyfully and the dragon-amphibians that guarded the seacliffs screamed at them as they moved through the sky and over the sea, once-enemies, now-brothers.
1972
WAR IN OUR TIME
Howard L. Myers
By Ever seen square gears? Or elliptical gears? They mesh just fine—and for some purposes, a weirdo gear in a complex machine works wonders!
The others looked up when old Radge Morimet stomped into the chamber of the Primgranese High Board of Trade. He stood, turning his head slowly to look at each of the Board members while the emo-monitor sensor implanted in his chin gave him quick reads of their attitudes.
