Veg shrugged. 'I'll prepare a full, er, repast,' he said, taking up the knife.
Aquilon went over to Cal. She knew he was hungry, and that for him a few hours of undernourishment were like starvation for a normal man. He simply did not have the physical resources to stand up under it. 'What are you going to do?' she asked, looking into his eyes. 'You told me you couldn't eat-'
'I don't suppose it would do any good just to tell you to leave me here and get on back to the main camp.'
She shook her head no. 'If you'll just tell us how we can help you-'
'You can't help me. I will die in a few hours, no matter what you do. If I could only convince you of the truth-'
Veg, slicing into more fungus, had been listening intently. 'Maybe it's time you did tell us, Cal. I've known you for three years, and you never let out a word. You never come to the mess hall. What's the matter with you? Why are you always so weak you can hardly walk? Why can't you eat any of our food?'
Cal closed his eyes as if in pain. 'You wouldn't understand.'
Aquilon took his hands, as she had the night before. 'We aren't going to let you die, Cal,' she said. 'We'll all stay here together.'
Veg chewed on fungus, not disagreeing.
'Death is my destiny,' Cal said, the words, from him, quite unmelodramatic. 'Anything else I might tell you would be a lie.'
'Then tell us the lie,' Veg said around his mouthful.
Aquilon started, surprised by the simplicity of it. She kept forgetting that the big man's unsubtle mannerisms did not denote any obtusity of mind or feeling; he would not have been permitted in space were that the case. At one stroke he had nullified Cal's elaborate defensive structure.
Cal watched them both for some sign of relentment, but found none; Veg consumed his fungus entree and Aquilon imitated him, more to keep up appearances than from present appetite. The stuff was foul.
'A story, then,' Cal said at last. 'Then you go on - the two of you.'
There was no response.
'I was only a paleozoologist searching for fossils,' Cal said, closing his eyes. 'You can't generally locate a given specimen just by digging a hole in the ground. My specialty was Eocene insectivores and I was running down a rumor that a primitive primate shinbone had been spotted in a sedimentary outcrop. It happened to be in a restive corner of the world, and I hadn't paid sufficient attention to local politics. I didn't even speak the language.'
'I don't believe a word,' Veg said equably.
'I was arrested as a spy - that was one word I picked up in a hurry! - and was unable to convey the true nature of my mission to them. My captors didn't understand paleontology; I think their religion renounced any nonbeatific derivation of man. They were convinced I was concealing information, and they had devious methods of coercion. They were not backward in the modern biological sciences. Odd how retrogression and advancement sometimes coexist. ...' He trailed off.
'What did they do to you, Cal?' Veg inquired. 'According to your story, I mean.'
Cal went on with a visible effort. Aquilon was shocked to see the fatigue and misery of years so deeply etched upon his face. 'It doesn't matter now, except for one thing. My diet became ... restricted. They fixed it so that I can't live on anything but-' He stopped.
'We have to know,' Aquilon said softly.
'... blood.'
There was silence for several minutes.
Veg walked over to the pack at last and withdrew a cup. He squatted down. 'Can you take it straight,' he asked, abandoning pretense, 'or does it have to be by transfusion?'
Cal's self-control dissolved, embarrassing Aquilon acutely. What had happened to the intellectual power she had so admired in Cal? This was a moaning baby of a man. Would it have been kinder to let him die?
'They made me into a vampire,' Cal whispered. 'I've been living on plasma ... have to go to the doctor for my meals. He's the only one on the ship that knows. The grouping RH factor - doesn't matter; I take it orally. How I've wanted to die!'
Aquilon whirled as the meaning of Veg's question sank in. 'You can't-' she cried.
Veg was carefully sterilizing his knife in the flame of one of the matches. 'Keep out of this,' he said gruffly.
He must have known. He had taken the last of the water so that he would have ... blood. 'But you can't even kill a herbivore,' she said, distracted. 'How can you-'
Veg wiped off his arm and readied the knife. Aquilon made as if to throw herself upon him, then subdued herself.
She had thought she understood the motivations of these men, and thought they understood each other - but her knowledge of anatomy, human and animal, and her associated studies left her convinced that Cal's story was a lie. No drug or surgical technique she knew of could possibly do to a man what Cal claimed; the nearest approach would be regression to an infantile dependence on milk, which was in fact very similar to blood. But if it could be limited specifically to blood, yet not so narrowly as to restrict the condition of that blood or the animals from which it came, a chemically similar substitute could certainly be prepared in the laboratory in quantity. The oral dosage was the giveaway - a transfusion was a precise business, but the digestive tract of man was equipped to handle a variety of things.
Cal had indeed made up a story, as he had threatened and Veg must have recognized it for what it was. Why, then, was Veg accepting the fiction as fact - and acting upon it? How could he donate, literally, his own blood, for the perpetuation of a charade?
And then she understood.
'I don't think I ever knew what real friendship ... was,' she said quietly. 'But you have to save your strength to carry him. Otherwise we won't get back at all, any of us.'
Veg hesitated. 'He's got to eat.'
She held out her own arm. 'I don't have to carry anything,' she said.
Veg studied her and nodded. 'You're pretty much of a woman,' he said, and there was a double meaning there, as there had to be. It erased his prior reaction to the bantering suggestion of marriage, and the motive behind it.
He lurched to his feet and charged past her.
Turning, she saw the reason. Cal had almost made it to the edge. There could be no doubt about his intent. Veg caught the little man and carried him back to the inner side.
'You don't know what you're doing,' Cal gasped weakly. 'I need to die-'
'You don't have a choice,' Veg said. 'Unless you want to spill her blood into the dust.' He returned to Aquilon, carrying the knife.
Once again the manta moved, flashing between them with alarming speed.
'What the-' Veg grunted, angry now. 'You can touch Cal, I can touch Cal. But it won't let me touch you. What's the matter with the critter?'
'Throw me the knife,' Aquilon said.
Gritting her teeth against the pain and shock, she made a neat surgical slice across the fleshy part of her forearm and let the rich blood drip into the cup.
The four moved on up the slope. Veg led the way, carrying Cal on his shoulders; Aquilon followed, bearing the rifle and her sketch-pad; last came the manta, hopping erratically. It evidently wasn't accustomed to slow travel. Aquilon remained nervously aware of it, almost feeling the slash of the tail down her exposed back, but it never came too close.
The sheer side of the mountain began to level out, as they neared what had to be the top of a convex slope. The spherical fungi became larger and more numerous, lining the trail like fat snowmen, and the candyland smaller growths reappeared.
The ground shuddered. Loud crashing and pounding approached from the obscurity above. Something was charging down the trail! Veg lowered Cal to the side and whirled. 'Only one thing makes a noise like that,' he said grimly.
Aquilon gripped the rifle and pressed the ignition stud, feeling the warmth of the chamber in her hands. It occurred to her now, as she saw the jet of water vaporize inside the translucent barrel, that they could have distilled the funguswater, cooking out the bacteria and eliminating the poisons that might have been in the solution.
<
br /> The rifle was hot and ready to fire. Veg strode toward her, reaching for the weapon. The manta leaped and flared ominously. He backed away. 'Throw it here!'
Too late. A great mottled shape came hurtling out of the mist ahead. It would weigh, Aquilon knew, in the neighborhood of a thousand pounds. Its spiny, discolored skin hung in huge folds, making the creature resemble an enormous horned toad. A single tiny eye was embedded in the flesh of its forepart, glaring balefully out. This was animosity incarnate. This was the omnivore.
Cal, nearest to it, huddled on the ground. The savage beast leaped, too anxious for its prey, and the great blotched shape passed over him, the sharp teeth of its striking tail clashing together just inches from his head.
Aquilon was before the monster now, the rifle hissing in her hands. The omnivore turned on her, raising its stout tail overhead. The vicious jaws in it gaped as that tail wove from side to side like a deadly serpent, doubly dangerous because it was a most specialized weapon of offense. There was no connecting alimentary tract, no soft tissue, no weak spot. Those jaws could crunch a human arm in half, and the tail could hurl a human body into the air and dash it against a rock or under the slavering underside.
Her bullets only stung it, and she had no time to put a shell in the other chamber. The massive propulsive muscles of the omnivore's single foot bunched, ready for the next leap.
Veg stepped in from the side, shouting, trying to distract the omnivore's attention, though he was armed only with the puny knife. The monster swiveled, aware of him in spite of the foolish cries; it could not, of course, hear him, but its perceptions were more diversified than those of other Nacre creatures, and it could smell him and feel the warmth of his body. The jaws of its tail clashed together loudly as it turned on this new adversary.
The manta, temporarily quiescent, came back to life. It rose into the air, once more assuming the shape that had earned it its name. The eye seemed to flash as the creature banked around both humans and landed before the omnivore.
Facing the monster, the manta was tiny. Four feet tall when stationary, it could not have weighed more than eighty or ninety pounds, Earth-gravity. Yet the bulking omnivore recoiled; it leaped back, turning in the air. Its toothed tail came back as a kind of rear guard, intersecting the second jump of the manta.
The disk of the manta spread out, suddenly huge. Aquilon could feel the wash of air as it took off. It passed over the omnivore. There was a sharp Crack! as of the snap of a whip - and the gruesome jaws at the tip of the monster's tail were flying through the air directly at Veg. He jerked back - and toppled over the edge of the path.
With a cry, Aquilon rushed to the brink, light-headed from the exertion and the loss of the blood she had donated. Veg was rolling helplessly down the side, puffball fungi shattering and squirting under him but cushioning his descent. He careened into one of the giants, bounced off as though it were a rubber boulder, and fetched up with his head buried in a smaller growth.
Aquilon scrambled down to help him, glad that the slope was less ferocious here than it had been lower on the mountain. As she got there, panting and dizzy, Veg straightened and spat white chunks out of his mouth.
'Are you all right?' she asked foolishly.
'Gimme a little - phew! - kiss and we'll find out,' he replied, smiling. It was more fungus he was clearing out, not an insult to her. Overcome by relief, she returned the smile.
She saw him blink, then tighten his jaw muscles in a spastic effort at facial control. Horror showed in the narrowing of his eyes.
Behind him the shape of the manta appeared, sailing down the steep slope. Its eye centered on Aquilon. Suddenly the body folded and swerved in a tangible double-take.
Too late she realized what she had done. Veg had seen. She had appalled him with her smile, that shameful thing she had tried never to show again. Now anything that might have built between them was gone. She knew what it was to wish for immediate death. Death...
'Cal!' she cried, remembering. 'He's still up there with the-'
Veg launched himself up the slope, followed lopingly by the manta. Aquilon started after them, but her head began to spin again almost immediately. She had exerted herself too much already, and there had been the shock of the ... smile. But life went on, and there were other things to worry about. She eased her pace and picked her way up carefully.
She reached the trail, afraid for what she might see. There had been no sound from Veg - or anything else. It was too quiet.
The omnivore lay dead, its body slashed into tattered sections as though a cosmic knife had dropped upon it. Pale blood dripped from the carcass, forming rivulets across the flesh and soaking into the dust beneath, as thick and slow as that of a man. Cal was trying to gather some of it in his cup.
It was a horrible sight, ludicrous and pitiful at once. Somehow the notion that Cal should try to drink the blood of the omnivore disturbed Aquilon even more than had the donation of her own. Yet it was the obvious solution, if they were to survive at all as a group; her present disorientation proved that her resources in this respect were severely limited. The wrenching of it suppressed the shock of the other thing, the smile for the moment.
It was right. It was a stroke of fortune. The omnivore could feed them, and the risk the consumption of its flesh and blood entailed was no greater than the one they had already taken eating the loathsome fungus or drinking its juice. If it worked, it spelled life for all of them, instead of a cruel death.
It was still sickening.
Something nudged her foot, making her jump and look down. The jaws of the omnivore's tail were lying there, like the head of a mutilated dog, snapping reflexively with a lingering life of their own. Muscle fibers trailed from the stub, tangling with the dust in clotted strings.
Aquilon leaned over the edge and gave way to silent nausea.
CHAPTER THREE - A BOOK OF VERSES
CAL'S house fronted the flexing water of the Gulf of Mexico. Subble had looked in vain for a private landing spot in the intensely developed suncoast of Florida, and had finally had to settle on the water, to the distress of the waterskiers ranging there. He anchored his flyer to the shallow bottom-land, allowed for the change of tide, and swam to shore.
Cal was working in the sun just beyond the seawall. He was small, standing a little over five feet, and not wellfleshed, but his skin was tanned and his movements sure, He gave no sign of any unusual weakness.
Before him, or rather around him, was an electronic device comprised of massed wires, a television chassis, ham radio equipment and laboratory mechanisms ranging from a pencil-soldering iron to a sophisticated pocket oscilloscope.
'Good,' Cal remarked as Subble swam to the wall and heaved himself onto the pavement. 'I need extra hands at this point.'
'Aquilon called you,' Subble said, shaking off the salt water.
'And Veg. Those two try to look out for my welfare, as I think you know. I owe them a great deal.'
Subble nodded, remembering the bloodletting episode Aquilon had described. He also understood by the man's entire attitude and immediate reactions that Cal was by far the most formidable of the persons on his list, physical evidence to the contrary. The man was extremely intelligent, and evidently approached the interview with a clinical rather than defensive manner. There was no bluster in him and no overconfidence; Subble was a situation to be explored and a hypothesis to be verified. Cal would ascertain the facts and let the consensus be his guide. Yet he was concealing something important, just as the others had done.
'I think we understand the situation,' Cal said. 'And this equipment should be no mystery to you.'
'A jury-rigged closed-circuit television transceiver adapted to the signal emitted by the manta's eye,' Subble said.
'Yes. We were slow to comprehend the nature of the creature. We assumed that it saw in much the way we do, though 'Quilon's dissection refuted that. But of course ordinary optics would be ineffective on a hazy world like Nacre. Just as the fish of th
e sublevels of the ocean become luminous-'
Subble was studying the schematics. 'This is highly adaptable.'
'Highly imprecise, you mean. I am not an electrical engineer, and until this is tested in the field it must be generalized. And testing is a problem.'
'I saw the manta in the forest with Veg, and I smelled another in Aquilon's basement,' Subble said quietly. 'I presume the first fed on wildlife and the second on rats. At least two other mantas have been at this spot within the past two days, and your equipment has been in operation. Why is testing a problem?'
Cal was not alarmed. 'Importation of unregistered aliens is illegal, for one thing. We called them pets, but that was a misnomer, and your presence here indicates that the government is getting suspicious. These creatures are dangerous, for another thing. Even you, with all your strength and skill, would be virtually helpless against a single manta.'
Of Man and Manta Omnibus Page 9
