by Larry Niven
No, today was worse. One hundred and seventy-four survivors were here for the ceremony, all those who could be moved from their beds.
Sylvia held Terry's hand as he sat in his wheelchair. The word wasn't final on his spinal damage yet, but the irony was crushing.
We've got good news and bad news.
The good news is that we won't have to amputate his left leg!
The bad news is that his spinal cord was severed, and he'll never walk again anyway.
There were twelve graves and a thirteenth marker. April, Alicia's baby, the first child born on this new world, had never been found.
Greg stood near them, and there was a quality in his face that she had associated with Ernst since the Hibernation Instability. His face was empty.
It fit. Everything fit together, a mosaic that began with the endless expanse of dappled gray clouds and the thin stream of smoke rising from the smoldering tip of a volcano just the far side of the horizon.
Perhaps most of all, what fit was Cadmann. She saw him out of the corner of her left eye, standing alone, with Mary Ann. Strange how that phrasing came to her. Mary Ann stood near him, almost touching him, but they might have been strangers in a subway: intimate through proximity, yet each sealed in his own world.
Cadmann's head turned, and he looked at Sylvia, through her, and she longed to cry out to him, realized through his inaccessibility how very much she cared.
But Terry's hand gripped hers, and Zack's voice called her from her reverie.
"... that we might live. All of us knew the risks, but these—these few paid the price for our mistake. With time, all of us will lie beneath this soil. Let these... thirteen... be the last to die by violence. Let our loss merely strengthen our resolve, deepen our commitment."
He cleared his throat. Usually he reminded Sylvia of Groucho Marx.
There was no hint of comedy now. He looked old and tired and frightened.
"Does anyone want to speak?"
There was a moment's silence, then Greg spoke in a voice that was pure venom. "Why didn't we listen? Why couldn't we have listened? Did Cadmann ask for so much?"
"Greg..." Zack's voice was soft. "This isn't the time."
"Piss on you!" Spittle flew from the corner of his mouth. "We combed this goddamned island from one end to the other, and we didn't find a fucking thing. Now we can't find anything, and people are already starting to say that that must have been the only monster. That it swam over from the mainland. That's bullshit..."
"Greg—"
"Fuck you, Zack. I trusted you. We all trusted you. You were supposed to be the one with the big view. Alicia trusted you. And now she's... she..."
Tears streamed from his eyes and he collapsed to his knees at Alicia's grave, his fingers clawing at the earth, all the pent-up emotion exploding out of him at once. It was a trigger. Others were crying now, quietly or with great wracking sobs.
From the corner of her eye, Sylvia saw Cadmann turn on his crutches and hobble away. Silent, solitary again, vindicated by death, dishonored by the only family he would ever have.
In time Sylvia lost herself in the work, and in greater time the flow of the work itself began to slow. Nobody was unaffected by the grief, and in a way it turned into a bond stronger than the original heigh-ho Manifest Destiny enthusiasm that had built an interstellar expedition.
Repairs were underway around the clock. In the middle of the mistiest night, the sparkle of laser and plasma torches lit the gloom like dazzling fireflies.
Within another week, what had happened had become a symbol almost as much as a reality. The electric wire around the periphery of the camp had been reinforced, reestablishment of full power given the highest priority. Guard shifts were doubled. Every night, several times a night, Sylvia awoke from troubled slumber, to be lulled back to sleep by the silent bob and swivel of the searchlights.
The minefield had been reactivated, providing the first dark moment of humor since the tragedy.
At just after three in the morning, a hollow explosion had shaken the camp. Frightened, hastily dressed colonists had joined guards outside the gates to find a storm of feathers still drifting down: a prodigal turkey had returned.
Grim jokes about turkey bombe and flambe had circulated for the next two days, and had helped the healing begin.
Sylvia ceased her efforts to write a new voice-recognition program into Cassandra as a familiar, disturbing figure limped past her window.
Cadmann. A crutch under his right arm, side bandaged, a ragged, badly healed scar creasing his cheek in a false smile. A silent giant with dark, accusing eyes.
He spoke to no one, taking his meals and medication in his hut. No one challenged him. No one dared to tell him that he should not hate them for what had been done. In her mind Sylvia could see that thing squatting atop Cadmann, grinning down at him, slowly raking the flesh from his body.
For a warrior of Cadmann's nature to have been disarmed, doped, tied and then abandoned to be monster bait was an insult so deep that there was nothing that could be said. And so, to their communal shame, nothing was.
Two weeks later, the door to her lab opened without warning. Zack Moscowitz came in.
"Well, he's gone."
"Hi, Zack."
"That Skeeter you heard. Cadmann stole it."
"Stole—"
"Or borrowed. He didn't say. We tried the radio. He isn't answering, and he's disconnected the tracer. We don't know where he's going, or why."
"You know why," Sylvia said. "He's telling us all to go to hell. And maybe we deserve it."
"Yeah." Moscowitz sighed heavily. "Yeah, I know. Some idiot suggested we go after him and get the Skeeter back. I didn't bother to ask for volunteers."
"So he's gone."
"Him, and he damn near dismantled his hut. He's also got two dogs, a rifle, ammunition and a case of liquor."
"It's his rifle. He'll have tools, too," Sylvia said thoughtfully.
"And if you add it all up, it won't come to more than his share."
"The Skeeter's a lot more than his share."
"He'll bring it back."
"Did he tell you that?"
Sylvia laughed. "Don't I wish. No, but he will. He hasn't any use for a Skeeter, Zack. He isn't out to hurt the Colony. He just wants—anyway, you watch, he won't take more than his share."
"Yeah. I guess I always knew that. Goddamn him!" Zack exploded. "Hell, Sylvia, it isn't the stuff he took! It's him. We need the son of a bitch."
"And if you'd—"
"And if I'd said it loud enough and early enough he'd still be here.
Yeah. Thanks for reminding me."
The Skeeter returned eight hours later. It landed two kilometers from the camp. Everyone came outside, but no one wanted to go closer. After a moment Cadmann creakily levered himself out of the cockpit. One of the dogs leaped out of the cabin after him. It bounded around his feet, as if unable to understand why his new master moved so slowly when there was so much to do, so much to see. Together they walked north.
The last Sylvia saw of him was a tiny, lonely figure climbing into the pass, disappearing into the distance and the mist.
Chapter 12
DINOSAUR KILLER
He that goeth about to persuade a multitude, that they are not so well governed as they ought to be, shall never want attentive and favorable hearers.
RICHARD HOOKER, Ecclesiastical Polity
"Save it!" Sylvia screamed as lights flickered throughout the camp. Jerry's hands flew over the keyboard. Cassandra's memory banks had just begun saving when the entire camp plunged into darkness. Shadows flashed back as the sizzling flare of arc welders beyond the communal dining hall created brief lightning storms in the Avalonian midnight.
Jerry shouted out the window to the welders. "Goddamn it, you could warn us!" There was no answer. He sighed. "What did we lose this time?"
"Maybe nothing." Sylvia glanced at her watch. "Know in a minute. I'll be glad when they get the power
plant rebuilt."
"Yeah." He tapped idly at the keyboard. "They say you can get used to hanging if you hang long enough, but I'll never get used to the power going out." A brief flare of light, and Jerry's face was outlined in the darkness as he lit a cigarette. "Have one?"
"You know better than that."
He shrugged. "Good time to start." He put the stiff foil package away.
This was a bad time, miserable in almost every way that Sylvia could think of. If Cassandra hadn't been damaged by the monster, her automatic power backups would have allowed them to continue the process of collating the satellite data. If she hadn't been damaged, all data would have been automatically backed up. If the power plant hadn't been damaged, there'd be no need to run cables from one of the two Minerva shuttles. There would have been a smooth, uninterrupted flow of electricity to the camp.
They were lucky to have power at all. The solar collectors uphill didn't collect enough power, and the storage capacity was tiny. And they had dynamite. How do you get power out of two hundred kilos of dynamite? They'd found an answer: they'd dynamited a cliff to dam the river. Now the river featured a long, narrow lake downstream from the camp, a landing field for the Minerva, and now the Minerva's motor could be brought within reach of cables from the half rebuilt power plant.
"There she goes," Jerry said as the lights winked back on.
"I don't know how much more of this I can handle," Sylvia said, wiping moist fingers on her pants.
"All that it takes," Jerry answered bluntly.
Cassandra booted back up almost at once, and they breathed a paired sigh of relief: none of the data had been lost. Sylvia spoke softly.
"Cassandra. Correlate and evaluate: optical-infrared scan, North Sea."
"Acknowledged." The computer continued its cross-referencing of the data it received from the geosynchronous satellite above the campsite and the transient data gathered by the lower, faster-moving Geographic.
"Northland is heavily populated." Jerry's voice held irritation now.
The two were like an emotional seesaw. "Conclusive signs of aquatic life. How in the hell are we going to zero in on something like our monster coming over?"
"Data, Jerry. There's an answer for everything that happened, but right now we just have to correlate data. We can't even say exactly what we're up against. If the protein spectrophotometer can be repaired, we'll get a look at the thing's DNA. Until then, we're doing autopsies on a corpse made of charcoal."
"There must be a pattern. This island is underpopulated. We know that.
Not enough differentiation. Samlon, plants, and those damn pterodons high up in the mountains, and they all look alike. It's—"
"And insects—"
"Okay, insects. All tiny. All flying things, no crawlers, and all these empty ecological pockets. It's like... maybe... Sylvia? It's like the Earth must have been after the Dinosaur Killer. Nothing big. Most of the species wiped out. O—kay. Let's start looking for iridium in the soil, shall we? A layer of vaporized asteroid, buried, but not deep. And maybe the satellites can find us a fresh crater."
"Dinosaur Killer—Jerry, could that be it? A big asteroid strike, long winter, planetary die-off—when? A thousand years ago? Five thousand? The plants have all come back, but not the animals?"
"Even half a million wouldn't be too long." He frowned. "There are other answers, though. Something regular, something that breaks the reproduction cycle. Something subtle... maybe it doesn't even show up for two or three generations... "
She felt momentary fear. Then she patted her bulging abdomen and laughed. "Ugly thought, but no. We've had three generations of chickens, and four generations of mice. Go for the Dinosaur Killer."
Her fingers flew over the keyboard, bringing to the screen the endless biological sets they had worked out: animal to vegetable kilotonnage, animal populations in the various temperature gradients. In the varying altitudes. In the dry climes. The wet. And on. And on, as they had for four days now. She remembered sleeping until she was entirely slept out, one Saturday following three college exams. She remembered this as she had once remembered hot fudge sundaes while dieting.
The answers were always the same. No hostile life on the island. There couldn't be. Nothing for it to live on. A simple, near-pastoral ecology. We're missing something obvious. Something I ought to remember. Is this what the—others—Mary Ann and Ernst and the others felt like? Something I ought to know, and I don't. She laughed suddenly.
"What?" Jerry asked.
"Nothing. Jerry, I like your Dinosaur Killer. I think you've got it."
Jerry carefully blew his smoke in the other direction. "Do you think that an expedition will really go out now?"
"No. Zack won't approve it."
"He'll be lucky if anyone listens a damn to what he has to say after this mess."
"Greg spoke for everyone? You included?"
"Not you?"
She paused. "I think Zack made an honest mistake, one that any of us might have made, and most of us did! Zack's a scapegoat. The fact that Cadmann was right doesn't necessarily mean that he was right for the right reasons. He'd been looking for something to go wrong right from the beginning—"
"I would have expected a comment like that out of Terry."
"No—this isn't a putdown. As far as Cad is concerned, somebody has to play Devil's Advocate."
The program purred on quietly and efficiently by itself. "Cadmann. What are we going to do about him?" The room lights dimmed again. "Shit! Cassandra Save!"
The power didn't come back for fifteen minutes. Enough, Sylvia thought. "I quit, Jerry. You should too. ‘Bye." She didn't wait for his answer.
Early dawn, but the camp was a hive of activity. The wreckage had been cleared away. New buildings sprouted, bare skeletons rising into the chill morning air. Three work crews in overlapping ten-hour shifts kept the jobs humming along smoothly. Everyone got just enough time to sleep, but not enough to grouse.
One monster did this. How many are there?
Dinosaur Killer. It just could be. The idea was exciting. She was already too tired to relax. She chose to walk the long way home. A chill breeze came from Spaceport Lake, and she wrapped her coat more tightly as she neared the power plant.
The engineers were rebuilding without tearing down the original structure. At this stage it had no shape or symmetry, only a chaos of crumbled walls and hastily erected scaffolding.
The power plant was one of the first buildings on Avalon. About half a year ago, she thought idly, and nodded to herself in satisfaction because she'd thought of it as half a year, not just over one Earth Standard. Avalon was home whether they liked it or not. Better learn to think so.
The power plant had flown down on a solidly packed one-shot cargo vehicle. A small solid-fuel rocket had dropped it from orbit to glide down on triangular wings. The engine was Minerva-compatible; in fact the whole package had looked a lot like one of the shuttles, with a Minerva's wing and belly. Motor, wings, hull, all were spare parts for the shuttles. And damned near all we have, too. What's left?
A Skeeter hovered over the power plant. A thin girder dangled from its underbelly. Omar Isfahan waved a handlamp, guiding the pilot, until the girder clicked down, was fitted and epoxied into place. Omar, tallest man in camp by three inches, looked tired. His fleshy cheeks drooped, his tight khaki shirt was dappled with sweat. Elsewhere in the structure men were soldering electric cables. When the Skeeter lifted away again someone yelled "Now!" and the lights flared back to life all over the camp. The glare stole the faint stars from their twinkling positions in the morning mist, but one of the twin moons still glimmered, a tiny dim crescent above the horizon.
She felt suddenly, unaccountably lonely. She wanted to go back to her hut and curl up next to her husband. Knowing that Terry would respond, would hold her with what strength he had. Knowing that if she began to cry he would say what comforting things he could.
If only... if only his new depth of understanding
weren't accompanied by a complete failure of his lower body.
But she was pregnant, and he was sick, crippled, and her need for lovemaking seemed both selfish and unworthy. It didn't help that she still thought of Cadmann—not his face, and nothing so crude as a sexual image, only a memory of the breadth of his shoulders. The curve of his upper arm, where the muscle showed most clearly, the unmistakably male smell of his body and breath...
She held herself, watching the construction on the power plant, barely noticing when Zack emerged from the shadows.
"Sylvia."
He seemed about ten years older, but there was strength in that maturity. In the faces and manners of so many of them, now. "How are you?"
"Tired, but making progress, I think."
He nodded without speaking. He was staring out toward Mucking Great
Mountain, and she didn't need to ask what he was thinking. If a camp vote had been taken the day after the disaster, Zack would have been ousted and Cadmann elected to the post in a moment. Take the vote soon enough after the disaster, and Zack himself might have led the electoral parade. Not now. Now he'd fight.
"We're surviving," he said. "We're going to keep surviving. We paid our price for this goddamned planet. It's all we're going to pay."
"I hope you're right, but how can you say that? Anyway, we all made our decision when we left Earth. We knew the risk—"
"What happened just shouldn't have happened." There was absolutely nothing of the old Zack in his tone. She wanted to back away from him. The flash of the arcs and welding lasers cast hard shadows on his face. His eyes were bright.
