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Cadma
Zack made his move, snatching at the rifle. Cadma
Cadma
"Please. Don't... just trying..." His head sank back to the ground, and he was unconscious.
"Jesus Christ," Carlos whispered, for once his accent forgotten. "What kind of man is he? How much somazine did you pump into that plasma, Jerry?"
"I didn't want to overdo it. Come on. Help me get him on the table."
Sylvia watched Carlos and Terry tie him down. Terry tightened the shackle loop until Cadma
"Why so tight, Terry?"
"You haven't told us yet," he said nastily. "Is that a piece of Ernst or isn't it?"
"No." Sylvia shook her head, more from fatigue than relief. "I've tried human antigens. It's not calf meat, it's not dog. It reacts to all of them. It's not turkey or chicken, and it's not catfish. So it's alien."
"So he killed a pterodon. So what?"
"I'm tired, Terry. Back off." Her voice was numb. "Jerry—get the liquid nitrogen, would you?"
She tweezed a piece of the meat to a dissection tray, and sliced a quarter-inch piece away. Jerry carried over a ceramic thermos and tipped the lid. The liquid nitrogen, boiling at the touch of room temperature air, foamed white vapor. Sylvia slipped the sample into the pot.
"We're going to do this right. Cassandra has a complete analysis of every life form we've found on this planet. I'm going to run a gene analysis. It will take about ninety minutes, and we'll have our answer. Is that all right with you, Terry?"
"Don't make me out for a villain," Terry said flatly. "Something terrible just happened here, and I want the truth."
Sylvia removed the frozen section of flesh, and Jerry started up the automated apparatus. A conveyer belt hummed, trundling into a rectangular box of chrome and white enamel. She placed the smoking sample gingerly on its tray, and it disappeared inside. There was a tiny, high-pitched hum as the laser saw sliced the meat into specimens only a few cells thick.
Cassandra would build a holographic model and then compare it in depth with the others in her memory banks. Then they would know. Sylvia wasn't sure that she wanted to.
She turned back to the magnascope, to the tissue sample displayed in a quilt of reds and pale browns. She looked disgusted, tired, heartbroken. "It could be anything. Pterodon. Samlon. Or something we never even dreamed of." It may have only been the terrible fatigue, but a tear welled at the bottom of her eye, and she wiped it away harshly.
"What are we doing here?" She snatched the sample tray from under the scope and hurled it across the room. It broke with a tinkle of crystal, and a spatter of clear fluid against the yellow plaster. "Just why the hell did we come?"
"We're all tired," Zack said. "It's going to be a couple of hours before we have answers?"
"Close enough," Jerry agreed.
"Then let's get some rest. Before this is over, we'll need every bit of it we can get. All right?"
Carlos looked at the wall, at the still form of his friend, strapped now to the table. "What about Cadma
"I honestly don't know," Zack said wearily. "But I know that I'm too tired and sore to think. I need some rest. He'll keep."
"Everyone but Jerry out of here," Sylvia said.
"I want to stay." Mary A
Zack was still massaging his stomach, feeling for bruised ribs. Every few seconds he wheezed in pain. He said, "Carlos, take care of Mary A
"No, I'm not—"
Sylvia closed her mind to the sound until she heard the door close behind them.
Then she and Jerry methodically stripped Cadma
She shivered in the fog. Jerry turned to her. "What do you think happened out there? You don't really think Cadma
"I don't know. I don't know anything right now. We'll know in a little over an hour. Just let me close my eyes for a few minutes."
Jerry nodded and started back to his cottage, to the dubious, transitory comfort of a warm bed, when Sylvia's voice stopped him.
"I can tell you one thing, Jerry. No matter what we find out, we're not going to like it. I promise you that there aren't going to be any comforting answers."
"Yeah." Jerry hunched his shoulders against the chill. He turned to speak again, but Sylvia had already disappeared around a corner, or into the fog, and he was alone.
Chapter 9
CONTACT
A man that studieth revenge keeps his own wounds green.
FRANCIS BACON
In the shadows beyond the fence, something watched. Something alive, silent, almost motionless save for the rise and fall of its torn and bleeding flanks.
The creature was badly hurt. It had passed the horizon of pain into territory that was strange indeed. Irreversible changes had taken place in its body. In a distant way, it even understood that it was dying. But first there was an obligation.
It hid in the shadowed fields beyond the reach of the searchlights. When it concentrated it could smell the man, the one who had hurt it. This one, whom it had badly underestimated, was the real threat. And every instinct screamed for it to get to him, to find and kill him.
It began to wiggle forward. It lay between rows of corn, just a few dozen meters southwest of the colony. The searchlights still swept across the ground, and the men still walked the edge of the camp.
How to get past the firevines? It moaned hungrily.
In the next instant the solution presented itself. One of the men ran his forepaw along a section of vine. He touched it—leaned on it. It recognized the section. This was the same stretch of firevine that had bitten it before. It seemed safe now. Perhaps firevines could only bite once...
The man was alone and not even looking in its direction. Now. Now, as the searchlights crisscrossed, there was a moment in which darkness was almost total, when shadow licked the fence, the man, and a stretch leading almost to the fields.
It moved.
It moved as fast as a Skeeter skimming at low altitude, moved so fast that the man at the fence hardly had time to look up, had no time to scream before it hit the fence with such momentum that the aluminum fencepost buckled and the lines snapped, that its impact slammed him back into the wall of the veterinary clinic.
His head dimpled the sheet metal and rebounded directly into the creature's flailing spiked tail. It shook the man's head free of the spikes, let the corpse slide to the ground.
It flowed onward, a quarter ton of rippling muscle and bone, black as a shadow, as dark and fluid as the river flowing behind and beneath the bluff, as much a part of the night as the stars or the twin moons.