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It didn't seem quite plausible, somehow. But if it had happened once, it could happen again.
The mainland was worth a look. Jerry was working on a possibility. Maybe a grendel could be triggered into releasing its super hemoglobin, by sonics or by the smell of an attacker. It would be forced to cook itself before it reached any vulnerable target.
When Jerry had something to test, then they would seek grendels on the mainland. Only for testing. The mainland belonged to another generation.
Today Avalon belonged to humankind.
A pregnant grendel on a piece of driftwood. A tricky, temporary current. What's wrong with this picture? Why was there a piece of the puzzle that seemed so distant, so lost? Hibernation Instability?
Damn, there it was—the possibility that he had kept from himself for so long. Certainly, anybody could suffer from Hibernation Instability. Anyone but Cadma
And he'd been sca
He had taken no such tests. Cadma
He brought his attention back to the bend in the river. As in the case of the second monster, the hole was difficult to see. It might have been no more than a fold in the shadow, but it was more. A quarter ton of death lurked there.
The last monster...
They would try to bring it back alive. And if a human being was put in the slightest danger, that would be that. They would return home with a leaking corpse. No woman would mourn her man, no child cry for its mother.
"Stage one," Cadma
Skeeters Two and Four rose up from behind the ridge, carrying the net between them. They lowered it into the water where its weighted edges settled quickly to the bottom. The two autogyros braced the hole, humming there like dragonflies hovering over a pond in summer. He smiled grimly at the lazy image. That image was about to explode.
Grendel-blood sacs were punctured and tossed into the water upstream from the hole. As the dark stain began to spread, Cadma
The water erupted. A clawed, toothed demon exploded from the depths. Both Skeeters juddered violently as it struck the nets, twisting and yowling.
Stu's radio voice screamed triumphantly from Skeeter Two: "We've got it!"
Engines whined with exertion. The Skeeters hoisted the creature free of the water. Cadma
The Skeeters bobbed and twisted like paper airplanes for the first few hideous moments. Then Stu Ellington masterfully regained control of his craft, and the grendel was secured. The two autogyros maneuvered the creature over the far bank and set it down.
The net was a Tasmanian Devil of crazed motion, the creature's legs and head so entangled that it looked as if it was trying to break its own limbs. It wouldn't break the net. Of this they were certain. But it didn't know that, it couldn't know that, and when the Skeeters touched the net down, it burst into furious action and the grendel's roar of anger and.... fear?
(Was that what it felt? Could it feel fear? He had never thought of them in those terms. Grendels were living death, and that was all. But something in its screams, its frantic, helpless contortions, flashed the sudden, dreadful image of a tortured child into Cadma
Stakes had already been pounded into the ground to form a circle around the netted creature. Hooked cables ran in from each stake. From his position on the bluff, Cadma
Cadma
As he swung across the stream, the ring of colonists moved in to surround their captured grendel. Jerry rushed in with a tranquilizer pistol. His hand jerked up as he fired.
The creature twitched as the dart hit, then exploded back into movement.
Stu touched Cadma
"What do you think?" Cadma
Jerry's limp yellow hair whipped in the backwash from the autogyro.
"All I can do is pump it full of tranquilizer. We sure can't move it like this."
"I—"
As if in response to Cadma
But the other stakes held. The beast hissed and thrashed crazily, but couldn't come any closer. It began to convulse, its movements without direction or aim.
Jerry's eyes narrowed. "It's not slowing down—"
He loaded another tranquilizer dart, and then another. They lanced into the grendel's sides with dull phutts. It shrieked and twisted more frantically, clawing furrows in the rocky soil, snapping and glaring balefully through the tangled netting.
Jerry jumped back and shook his head. "Each of those carried enough somazine to knock over a rhino. I'm afraid I just don't understand how it's wired—" The thing snarled and lunged at them, sending fragments of rock spi
"It's dying," Jerry said softly.
Its labors were pitiful. It tried to head back toward the river, but the last six stakes held, and it just struggled at the end of the lines.
And struggled. And struggled.
"Isn't there anything that we can do?" Cadma
"We could let it go."
"No, thank you."
The large body movements were growing spastic now, replaced with a kind of overall tremble, a desperate, dying convulsion.
It exploded back into motion, moving so quickly that it scarcely seemed to be anything made of flesh, seemed more an engine with a shattered governor, a dark whirlwind. Its screech spiraled up and up and up the scale, clawing toward a terrifying crescendo. It bounced and thrashed at the end of the cables. The incredible effort went on and on, as if the creature were draining everything left in its body in one last all-out effort, nothing held back, nothing in reserve for the functioning of any organ, just the now, now, now of a creature with no way to tell its cortex that there is no threat.
Then it was still. Only its tail tremored. The hunting crew moved back in and re-anchored the loose cables. Jerry, his face glum, poked at the thing's tail with a long stick. It twitched reflexively.
"Asleep?"
"Dead." Jerry waved the Skeeters down.
The netting was refastened, the cable hoists reattached. Cadma
Cadma