by Larry Niven
But that wasn't what saved Greg. Sylvia had seen the creature's bullet-torn hind leg collapse as it leaped. It was sideways to Greg as the flame caught it, and it dropped in front of him, burning, motionless.
It was dead. It had to be dead—nothing could possibly survive the bullets, the fire—and Greg sent a steady tongue of flame licking into it. Flame rolled up from its body and exploded against the shack behind it, jellied gasoline spattering everywhere.
Then it moved. Without any warning sign at all the damned corpse was moving again. George Merriot leaped away, too slowly; the creature brushed him and he was aflame.
The burning man thrashed on the ground, arms flopping, trying to put out the jellied gasoline sticking to his jacket and pants. Rachel Moscowitz was battering at him with a blanket. Bobby Erin whipped off his robe and slapped it onto George, totally unconcerned by his own resulting nudity. All eyes were on the monster.
The monster had gained twenty meters toward the river cliff in the blink of an eye, and once again was motionless.
The smell of fuel and burnt flesh boiled up from it in nauseatingly dense clouds of oily smoke.
It moved. Its tail was a sudden blur, and then an impossible living fireball streaked for the river, fifteen good meters this time. Through the smoke and flame she could see its head wagging slowly, agonizingly, as if trying to orient itself. Its tail lashed mindlessly.
Greg followed, firing the flame-thrower not in bursts but in a single continuous stream. He laughed and cried hysterically, unmindful of the havoc he was wrecking. "You—stay still—Alicia—you—" Firing the flame-thrower at the tail had the same effect as firing it at a spinning propeller: a blur, a thin, curdled mist of flame.
Buildings were afire all around them. Stu Ellington, his moon face ruddy with fear and adrenaline exhaustion, cried, "God's sake, Greg, put it out! Put the damned thing out! The animal's dead!"
Stu shouldered a rifle, aiming not at the dying thing wrapped in a web of flame, but at Greg.
"Greg—" Greg didn't, couldn't hear the order, but the flame-thrower tanks spat out their last breath of fire and were empty. Trembling, Stu lowered the barrel to the ground.
"You, die, die, damn you, die—" Sylvia was startled to hear her own voice, hear herself chanting, not knowing when she had started it, knowing only an intensely morbid fascination with the thing that—
It moved, and this last leap took it over the edge of the bluff. It didn't even scream as it fell.
"Get it!" Zack bawled instantly. "Don't let it get away." Colonists ran toward fires and the injured. Zack grabbed randomly. "Jill. Harry. Ricky—no, Jesus, get some drawers on. Mits. Get a steel net on that thing's body. It's almost dead, but don't take any chances and don't let the body wash away."
Sylvia pulled herself erect. Something had bruised her ankle. She pulled the robe about her swollen stomach. I should do something—Smoke and blood and the stench of cooking monster flesh filled the air.
A dozen bodies lay scattered and bleeding. Jean Patterson broken and twisted and still at last. Jon van Don, Sylvia's next-door neighbor, his face a mask of blood, fumbled with numbing fingers to stanch wounds across his midsection. Scenes from newsreels, from long past wars on Earth. Sylvia wandered blindly through hell. "Terry!"
He must be all right. He must be helping to put out the fires—
Flames grew everywhere. Tanks spat white foam into the wreckage.
A thin current of wailing was an incessant background to her every thought. Broken glass and wood and plastic crunched under her every step, and Sylvia was losing it, tottering on the brink of overload. We had time. We should have been ready. We should have known. Cadmann warned—
Cadmann. Cadmann's still in the clinic!
She was running before she knew it. One slipper flew off, and the bare pad of her foot skinned along the ground. There was no one at the door of the infirmary, and at first she thought that it was empty. Then she saw Mary Ann and Carlos hunched over Cadmann.
Cadmann wasn't moving. Blood oozed from a dozen wounds.
She fought to get in next to him. Mary Ann turned and glared at her.
"We can take care of this," she said, and her voice was frigid. "He warned you, damn you. God damn you to hell. He trusted you. And you tried to kill him. Go on. I'm sure that your husband needs you somewhere."
Carlos's dark face was sliced along the chin, a wound that oozed blood onto his green sleeveless shirt. She reached out to touch him. He spoke without turning. "No. It's all right. Why don't you get a first-aid kit and see who needs help?" He didn't try to smile, but there was no hostility in his face. "Go on, Senora Faulkner."
Unconscious, Cadmann groaned as Mary Ann's fingers tenderly probed his wounds.
Sylvia backed out of the room, grabbing the first-aid kit as she went, mumbling, "I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. I tried—" But no one was listening to her anymore.
There was so much damage—everywhere. Her emotions were in such a snarl that it was impossible to find a loose end, somewhere she could begin to unravel.
She counted the blanket-draped figures that she could see. At least four corpses. Three times that many wounded, and some would be dead by morning. She walked stiff-legged and numb, desperate to find a way to make herself useful.
Terry. She heard his voice to the left, barking orders. He was working with three other men to quell a blaze roaring in one of the storage sheds. Her mind wasn't working. She wasn't thinking clearly, and she wanted to, badly. What did they store in that shed? What... ?
The sudden realization hit her, and she screamed. "Terry!"
He turned. "Sylvia! Get back!" The sheer ferocity and alarm in his voice took her by such surprise that she did back up, and then she was off her feet, feeling the wall of air before she saw the light or heard the sound.
The shed behind Terry mushroomed into a fireball, and the men with him screamed, twitching like moths caught in a Bunsen burner. The edge of the fireball lifted Terry and flipped him into a stack of tools where he lay, clothes smoldering, as the camp burned...
Impressions:
Blackened faces, bandages. Wisps of smoke rising from twisted alloy support struts. A sky gray with ash, a dawn welcomed with low, despairing moans.
Wars must look like this, Sylvia thought. Cadmann would know—
The communal dining hall was smoke-damaged but otherwise unharmed. Now it held most of the Colony, excluding those too badly wounded to be moved.
There was little sound in the room save the few mingled, stifled sobs. She felt what nobody spoke of: the sense of relief from those who had come through the ordeal with hides and families intact. The unwounded. There aren't any unwounded. We've all been hurt. Sylvia thought. A fragment of song came to her. Sometimes I feel like a motherless child. A long way from home.
"Mary Ann—"
Mary Ann paused in her endless rounds among the wounded.
"Is Cadmann--?"
"He's alive."
"Don't go! Terry. Where is Terry?"
Mary Ann's mouth was a grim line. "He'll live. I think."
"Live—"
"Maybe. I have to go. You're not hurt. You're all right. So is your baby."
Sylvia let that thought sink in. The baby is all right... Another shadow fell across her. Zack wandered aimlessly through the room with a bullhorn, counting the wounded, trying to get a feel for the extent of the damage. His eyes were red and puffy. Carolyn McAndrews followed him, a sallow wraith at Zack's heels.
Zack climbed onto a dining table and raised his bullhorn. "I don't know what to say." He paused. There was silence. "We... we have more than enough medicine and bandages." The bullhorn bellowed his voice: gravelly, ruined by an endless night of screaming. "If there are any bite victims that I am presently unaware of, please..." He wavered, losing focus, and Rachel steadied him.
Sylvia felt herself coughing, watched herself raise an unsteady hand.
"Zack—what do we do now? What do we do about the defenses?"
<
br /> "Full alert, of course, we activate the mine field. The electric fences. But—Goddamn it, Sylvia, you know that thing was impossible! Impossible! We couldn't have expected that. It's a fluke. Nothing that large can live on this island, the ecology can't support it. There's no food chain. You said that yourself! It swam over from the mainland, it must have, and how could I have know it could do that?" He wiped his forehead with a grimy hand. His voice cracked. "There just isn't enough food to support it."
"It got here, didn't it?" Ida van Don screamed. Her face was chalk, except for the smear of blood on the left side of her face. "It got—" She couldn't get the rest out, and buckled over with sobs. Phyllis draped a blanket over her shoulders.
"Not enough food," Sylvia said. She tried unsuccessfully to hold back her own tears. "Yes, I said that. All right, Zack, it wasn't your fault! Is that what you want on your tombstone? It wasn't your fault? Zack, it couldn't be, it shouldn't be, but it's here, and you can't know there aren't more, and what in the hell do we do about it?"
"Mary Ann would have a suggestion." Carlos's voice was dry and carefully controlled.
Zack's lips drew taut. His hands shook. Rachel took the microphone. Her voice was as raw as her husband's. "Is that a suggestion or a demand, Carlos?"
"Neither. Not yet, anyway."
"Then we needn't worry about it yet. Sylvia, all serious suggestions are welcome. We know we need more security. Please, all of you, be assured that until the entire situation has stabilized, no aspect of security will be neglected. But we have to start somewhere—right now, we have to make sure that a total inventory of the damage and losses is made, and that all of the wounds are dealt with. Yes—Andy?"
The engineer stood. His right arm was strapped to his chest. "This wasn't supposed to happen. Nothing like this was supposed to happen. I was... We can't go home!"
Jill Ralston, the slender redhead from agriculture, stood. Both of her hands were wrapped in burn gauze. "Dammit, I saw that freaking animal take over a hundred rounds, and half a tank of jellied fuel. It was in the water, and the water smoked. We got a net around it, and its tail was still twitching! It had to be dead, just spasms—but I'm telling you that it almost killed the three of us. If there had been five of them, they could have killed everyone in the camp."
"Five—hell if it would have needed five!" Ricky shouted.
Rachel tried to speak, but despite the microphone she was drowned out in the babble.
"One. One more would finish us!"
"Cadmann was right all the time, damn, why didn't we listen to the colonel?--"
"Ten light-years, ten years away—"
"Power plant's finished—"
"Vet shed—"
"The biology lab's wrecked—"
Zack took the microphone and waved his hand. "Enough! Listen, damn it!" The babble died away. "Look, we're not going to get productive work done until we rebuild the camp, and we can't do that until our minds are at rest."
"Yeah, sure, relax," La Donna called. "Good old Zack. No-o-o problems."
"Cut the crap. It doesn't help the situation if everyone talks at once. Look, chances are we won't find another one of these—things. No sense in taking chances, we'll take precautions, but damn it, science is science. There's nothing for it to live on here. There won't be more of them—"
"How the hell can you know that?"
"There couldn't have been that one—"
"Stop! You're scientists and engineers, and the best people that could be chosen from a half billion applicants, and God damn it, act like it!
"All right. Now, just to be sure, we'll put a study team on the problem. Immediately. What do we have that will kill these... monsters... and do it efficiently? We'll find out!"
"I think we need atomic bombs," Andy said. Two people laughed. Andy sat down again.
Zack spoke through pain, pushing his voice when it should have been allowed to rest. "We weren't prepared. Whether we ever run into another of those or not, we'll soon know what will kill it. One person by himself should be able to do it. We'll find out. I swear. This is our island, and I'm not turning it over to any goddamned monster. Ours, do you understand?"
"Right." Carolyn McAndrews stood and applauded. After several seconds others joined wearily. Sylvia rose and left the room.
She walked out through the door, out into the camp, where smoke still rose from the twisted struts. Three buildings had been totally destroyed. The power plant looked bad. People dug in the ruins, trying to find valuables or irreplaceables.
Here was the hospital. Its normal five beds had been expanded to twenty. Most of the wounds would heal, thank God, but a few, just a few...
Terry for instance.
Terry lay torpid in a bath of saline solution. Jerry was checking
Terry's wounds as Sylvia came through the door, and his face was grim. "We may have to amputate the right leg. The bones are shattered."
She nodded numbly and sat down in a folding chair next to him. Terry was still unconscious, filled with painkillers. His skin was reddish and peeling, as if he had been staked out in the Mojave for days.
"He's lucky to be alive," Jerry said.
"We're all lucky," Sylvia said soberly. "Somehow, that doesn't make things any easier."
There was one figure conspicuously absent from the expanded hospital, one figure that she wanted desperately to see. Jerry caught the look in her eye. "We moved Cadmann back to his hut. He damned well insisted. He's taking food there. I don't know. He's very weak, but there are others who need help more. He'll heal—"
Sylvia half stood, but Jerry's hand tugged at her. "Name of God, Sylvia. You're not the only one who's sorry. We screwed up, and we're paying for it. But you can't do any good. How do you think Terry's going to feel if he wakes up and you're not here? Let it be."
She twisted her arm in his hand, and then finally sat back again.
Drained. "There isn't anything to be done."
"Nothing. We've got the body out of the river, and as soon as the wounded are stabilized, we'll be able to spare you. Until then... you're a doctor, not a lovesick schoolgirl. This is your husband. For God's sake act like it."
A slap across the face couldn't have shocked her more, and she nodded.
"I... I'm sorry, Jerry."
"Being sorry doesn't count for shit. Broken bones don't care how you feel. They just need to be set."
What time was it? How long had Jerry been working while she luxuriated in her grief? It had been twenty hours since the attack. It had probably been two days since Jerry had slept, and he was still going. Shame swept through the depths of her. But in its wake was resolve, and a kind of nervous energy. She stood. "Jerry, thank you. There's a time for self-pity, and this isn't it. How long has it been since you slept?"
Jerry smiled raggedly, running his hand through a thatch of hair that looked as limp and tired as the rest of him. "Sleep. Sounds familiar. It sounds like something I read about once."
"Get out of here, and don't come back for at least six hours. Doctor's orders."
"Are you all right?"
"Now I am. I have to pass the favor on. Scoot."
Jerry took a last look around the infirmary and shuffled off, grabbing his coat on the way out.
Sylvia rolled up her sleeves, and touched her stomach gingerly. The baby was fine, she could feel that. If anything had happened...
But now there was work to be done.
A war zone. That was what it looked like in here. A goddamned war zone.
Chapter 11
EULOGY
He is gone from the mountain,
He is lost to the forest,
Like a summer-dried fountain
When our need was the sorest.
SIR WALTER SCOTT, The Lady of the Lake
For Sylvia, the next three days were a stabilizing time, a time of learning who was going to die, and who would live. They lost three more during that time, raising the death toll to twelve.
It seemed that
none but the dead slept during those days. There just wasn't enough painkiller or somazine to keep the wounded asleep.
If only...
That game was too easy, and too painful to play. "If onlys" turned wishes into guilty visions, turned thoughts of mine fields and guards and infrared scans into haunted caves, vast cobwebbed torture chambers where her sleep-starved mind whipped and racked her without mercy.
She was pregnant, and she couldn't deny it or hide it, and so every night when others went back to the hospital after dinner she was driven into bed, and given orders not to show her face until morning.
But the guilt and the pain and the sheer stark need drove her on.
She saw Zack. He was going harder than she. Perhaps harder than anyone. And if she knew that her dreams were pits of despair and self-recrimination, his were beyond her imagining.
Her life during those vital hours was consumed with the wounded—the burns, the bites and punctures, the broken bones and ruptured internal organs, the cuts, nervous exhaustion, fatigue, shell shock and even a bullet wound.
But Zack had to pore over Andy's reports as the engineer corps examined the damage. The biology lab was almost totally destroyed. The power plant looked wounded, but was in fact dead. The plasma toroid was punctured; the only replacements within ten light-years were in the motors of the Minerva vehicles.
And in three days, after the worst had passed—after all the fences were mended, the first tentative inventory taken and all the medical cases stabilized—it was Zack who performed the service at the mass burial.
No preachers. We didn't want any. No preachers, no rabbi, no priests.
We are the scientists, rational, thoughtful—was that wise?
"They died that we might live," Zack began.
She thought of the last funeral she'd attended, the last time when she had felt grief gnawing at her like a living thing—the day they buried her father, only six months after her mother was laid to rest. The day she had turned from the rolling green expanse, the endless rows of white markers at Arlington National Cemetery and flown home without a word to anyone. And upon returning home made her final decision to accept the offered berth aboard Geographic. That day, and its decision, and the accompanying grief were like a wood-grain finish buried under layers of cheap, cloudy shellac. It only came to mind when she thought of how very much her mother would have wanted to touch her stomach, to hold her and cry happily with her as women cry, rejoicing in the torch of life being passed from one generation to the next.
