“Jesus Christ!” I yelled, and hurled the paddle from me.
Dangling from the end of it, with its teeth apparently dug right into the plastic, was a thing like a conger eel, its writhing body as long and as thick as my arm. It was thrashing madly, probably none too pleased at being ripped from its muddy haven.
The paddle landed in the water, and temporarily ducked below the surface. When it floated up again, I inspected it carefully to make sure the thing had let it go. Then I plucked it out, and handed it on to Angelina. The teeth marks stood out plainly on the blade. If it had been a leg instead of a paddle, one of us could have stopped worrying about the confinement of a sterile suit, and started worrying about how to get along in life with only one foot.
“It would be a good idea,” I said, “not to step in the water.”
The rain, was by now no more than a thin drizzle. The sky was leaden gray, without the least sign of the moon or any stars. The twilight was quickly gone, leaving us in Stygian gloom. We did step ashore briefly, but it was too difficult fighting our way through the branches and brambles by torchlight, and we soon returned to the boat, stretching the membranes across the open spaces so that we were more or less sealed in.
I looked around at the clutter, and said, “This is not a good place to sleep.”
“Neither is the bare ground,” Angelina replied. “At least, we have no reason to think so.”
“If Juhasz did arrange this,” I said, “we sure as hell owe him one.”
“He’s got troubles enough of his own,” she answered. “Even if he did arrange it, write it off as an aberration. Anyone’s entitled to be a little unbalanced when they’ve spent the best years of their life waking up every ten years or so to spend a couple of weeks riding herd on a tin can full of machines. Anyway, I thought you’d approve of him. Your mother would.”
I remembered what I’d said about single-mindedness. As far as forgiveness went, I compromised. I forgave her for the nasty crack, and reserved judgment on Juhasz.
“It’s going to be a long night,” I said. “Maybe it would be better if we kept going. Even if we only make a few hundred meters, it’s that much farther on.”
“If we run this boat over a rock,” she pointed out, “we’re really up to here.” She put her hand flat beneath her chin. She was right. Hurrying wouldn’t help if all we succeeded in doing was killing ourselves a little bit sooner.
I called Zeno to see what was doing where the action was supposed to be.
“We’re at the dome,” he reported, “but we’re not going in tonight. We still have to get the greater part of the equipment over here. For now, we’re putting up our own temporary shelter. If it makes you feel any better, it’s started to rain.”
I reported our situation to the Ariadne as soon as she cleared the horizon. They quickly reported back to us on our current position. We hadn’t come very far. It was no surprise to hear the news, but I’d been hoping that appearances might have been deceptive.
“You’d better try to sleep,” I told Angelina. “I’m going to stay awake for a while. I don’t suppose anything can happen, but I’ll settle easier if I’ve watched a couple of empty hours go by.”
For a moment, I thought she was going to object, but then she shrugged, and settled back into the space she’d cleared in the bow. I switched off the torch, and sat at the front of the cupola, leaning forward slightly. I couldn’t see anything outside, even when my eyes acclimated to the darkness. There was still no starlight to cast even the faintest of shadows.
In conditions like that, one inevitably becomes slowly more sensitive to sounds. The plastic of the suit cut out many slight sounds I’d ordinarily have been able to hear but there were still noises aplenty to catch my attention. There was no croaking of the kind we associate with frogs on Earth. There were whistling noises—sounds that might have come from a high-pitched penny whistle or a flute—but whether they were made by vertebrates or invertebrates I couldn’t tell. There were frequent plopping sounds close at hand, which I guessed to be frogs diving from the rafts, but they may equally well have been fish rising to the surface. A couple of times the boat was nudged gently from underneath, and I kept thinking of the awesome teeth possessed by the eel-like thing.
Eventually, I let my thoughts drift off into a long reverie—a tangled web of memories from the recent and distant past that grew gradually more inconsequential. In the grip of the daydreams I must have become drowsy, but I never went to sleep. When the boat lurched, I was instantaneously alert.
Apparently, I wasn’t the only one to be surprised, for there was a strange kind of snorting sound from outside. Aiming the torch at the sound, I switched on. The snort had died away to a curious kind of snuffling noise, but now this changed to a yelp.
My eyes were no more ready for the flash than the creature’s, but at least I knew what was happening. For him (or maybe her) it was an altogether alien situation. I saw big staring eyes, comical rather than fearsome, and a rounded skull, flattened toward the edge of the snout. The toothy mouth was underneath, but in the instant that I saw it the rubbery lips were puckering over the teeth, and a fraction of a second later something hit the plastic of the cupola with a sharp splat!
Then the thing was gone, diving for the muddy darkness.
Angelina, sitting bolt upright, said: “What was it?”
I directed the torch back in her direction, making her cover her eyes with a silver-clad arm.
“I don’t know,” I said. “It looked like a cross between a plesiosaur and a sea lion, but I only saw the head. I think the body was going to rest in the shallows while the neck explored the foliage. We’re probably tied up to its favorite lurk-line. The damn thing tried to spit in my eye, but maybe it was entitled.”
“Big?” she queried.
I nodded. “The big ones only come out to play when it’s dark,” I said. “That’s why we never saw them on the film. It had big eyes, though—it doesn’t hunt by sense of smell.”
She looked out at the pitch-black night, and said: “It must eat a lot of carrots.” It was an esoteric reference to some ancient piece of folklore.
“It didn’t look very dangerous,” I said. “A small mouth. One thing does bother me, though.”
“What’s that?” she asked.
“Spitting is a very peculiar defensive reflex to be equipped with if you spend most of your time lurking underwater. It implies that the fellow he usually spits at attacks him on land. He may not be the only monster who rears his ugly head by night.”
She considered the thought for a moment, then commented that the sooner we got out of the swamp, the better.
I had to agree.
CHAPTER TWELVE
It is, they say, always darkest before the dawn.
This, like most of the things “they” say, is a damn lie. Before dawn, the sky begins to get gradually lighter because of light refracted through the atmosphere. The hours before our first dawn on Naxos were rendered even lighter by the fact that there was a break in the clouds. The rain abated once more, and the stars came out.
The fact that I was awake to see it owes much to the habit of clean living and punctilious routine. I had been so very ready to doze off when night fell because of the marginal desynchronization between the natural event and the artificial day/night cycle aboard the Earth Spirit, which I had kept to even on the Ariadne. Night, on Naxos, was a fraction over ten Earthly hours long. My habit has always been to sleep for seven. (I could have gotten by on five were it not for the loss of benefit on nightmare nights.) Ergo, I woke up about an hour before dawn, and looked up at the bright stars, whose light was filtered through the raindrop-spattered canopy of the boat’s makeshift “cabin.”
It seemed the most natural thing in the world to unstrip the seam so that I could see properly.
As I moved, the boat rocked, and Angelina woke up. I could tell that she was on edge by the way she shot into an uptight sitting position, her hands reflexively groping for th
e rifle. She didn’t find it. It was laid across my lap.
“What are you doing?” she whispered. At least, it sounded like a whisper—I could barely hear the words and it was inference rather than delicacy of hearing that conveyed their content.
I didn’t switch on the flashlight, but laid a hand on her barely visible arm to reassure her.
“Nothing wrong,” I said quietly. “Look around. Stay here.” I was uncomfortably aware of the fact that I sounded like Vesenkov. She got the message.
After a moment’s thought, in which I reflected on matters of practicality and mankind’s long-standing but almost-forgotten traditions of gallantry, I passed the rifle back to her, butt first. I picked up the flare pistol instead. It only had two shots in its locker, but rumor has it that really monstrous things aren’t much intimidated by rifle bullets, whereas a faceful of flaming phosphorus is enough to see off anything up to and including Tyrannosaurus rex.
I was careful not to put my foot in the water as I stepped ashore. There was no sign of my long-necked friend, who would probably have crossed this particular location off his social calendar. I stood in the shadow of the nearest tree, quite still, waiting until I was one hundred percent sure of my poise and alertness. The stars were bright—much brighter than the stars seen from Earth—and testified to the benefits of being part of a relatively dense cluster. The network of branches which extended out from the bole of the tree just above my head cast a curious web of star-shadows on the ground, like a halo surrounding a region of darkness.
After six or seven minutes, I stepped across the web of latticed shadows, and began to move through the thick undergrowth, as quietly as I could.
Something the size of a small pig, bloated and long-legged, squirmed out of my path, heading for the water. I put it down as a big frog, though I couldn’t see that clearly. Something else squirmed under my foot, and I experienced a momentary vision of teeth sinking into the leathery plastic of the suit’s shoe. But the legless thing only wanted to get out of my way.
I tried to tread more carefully, just in case.
In the middle of a patch of open ground, with the vegetation up to my knees, I paused, looking around for a better place to walk. I could see the stems and flower heads moving, stirred by feeding things—guided, no doubt, by sense of smell. In a world of amphibians, I recalled, the sun is an enemy, threatening desiccation. The easy way to cope with it would be simply to avoid it.
In the middle of the open space there was an area of ground where the vegetation was not so coarse and tangled. Indeed, it looked almost flat. I made straight for it, thus demonstrating the perils of overlooking the obvious. I didn’t bother to ask myself why it looked flat. I got the answer, though, when I reached forward with my right leg to step out on to it, and the foot just kept on going. It wasn’t ground at all; it was a pool of water.
I yelped, and tried to draw back, but I was off balance. If the pool had been deep I’d have cartwheeled forward and gone under with all limbs flailing. As was, my foot hit bottom and I merely batted the raft-concealed surface with my right arm. My left leg came clear of the tangled grass, and in order to stay upright I had to put it down in the water close to its partner.
Then something wound itself around my ankles, tying them together, and I realized that I was in trouble. I tried to break its grip, but I couldn’t get my feet to move. Then it began to pull, and I was faced with the undignified prospect of shuffling along in the mud, desperately trying to keep my balance, while it brought me to wherever it wanted me.
I couldn’t fire the pistol downward, for fear that it would do far more damage to me than to the beastie, so I pointed at the sky and pressed the trigger. The flare went up as a little yellow spark, then burst into a giant flower of red flames, bathing the whole island with the glow of hellfire.
At least, you would have thought it was hellfire the way the local populace responded. My mind was on other things, and the circumstances weren’t right for the taking of a census, but I saw half a dozen hulking things that were a cross between a bullfrog and a turtle squirming over the grass, flattening it as they went with ungainly flipper-feet. I saw something else, too, out of the corner of my eye—something that moved much faster and much more easily. I couldn’t even say for sure whether it had two legs or four, but it wasn’t squirming—it was running. I could hear the splashes as the overlords of this little hunting range returned to their castles beneath the curtain of surface vegetation. Metaphorical castles, of course.
There was nothing metaphorical, though, about the thing which had my feet. Worst of all, it didn’t seem impressed by the blaze of red light—from which it was shadowed, of course, by the rafts sitting atop its pool.
Having run out of good ideas of my own, I yelled for help. Angelina appeared at the poolside, rifle at the ready.
I pointed at the surface about a meter in front of me, in the direction that the thing was trying to pull me.
“Put a couple bullets there,” I said.
She did, and the effect was startling. The grip on my ankles relaxed, and the water was churned up by what seemed to be a dozen thrashing tentacles. I hauled myself clear, and switched on the flashlight, which I still held in my left hand. As the writhing arms cut the floating leaves to pieces, we could see the water growing turbid.
“Dead center,” I commented. The operative word, of course, being dead.
“Are you coming back now?” she asked, her tone implying that I should never have set out.
“We scientists must not allow ourselves to be intimidated by trivial risks,” I told her.
“No,” she said, “but are you coming back to the boat?”
“Damn right,” I answered. “We’ll come back in the morning to see what it was.”
By the dawn’s early light, we came back to see what there was to see. The pool was still turbid, and colored a most peculiar milky pink. I used the tooth-marked paddle to bring the thing out. It had twelve tentacles, each about one and a half meters long, and a complex body that was very soft and apparently protean.
“Shall we call it a squid or an overgrown sea anemone?” I asked. It was plainly neither.
“These things have red blood, just like you or me,” she said contemplatively.
“That’s right,” I said. “Invertebrates and vertebrates alike. Not hemoglobin, but something like it. Remarkable chemical consistency, if I remember rightly.”
She dipped a hand into the milky pink soup. It seemed to have the texture of unset jelly.
“Then what’s all this stuff with the blood? Fluid protoplasm?”
I didn’t know, and turned away in search of anything else of interest that the night’s dramatic events might have left behind. I spotted it, about twenty meters away. One of the big bloated creatures that didn’t move too well. It was, of course, dead. I went over, wondering whether it had died of shock, or whether it had been caught by some falling part of the expended flare.
As it happened, the cause of death was quite obvious and very much more remarkable. It was stuck the ground, impaled upon the shaft of a long, thin piece of cane which certainly hadn’t grown up overnight. I pulled out the shaft, and saw that the business end, which had been thrust through the frog-thing’s body below the neck, had been shaped to a point.
It wasn’t much of a spear, but it was very definitely a spear. I called Angelina over.
“Look,” she said, pointing at the hapless, and somewhat shrunken corpse. “When these things bleed, they don’t just bleed—they leak all over the place.” True enough, beneath the body there was more of the milky goo.
“Very messy,” I agreed. “But what I am holding in my hands is rather more significant.”
She examined the spear, and then looked at me. Her expression was more eloquent than words could ever have been.
“Frogmen,” she said, with a halfhearted giggle.
“When I fired the flare,” I said quietly, “something ran away. I couldn’t see what it was—jus
t the motion. Nothing like these misshapen things.” I pointed down at the murdered creature. It was more toad-like than turtle-like, but it was obviously not built for jumping. Its limbs seemed not to have made up their minds whether to be legs or flippers. They were triple-jointed, but showed no evidence of boned fingers; they ended in fleshy fans of tissue. The eyes were small, rounded and black, and the snout was rounded like a pig’s.
“This changes things,” Angelina observed.
“Yes,” I said. “This changes everything.”
We walked slowly back to the boat.
I picked up the radio mike and called to attention anyone who might be listening. The Ariadne’s duty officer acknowledged immediately, but I had to wait for Zeno. Eventually, he came in.
“This world isn’t as primitive as it looks,” I said. “There’s evidence here of intelligent life.”
“What evidence?” asked the man in orbit.
I told him.
“Hold,” he said. “I’m contacting the captain.”
“How did he come to leave his supper behind?” asked Zeno, who didn’t sound particularly surprised by the unexpected turn of events.
“I frightened him by letting off a flare,” I said. “Our arrival here seems to be having a traumatic effect on all and sundry.”
“How was the spear sharpened?”
“Nothing complicated,” I answered. “It seems to have been honed down by scraping it on a rock. The cane is common enough—it grows in clumps in the mud. It’s not what one might describe as high technology. This isn’t the kind of terrain where you’d expect the early development of the flint axe.”
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