Deathbeast

by David Gerrold

  He glanced up as Megan cautiously approached. “Yes . . . ?”

  “As your guide,” she began, “I am required to warn you—”

  He turned his gaze deliberately back to the scanner. “You’re not my guide any more.” His tone was deliberately polite.

  “Our contract—” she started to point out.

  “—is revoked.” He finished for her. “I chartered this hunt, I sold the extra spaces, I hired you and I can fire you.”

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  She exhaled loudly and began again. “If you refuse to listen—” She stopped; he was refusing to listen. “All right,” she said, in a different tone, one with more determination. “I am required by law to warn you that if you refuse to accept our services and expertise, then neither Loevil nor myself can be held responsible for the death or injury of yourself or any other member of your party. Do you understand that?”

  “That’s all fine with me,” he said, still not looking up. He was preoccupied; he made a note on the screen with a light-pen. “I’m not going to watch out for your asses either.”

  Megan’s voice was quiet. “I think you’re making a mistake.”

  “Mm-hmm.” A polite sound, he really wasn’t listening.'

  “We do know our jobs—”

  He glanced up. “Tell that to Eese and Dorik and Tril.” After a beat, he added, “Your other five hunters—the ones who died—did they listen to your advice?”

  Megan’s silence was answer enough.

  “Right,” Ethab said. “Maybe the fault is in the guides. You and Loevil don’t seem to be very good. I think I’ll do better without.”

  “The hunters who died were foolish. They wanted to kill a Tyrannosaur—like you. It’s the policy to recommend against it. They didn’t listen to that.”

  Ethab’s voice was cooling rapidly. ‘7 have the weaponry for it.”

  “No one has ever brought one down—and last night’s is the biggest we’ve ever measured.”

  Ethab stood up, brushing the dirt from his trousers. “Good. That makes it a challenge. My advice is that you and Loevil should try very hard to keep out of the way. Concentrate on your own survival and maybe your hunt

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  ers will survive for once.” He brushed past her and started back for the camp.

  Megan touched her communicator. “Loevil?”

  His voice came back cautious. “Yo?”

  “We got problems.”

  “Yeah,” he agreed.

  “We need to talk.” She added, “Discreetly

  Seven

  THE WAY THINGS WORK

  First there was organic soup.

  Before that, the seas were barren, the land was sterile— but there was the sun, pouring light unceasingly upon the turning face of Earth. The air heated, the seas bled vapor upward, high-pressure areas poured into lower pressure ones; the winds pushed water vapor against the towering walls of mountains, jagged and still uneroded. The mountains held the clouds and bled the water out of them as rain—the rain poured down as droplets, then became a trickling on the .higher slopes, brooks became streams, rivulets turned into rivers and the water returned to the sea—carrying with it salts and minerals it leached from mountaintops.

  There was ultraviolet light, there were storms. The light gave charges to the clouds—when they discharged, there was lightning. Where it touched the air and sea, it rearranged the shape of little things—molecules were broken, recombined. Hydrogen and methane and ammonia—and oxygen as well, it was there in water vapor.

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  Wherever ultraviolet light or lightning touched, the air gave birth to newer forms—compounds, forms of carbon, building blocks for higher forms; these were the first amino acids.

  And then, there was time—as much as necessary. If anything is possible, then given all of time for it to happen, it is inevitable. There was organic soup cooking on the face of Earth, simmering for a million years or more, growing ever richer beneath a glittering sun. The ingredients grew more complex: amino acids broke down and recombined, changing, ever changing, growing in a bath of warm ingredients, building and rebuilding, adding molecules, becoming chains—becoming enzymes. Smaller molecules were incorporated into larger ones—a primitive kind of evolution was at work; those forms that could continue, did—those that couldn’t became substance for the others. Some, with phosphates in their makeup, formed into tiny sphericles—their walls were almost membranes, and they were almost—almost living cells.

  But, even if they weren’t life—not yet—they still performed one of its most necessary and far-reaching functions: these tiny almost-living things were acting on the world they lived in. Gathering in pools, shallow backwaters, tidal basins, they began to form a more aggressive kind of soup—no longer would their processes depend entirely on chance. This process fed on that one, that one fed on this—the intermediate and lower stages fed the higher ones; the basic source of energy was still the sun— but much of what was needed for these piotem-thingies to continue could be synthesized from materials already at hand. Carbon dioxide gas began to appear in the Earth’s atmosphere, a waste product of organic workings.

  Eventually—inevitably—some of the systems learned how to regenerate themselves when damaged. The hardware of these protein processes learned how to heal and

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  rebuild—learned how to grow. And out of that, there came another kind of growth—into something else. When the little system grew too big, its volume getting larger than could be sustained by its available osmotic area—it broke in two. Each of the daughter-systems healed and now contained all of the information of the parent. It had reproduced. It was alive. It was a cell!

  And life began.

  The rest is history.

  Simple life grew in the sea and along the shores—it took its energy from the sun, it synthesized sugars from that light, utilizing chlorophyll or other, simpler, substances to effect the change. These forms were plants— they began to use the carbon dioxide in the air, they gave off oxygen instead. Other forms were parasites, they fed on the plants. Unable to synthesize their own food from sunlight, they ate the plants and used them as food. They took in oxygen to help metabolize the energy they ate and that made more energy available to them.

  Things grew more complex.

  There were animals that fed on animals, and animals to feed on them. Plants began to spread across the Earth —wherever there was water. Animals followed inevitably after; and as plants grew ever more complex to meet their changing needs, so did the things that fed on them change to keep apace.

  Changes must have happened slowly—each life form on the planet was a product of stability. When the dinosaurs appeared—immense, warm-blooded ancestors of birds—they walked the Earth for a hundred and thirty- five million years before they disappeared. By contrast, lowly man has only been around for two million years, at most—and less than a tenth of that is recorded history. The thecodonts that became shrews, the shrews that became primates, the primates that became Australopithecus

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  that eventually became man, that species is one still evolving—and not necessarily for stability. He changes his world faster than he can adapt to it. Just as the life- simulating processes of the first organic compounds changed the face of Earth so that other things might feed and grow, so are the products of humankind changing the newer Earth. There is no difference in the process—it was started, it continues.

  Things live. Things feed upon them. Things die. So that other things may live.

  Which is the way it should be—unless, of course, you’re one of the things that has to die. And you don’t want to.

  Loevil came back into camp with the last of the shattered fence posts. He tossed them onto a pile of other broken gear.

  Watching, Megan shook he
r head ruefully. “I hate to be without those.”

  “Me too—but they’re no good to us now.”

  Kalen kicked at the heap of debris. “Aren’t you afraid of leaving fossils?” he asked.

  “There’s a hundred million years ahead of us,” Megan answered. “Nothing we do in this envelope is going to have the slightest effect uptime.”

  Loevil added, quoting the textbook, “Parallel macroprobabilities cancel out random anomalies in the microscale flows and prevent their buildup to the macro-level threshold.” He paused, realized Kalen was studying him skeptically, then decided the hell with it, and went on with his explanation. “The most effect we could make here—the most effect—might be to change the composition of a few tablespoons of oil, umpteen million years up the line. And that would cancel out in the refinery anyway.”

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  Kalen turned accusingly to Megan, ‘Then why were we told not to kill more than two of any individual species?”

  Megan ignored his tone and answered as professionally as Loevil had. “_We have to leave breeding stock for future generations—of hunters.”

  Kalen snorted in disbelief and annoyance. He turned and strode away. Megan shrugged and looked at Loevil. Loevil shrugged back. “He wasn’t going to like the answer no matter what you said—why did he bother to ask?” He surveyed the camp one last time, and said, “I guess that does it. ...”

  Megan nodded and they began to group up, ready to move out again.

  Nusa moved up to Ethab, wondering if he was feeling differently toward her now that Megan had proved herself incompetent. She’d have to gauge this carefully. She tried to be casual, as she pointed toward the deathbeast’s tracks—each print was nearly two meters long. She said, “I think he went thataway.”

  Ethab was his normal sullen self. “It doesn’t make any difference.”

  “??” She gave him her raised eyebrow expression.

  “This is his feeding area,” Ethab explained. “He’ll be around. And hungry.” He added, “He hasn’t had enough to fill himself. He’ll be hunting again tonight.” He pointed. “There are some marshlands down there—if the scanner is correct. That’s where most of the game will be.” He turned to the others waiting behind them. “Let’s move out.”

  This time, Ethab took the point and everybody else just followed. Their military air was gone, replaced by a grimmer feeling—one of deliberate violence and mayhem looking for an opportunity to express itself.

  Plants grew—they were machines for turning sunlight

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  into sugar. Insects moved among them—they were machines for pollination so that plants could reproduce. Animals fed upon the plants and insects. Other animals fed on them. The Earth turned. It was an organic factory. It made dinosaurs.

  Six human beings walked through this ecology, looking for the largest of the meat-eaters. Someday, the organic factory would be producing billions of units identical to them—and then, they would be the fiercest of all meat- eaters in the ecology—except it would be a different ecology when the more ferocious human beings came to live in it. Here and now, it was pastoral, but only by comparison—humans didn’t fit. There was no function for them to fulfill, no niche for them to survive in—there wasn’t even anything well suited to be food for them.

  They were here only for the killing—for the pleasure of it.

  Killing is a part of living. The predator enjoys his work.

  It was a perfect summer’s day for it.

  The sky was cloudless blue, a shade like robin’s eggs, but vaster, deeper and unspeckled. Motes of lesser color seemed to dance in it—not in the sky, but in the imperfection of the eye’s ability to perceive such an intense unbroken shade. The hills were washed with yellow, their striated histories written on their jutting peaks and bluffs; red and ochre, deep brown and almost-white, shale and sandstone, they were the rumpled bedsheets of the Earth. Here a herd of granite boulders paused in midmigration, waiting patiently for a southbound glacier,'it wasn’t due for twenty thousand years or more; they didn’t mind. Conifers stood all around them, tall and crisply needled— they were merely transients in this neighborhood, here one century, gone the next; and at their feet were clustered even lesser shrubs and bushes. There were drying tumbleweeds, waiting for the wind to tug them loose—they were

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  the hoboes of the world of plants, shiftless, no-account, they let the idle gusts of fortune set their path.

  Toward the marshlands there were flowers, blossoms and spikes of every shade and hue; the meadows danced with color like a rainbow. Every ripple of the breeze turned waves of variegated blooms, “a pane of colored brilliance all asparkle ’neath a silver sun . . .” Who wrote that? Loevil wondered. The line had crept unbidden to his thoughts. The Waltz of the Flowers, he remembered —someone had taken someone’s poem and someone else’s music and set them to the images of alluring blossoms, a wondrous untouched landscape, implanting them forever in the bedrock of his mind—and every time he saw a flower or heard a reminiscent note, the experience would resonate with the memory of someone else’s interpretative vision. He hated that—he hated it when so-called artists— conceited synthesists with dreams of glory—told you what you should be feeling from a work, by borrowing from other well-established pieces to use their magic as its own. Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, for instance, would forever reek of dinosaurs—even more so now that there were images of real ones to set the music to. Goddamn Walt Disney anyway.

  He followed the others with a sour sarcasm; every step was clad in lead. Maybe it’s hypoglycemia, he told himself: low blood sugar. When I can’t even appreciate a meadow of flowers, a bit of Tchaikovsky, and the poet laureate of— .

  Beside him, Nusa asked, “Did you ever wonder ... ?” He looked over at her. “Wonder what?”

  “... how the dinosaurs... do it?” Her expression was sincere, thoughtful.

  “Do what?” he asked blankly, then it sank in. “Oh.

  , That.” He realized he never had. “1 don’t know—” he

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  said. “But they must have a way ... somehow....” He couldn’t think of one offhand.

  “But they’re so big . . . and clumsy ... and . .. and ...” She trailed off, at a loss for words to finish the thought.

  Loevil considered it. “The pterodactyl brings them... ?”

  She made a face.

  He looked at her. “Well. . . ?”

  She was unconvinced. “The little ones come from somewhere.”

  “In all of our missions, I’ve never seen it,” he admitted. “Maybe they adopt their young.”

  Ahead of them, Ethab turned—looked back at them, annoyed, his glance flicking across the whole landscape. “Mr. Loevil—” he started to say, then became abruptly and deceptively softer. “Have you ever thought how nice it might be to have a mountain named after you?”

  “Huh?”

  Ethab said, “I was thinking we might name those hills behind you the Loevil Hills.”

  Loevil turned to look—

  Nearby there was a gentle slope with two large granite boulders looming whitely out of it; wind and water had eroded them into a vivid evocation of a human gluteus maximus; enough of the boulders were exposed to suggest legs and thighs as well—as if a giant naked figure were sprawled, belly-down, across the hill; the high point, at the crest, would have been the insertion point for a Brobdingnagian enema.

  Nusa caught herself and muffled her laughter behind her hand. Loevil didn’t know whether to look annoyed, or to grin weakly back—

  Ethab added, drily, “There is a resemblance....” He turned and continued on.

  —and Loevil made up his mind that he was annoyed. It had been the shock of Ethab making a joke that had

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  thrown him; but it was less of a joke than it was an express
ion of his hostility, and Loevil didn’t like that. Kidding should be for fun, not for pain—didn’t he know that better than anyone? Self-righteously he told himself, I never hurt anyone with my jokes. At least not deliberately. At least, / try not to....

  All he knew was that he felt hurt. And by anyone’s standards, rightfully so.

  Oh, the hell with it, he told himself. Consider the source—a repressed latent homosexual with delusions of macho and confused by a rampaging male insecurity. That was the phrase—wasn’t it? He couldn’t remember.

  He became aware that something was beeping on his scanner.

  Eight

  “THEY DON’T HAVE BRAINS ENOUGH TO DIE”

  “Hold it,” Loevil called.

  The party of hunters stopped. They were at the edge of a lush meadow.

  “I’m picking up a large heat source,” Loevil said, reading off his meters. “Warm-blooded, slow metabolism —probably an herbivore.”

  Megan stepped over to him, switching her unit to the same scanning bands to compare. She glanced over at Loevil’s scanner, reached and adjusted a control for him. “Confirmed,” she said, and pointed. “That way. It’s fairly close.”

  Ethab nodded to Kalen. “Check it out.”

  Kalen separated himself from the group and moved off at an angle, his rifle held low and ready. .

  He pushed carefully through the brush, choosing each step with care. He ducked under a branch, came around a gnarly tree, and stopped—