A Science Fiction Omnibus Page 9

  You have no emotion now. You are just faintly put out. You expected dramatic thrashing of the ground, or bellowing; on the other hand, you are glad the thing did not appear to suffer. You are like all cruel men, sentimental; you are like all sentimental men, squeamish. You tuck the gun under your arm and walk round the land side of the dinosaur to view your victory.

  You prowl past the ungainly hooves, round the septic white of the cliff of belly, beyond the glistening and how-thought-provoking cavern of the cloaca, finally posing beneath the switch-back sweep of tail-torump. Now your disappointment is as crisp and obvious as a visiting card: the giant is not half as big as you thought it was. It is not one half as large, for example, as the image of you and Maude is in your mind. Poor little warrior, science will never invent anything to assist the titanic death you want in the contraterrene caverns of your fee-fo-fi-fumblingly fearful id!

  Nothing is left to you now but to slink back to your time-mobile with a belly full of anti-climax. See, the bright dung-consuming birds have already cottoned on to the true state of affairs; one by one, they gather up their hunched wings and fly disconsolately off across the swamp to other hosts. They know when a good thing turns bad, and do not wait for the vultures to drive them off; all hope abandon, ye who entrail here. You also turn away.

  You turn, but you pause. Nothing is left but to go back, no, but AD 2181 is not just the home date; it is Maude. It is Claude. It is the whole awful, hopeless, endless business of trying to adjust to an over-complex environment, of trying to turn yourself into a cog. Your escape from it into the Grand Simplicities of the Jurassic, to quote the brochure again, was only a partial escape, now over.

  So you pause, and as you pause, something lands socko on your back, pitching you face forward into tasty mud. You struggle and scream as lobster claws tear at your neck and throat. You try to pick up the rifle but cannot, so in agony you roll over, and next second the crab-thing is greedying it on your chest. You wrench at its shell, but it giggles and pecks your fingers off. You forgot when you killed the bronto that its parasites would leave it, and that to a little shrimp like you they would be a deal more dangerous than their host.

  You do your best, kicking for at least three minutes. By the end of that time there is a whole pack of the creatures on you. Already they are picking your carcass loving clean. You’re going to like it up there on top of the Rockies; you won’t feel a thing.

  Grandpa

  JAMES H. SCHMITZ

  A green-winged downy thing as big as a hen fluttered along the hillside to a point directly above Cord’s head and hovered there, twenty feet above him. Cord, a fifteen-year-old human being, leaned back against a skipboat parked on the equator of a world that had known human beings for only the past four Earth-years, and eyed the thing speculatively. The thing was, in the free and easy terminology of the Sutang Colonial Team, a swamp bug. Concealed in the downy fur behind the bug’s head was a second, smaller, semi-parasitical thing, classed as a bug rider.

  The bug itself looked like a new species to Cord. Its parasite might or might not turn out to be another unknown. Cord was a natural research man; his first glimpse of the odd flying team had sent endless curiosities thrilling through him. How did that particular phenomenon tick, and why? What fascinating things, once you’d learned about it, could you get it to do?

  Normally, he was hampered by circumstances in carrying out any such investigation. Junior colonial students like Cord were expected to confine their curiosity to the pattern of research set up by the Station to which they were attached. Cord’s inclination towards independent experiments had got him into disfavour with his immediate superiors before this.

  He sent a casual glance in the direction of the Yoger Bay Colonial Station behind him. No signs of human activity about that low, fortresslike bulk in the hill. Its central lock was still closed. In fifteen minutes, it was scheduled to be opened to let out the Planetary Regent, who was inspecting the Yoger Bay Station and its principal activities today.

  Fifteen minutes was time enough to find out something about the new bug, Cord decided.

  But he’d have to collect it first.

  He slid out one of the two handguns holstered at his side. This one was his own property: a Vanadian projectile weapon. Cord thumbed it to position for anaesthetic small-game missiles and brought the hovering swamp bug down, drilled neatly and microscopically through the head.

  As the bug hit the ground, the rider left its back. A tiny scarlet demon, round and bouncy as a rubber ball, it shot towards Cord in three long hops, mouth wide to sink home inch-long, venom-dripping fangs. Rather breathlessly, Cord triggered the gun again and knocked it out in mid-leap. A new species, all right! Most bug riders were harmless plant eaters, mere suckers of vegetable juice –

  ‘Cord!’ A feminine voice.

  Cord swore softly. He hadn’t heard the central lock click open. She must have come around from the other side of the station.

  ‘Hello, Grayan!’ he shouted innocently without looking round. ‘Come and see what I’ve got! New species!’

  Grayan Mahoney, a slender, black-haired girl two years older than himself, came trotting down the hillside towards him. She was Sutang’s star colonial student, and the station manager, Nirmond, indicated from time to time that she was a fine example for Cord to pattern his own behaviour on. In spite of that, she and Cord were good friends.

  ‘Cord, you idiot,’ she scowled as she came up. ‘Stop playing the collector! If the Regent came out now, you’d be sunk. Nirmond’s been telling her about you!’

  ‘Telling her what?’ Cord asked, startled.

  ‘For one thing,’ Grayan reported, ‘that you don’t keep up on your assigned work.’

  ‘Golly!’ gulped Cord, dismayed.

  ‘Golly, is right! I keep warning you!’

  ‘What’ll I do?’

  ‘Start acting as if you had good sense mainly.’ Grayan grinned suddenly. ‘But if you mess up our tour of the Bay Farms today, you’ll be off the Team for good!’

  She turned to go. ‘You might as well put the skipboat back; we’re not using it. Nirmond’s driving us down to the edge of the bay in a treadcar, and we’ll take a raft from there.’

  Leaving his newly bagged specimens to revive by themselves and flutter off again, Cord hurriedly flew the skipboat around the station and rolled it back into its stall.

  Three rafts lay moored just off shore in the marshy cove at the edge of which Nirmond had stopped the treadcar. They looked somewhat like exceptionally broad-brimmed, well-worn sugar-loaf hats floating out there, green and leathery. Or like lily pads twenty-five feet across, with the upper section of a big, grey-green pineapple growing from the centre of each. Plant animals of some sort. Sutang was too new to have had its phyla sorted out into anything remotely like an orderly classification. The rafts were a local oddity which had been investigated and could be regarded as harmless and moderately useful. Their usefulness lay in the fact that they were employed as a rather slow means of transportation about the shallow, swampy waters of the Yoger Bay. That was as far as the Team’s interest in them went at present.

  The Regent stood up from the back seat of the car, where she was sitting next to Cord. There were only four in the party; Grayan was up front with Nirmond.

  ‘Are those our vehicles?’ The Regent sounded amused.

  Nirmond grinned. ‘Don’t underestimate them, Dane! They could become an important economic factor in this region in time. But, as a matter of fact, these three are smaller than I like to use.’ He was peering about the reedy edges of the cove. ‘There’s a regular monster parked here usually –’

  Grayan turned to Cord. ‘Maybe Cord knows where Grandpa is hiding.’

  It was well-meant, but Cord had been hoping nobody would ask him about Grandpa. Now they all looked at him.

  ‘Oh, you want Grandpa?’ he said, somewhat flustered. ‘Well, I left him… I mean I saw him a couple of weeks ago about a mile south from here –’
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  Nirmond grunted and told the Regent, ‘The rafts tend to stay wherever they’re left, providing it’s shallow and muddy. They use a hair-root system to draw chemicals and microscopic nourishment directly from the bottom of the bay. Well – Grayan, would you like to drive us there?’

  Cord settled back unhappily as the treadcar lurched into motion. Nirmond suspected he’d used Grandpa for one of his unauthorized tours of the area, and Nirmond was quite right.

  ‘I understand you’re an expert with these rafts, Cord,’ Dane said from beside him. ‘Grayan told me we couldn’t find a better steersman, or pilot, or whatever you call it, for our trip today.’

  ‘I can handle them,’ Cord said, perspiring. ‘They don’t give you any trouble!’ He didn’t feel he’d made a good impression on the Regent so far. Dane was a young, handsome-looking woman with an easy way of talking and laughing, but she wasn’t the head of the Sutang Colonial Team for nothing.

  ‘There’s one big advantage our beasties have over a skipboat, too,’ Nirmond remarked from the front seat. ‘You don’t have to worry about a snapper trying to climb on board with you!’ He went on to describe the stinging ribbon-tentacles the rafts spread around them under the water to discourage creatures that might make a meal off their tender underparts. The snappers and two or three other active and aggressive species of the bay hadn’t yet learned it was foolish to attack armed human beings in a boat, but they would skitter hurriedly out of the path of a leisurely perambulating raft.

  Cord was happy to be ignored for the moment. The Regent, Nirmond, and Grayan were all Earth people, which was true of most of the members of the Team; and Earth people made him uncomfortable, particularly in groups. Vanadia, his own home world, had barely graduated from the status of Earth colony itself, which might explain the difference.

  The treadcar swung around and stopped, and Grayan stood up in the front seat, pointing. ‘That’s Grandpa, over there!’

  Dane also stood up and whistled softly, apparently impressed by Grandpa’s fifty-foot spread. Cord looked around in surprise. He was pretty sure this was several hundred yards from the spot where he’d left the big raft two weeks ago; and, as Nirmond said, they didn’t usually move about by themselves.

  Puzzled, he followed the others down a narrow path to the water, hemmed in by tree-sized reeds. Now and then he got a glimpse of Grandpa’s swimming platform, the rim of which just touched the shore. Then the path opened out, and he saw the whole raft lying in sunlit, shallow water; and he stopped short, startled.

  Nirmond was about to step up on the platform, ahead of Dane.

  ‘Wait!’ Cord shouted. His voice sounded squeaky with alarm. ‘Stop!’

  He came running forward.

  ‘What’s the matter, Cord?’ Nirmond’s voice was quiet and urgent.

  ‘Don’t get on that raft – it’s changed!’ Cord’s voice sounded wobbly, even to himself. ‘Maybe it’s not even Grandpa –’

  He saw he was wrong on the last point before he’d finished the sentence. Scattered along the rim of the raft were discoloured spots left by a variety of heat-guns, one of which had been his own. It was the way you goaded the sluggish and mindless things into motion. Cord pointed at the cone-shaped central projection. ‘There – his head! He’s sprouting!’

  Grandpa’s head, as befitted his girth, was almost twelve feet high and equally wide. It was armour-plated like the back of a saurian to keep off plant suckers, but two weeks ago it had been an otherwise featureless knob, like those on all other rafts. Now scores of long, kinky, leafless vines had grown out from all surfaces of the cone, like green wires. Some were drawn up like tightly coiled springs, others trailed limply to the platform and over it. The top of the cone was dotted with angry red buds, rather like pimples, which hadn’t been there before either. Grandpa looked unhealthy.

  ‘Well,’ Nirmond said, ‘so it is. Sprouting!’ Grayan made a choked sound. Nirmond glanced at Cord as if puzzled. ‘Is that all that was bothering you, Cord?’

  ‘Well, sure!’ Cord began excitedly. He had caught the significance of the word ‘all’; his hackles were still up, and he was shaking. ‘None of them ever –’

  Then he stopped. He could tell by their faces, that they hadn’t got it. Or rather, that they’d got it all right but simply weren’t going to let it change their plans. The rafts were classified as harmless, according to the Regulations. Until proved otherwise, they would continue to be regarded as harmless. You didn’t waste time quibbling with the Regulations – even if you were the Planetary Regent. You didn’t feel you had the time to waste.

  He tried again. ‘Look –’ he began. What he wanted to tell them was that Grandpa with one unknown factor added wasn’t Grandpa any more. He was an unpredictable, oversized life form, to be investigated with cautious thoroughness till you knew what the unknown factor meant. He stared at them helplessly.

  Dane turned to Nirmond. ‘Perhaps you’d better check,’ she said. She didn’t add, ‘ – to reassure the boy!’ but that was what she meant.

  Cord felt himself flushing. But there was nothing he could say or do now except watch Nirmond walk steadily across the platform. Grandpa shivered slightly a few times, but the rafts always did that when someone first stepped on them. The station manager stopped before one of the kinky sprouts, touched it, and then gave it a tug. He reached up and poked at the lowest of the budlike growths. ‘Odd-looking things!’ he called back. He gave Cord another glance. ‘Well, everything seems harmless enough, Cord. Coming aboard, everyone?’

  It was like dreaming a dream in which you yelled and yelled at people and couldn’t make them hear you! Cord stepped up stiff-legged on the platform behind Dane and Grayan. He knew exactly what would have happened if he’d hesitated even a moment. One of them would have said in a friendly voice, careful not to let it sound contemptuous: ‘You don’t have to come along if you don’t want to, Cord!’

  Grayan had unholstered her heat-gun and was ready to start Grandpa moving out into the channels of the Yoger Bay.

  Cord hauled out his own heat-gun and said roughly, ‘I was to do that!’

  ‘All right, Cord.’ She gave him a brief, impersonal smile and stood aside.

  They were so infuriatingly polite!

  For a while, Cord almost hoped that something awesome and catastrophic would happen promptly to teach the Team people a lesson. But nothing did. As always, Grandpa shook himself vaguely and experimentally when he felt the heat on one edge of the platform and then decided to withdraw from it, all of which was standard procedure. Under the water, out of sight, were the raft’s working sections: short, thick leaf-structures shaped like paddles and designed to work as such, along with the slimy nettlestreamers which kept the vegetarians of the Yoger Bay away, and a jungle of hair roots through which Grandpa sucked nourishment from the mud and the sluggish waters of the bay and with which he also anchored himself.

  The paddles started churning, the platform quivered, the hair roots were hauled out of the mud; and Grandpa was on his ponderous way.

  Cord switched off the heat, reholstered his gun, and stood up. Once in motion, the rafts tended to keep travelling unhurriedly for quite a while. To stop them, you gave them a touch of heat along their leading edge; and they could be turned in any direction by using the gun lightly on the opposite side of the platform. It was simple enough.

  Cord didn’t look at the others. He was still burning inside. He watched the reed beds move past and open out, giving him glimpses of the misty, yellow and green and blue expanses of the brackish bay ahead. Behind the mist, to the west, were the Yoger Straits, tricky and ugly water when the tides were running; and beyond the Straits lay the open sea, the great Zlanti Deep, which was another world entirely and one of which he hadn’t seen much as yet.

  Grayan called from beside Dane, ‘What’s the best route from here into the farms, Cord?’

  ‘The big channel to the right,’ he answered. He added somewhat sullenly, ‘We’re headed for it!’
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  Grayan came over to him. ‘The Regent doesn’t want to see all of it,’ she said, lowering her voice. ‘The algae and plankton beds first. Then as much of the mutated grains as we can show her in about three hours. Steer for the ones that have been doing best, and you’ll keep Nirmond happy!’

  She gave him a conspiratorial wink. Cord looked after her uncertainly. You couldn’t tell from her behaviour that anything was wrong. Maybe –

  He had a flare of hope. It was hard not to like the Team people, even when they were being rock-headed about their Regulations. Anyway, the day wasn’t over yet. He might still redeem himself in the Regent’s opinion.

  Cord had a sudden cheerful, if improbable vision of some bay monster plunging up on the raft with snapping jaws; and of himself alertly blowing out what passed for the monster’s brains before anyone else – Nirmond in particular – was even aware of the threat. The bay monsters shunned Grandpa, of course, but there might be ways of tempting one of them.

  So far, Cord realized, he’d been letting his feelings control him. It was time to start thinking!

  Grandpa first. So he’d sprouted – green vines and red buds, purpose unknown, but with no change observable in his behaviour-patterns otherwise. He was the biggest raft in this end of the bay, though all of them had been growing steadily in the two years since Cord had first seen one. Sutang’s seasons changed slowly; its year was somewhat more than five Earth-years long. The first Team members to land here hadn’t yet seen a full year pass.

  Grandpa then was showing a seasonal change. The other rafts, not quite so far developed, would be reacting similarly a little later. Plant animals – they might be blossoming, preparing to propagate.