The Paradox of the Sets Page 13

  They were intimidated by the light...enough to be reluctant to attack. But they were also drawn here by an instinct that would almost certainly overwhelm that fear.

  How, I wondered, had they sensed our presence? They couldn’t see...surely there was nothing in the smell of our suits that suggested food. Maybe something in the packs...or the vibrations of our conversation. They must be inordinately sensitive to sound.

  Gley brought up the rifle and fired. He was still clutching the flashlight in his left hand and he hadn’t been able to aim properly. The recoil nearly jerked the gun out of his hands altogether. The deadly hail of pellets rattled off stalactites and outcrops of rock, and one of the fluttering shapes dropped from its flight, crippled if not dead.

  Until then, they hadn’t actually made a move to attack—they’d just fluttered around at a respectful difference. But now they went mad. The echoes of the shot were still resounding in my head when the black shapes arrowed in toward Gley. He was still trying to recover control of the gun, and he dropped the flashlight in order to do it. It hit the rock, bounced, and rolled into the pool.

  He fired again, but this time it was a random shot and they were too close. Three of them thudded into his body, each striking at the torso. I could see now that they were each about a foot long, with a wingspan of two and a half times that. Their wings were leathery and batlike, but their bodies weren’t furry. They were mammals, all right, but their bodies were scaled after the fashion of a pangolin. Their heads were reminiscent of the head of a snake, but instead of long poisonous fangs their jaws were filled with vicious tearing teeth.

  “Get into the water!” I howled, knowing that Gley was finished unless he took action immediately. It was all the warning I could give him, because the beasts were diving at me too. I put my hands up protectively and managed to fend one off. Another clung to my arm, but I took my own advice and flung myself full length in a desperate attempt to get as much of me underwater as I could.

  I heard a gigantic splash which told me that Gley had either heard my yell or had stumbled over the edge of the pool in his desperate attempt to dislodge the monsters from his suit.

  I tried to thrash about as much as possible, splashing the water up into the air. I didn’t suppose that the beasts would particularly mind getting wet, but the spray would play hell with their echo-location and send them careering off in search of empty air.

  I managed to get a grip on the one that was clinging to my arm, and tried to tear it off. The teeth were embedded in the plastic of the slit but hadn’t yet dug into my flesh. I was rolling in the water in a horribly ungainly fashion, with the air-filled helmet obstinately refusing to sink but bobbing about on the surface like a stoppered bottle while the rest of me threshed the water. I clawed at the beast and managed to grab a wing. Its jaw wasn’t strong enough to stay clamped as I ripped it away, and I could feel the wing-bones cracking under my clutch. I managed to thrust the creature away, sure that it couldn’t fly or swim.

  Gley was thrashing about much nearer to the edge of the pool, in no more than a foot and a half of water. There was so much water running off my helmet I had to feel my way to him, dog-paddling as best I could. I clutched his arm, trying to get him completely underwater, where the bat-things clinging to him could not survive. He was trying to wrench them off with his hands, but their teeth were caught in the coarse shirt he was wearing inside the suit, and they could not be dislodged even after I was certain they were dead.

  Calmness returned very slowly as we both realized that the situation was getting no worse and that the air was no longer filled with fluttering shadows. Moving as if with a single mind the flock had fled, leaving at least five of their number for dead.

  It took some time to prise the dead predators away from Gley’s chest. The suit was badly perforated and the shirt was stained with a few tiny spots of blood, but no terrible damage had been done in the way of laceration. There was nothing that a shot of antibiotic wouldn’t cure. There was plenty of tape in the first-aid kit which I could use to make temporary repairs in the suits. The repairs would hold up fine—in the air. The seal wouldn’t be anywhere near so good if I continued to play about underwater.

  Gley was cursing unsteadily as we made our way cautiously back onto the rock shelf. The first thing he did was reach for his gun.

  “Steady!” I said, in a terse whisper. “That’s what set them off.”

  He didn’t answer. That was probably the most sensible thing he could do, if it really was the vibration of our speech that had attracted them in the first place.

  I reached for the first-aid kit in my own pack, and muttered: “Pack up your stuff. We’re getting out of here.”

  “No!” he said.

  “We’ve got some mud. Maybe we can get a few grams more. But we’re not hanging about.”

  While I spoke I was already taking tape off the reel to seal up my arm. He didn’t make any move to start packing up, but inspected the rents in his suit. The little patches of blood were extending slowly.

  “Just scratches,” he said. “They won’t come back. Not after this.”

  Even as he spoke there was a sound of scraping, and fluttering shadows moved.

  “They’re not going to go away,” I told him. “The smell of blood’s in the air. Predators that flock like that tend to be simple-minded...all controlled by similar signals of a very basic kind. It’s a matter of instinct. They don’t like the light, but it didn’t stop them before and they’ll come again as soon as any kind of stimulus reaches the trigger level.” I spoke in the same whisper, with my helmet very close to his so that he could hear well enough. I was all too conscious that sound might be one of the things that could act as a trigger. Being damn near blind they could hardly locate their prey by sight. It had to be a matter of the sound they picked up with the same over-sensitive ears that monitored their echo-location systems. Sound or smell. Or both.

  I gave Gley a shot of antibiotic—only a small one in the tissues around the cuts. He didn’t even wince. Then I started to unreel more tape, wondering if I had enough to do a proper job, looping the stuff right around his chest. I decided to economize and tore off strips to cover up the holes.

  “This stuff wasn’t made for sticking to plastic,” I said. “It’ll do as a temporary repair—it’s airtight. But it wouldn’t be very clever to start testing it under water. And it might be as well to bear it in mind that you were damn lucky. We both were. Landing on your chest or your forearm all they can rip is the plastic sheath. But if they were to get under your arm or at your waist they’d be tearing into the recycling systems. That could mean big trouble. They might have adapted to breathing sulfurated air, but we haven’t, and at my time of life I don’t want to have to start learning.”

  I didn’t like the way he kept looking around, still holding the shotgun as if he meant business. I had the feeling that I wasn’t getting through to him.

  “We get out,” I whispered insistently. “Now. I don’t care if there’s a treasure chest full of alien doubloons in there. It’s not worth dying for.”

  More fluttering shadows. They were out there, among the pillars of rock and the stalactites. Waiting. I tried to remember how far back it might be to the point at which we’d entered the cave system. Too far. If we ran, and they followed us....

  And it wasn’t only them we had to fight. It was Gley’s obsessions. The two self-imposed crusades which had fuelled his sense of purpose these last few years: to gain proof that aliens had brought the Sets to Geb, and to kill the monster that had stalked his entourage.

  “How many of them are there?” he croaked. He was trying to keep his voice down, but his throat was dry.

  “It doesn’t matter,” I muttered, fiercely. “Discharge that thing again and you’re likely to drive them out of their tiny minds. Think how sensitive their hearing must be!”

  He looked at the pool. Near to the edge the surface was glowing eerily. The flashlight that had fallen in was still alight
beneath a couple of feet of water. The water showed up greenish-yellow, as if it were chlorinated.

  “We have to find something,” grated Gley’s unsteady voice. “Something.”

  “We already have,” I tried to assure him, though I was by no means sure myself. “The mud is radioactive. If the analysis checks out....”

  “If!” he retorted, too loudly.

  “There’s any number of things we might find in it,” I said, trying my damnedest to build a convincing argument. “Whatever was up above has been washed down into this pool. We won’t find any large lumps of metal or plastic...but we don’t have to. Anything that’s in the mud that couldn’t have got there naturally...a few molecules of artificial plastic...fine particles of some alloy. Anything.”

  “It’s not proof,” he insisted. “And it won’t tell us how long.” His eyes were roaming the shadows, now, trying to find the scaly forms that cast the shadows. The worst of it was that he wasn’t afraid. The good, healthy fear that should have been welling up within was damped right down, under the control of more powerful forces.

  “Are you prepared to die for this crazy obsession?” I demanded. Now I was too loud, too.

  “This is the one and only chance,” he said. “You came with me. You were prepared to take the risks. You can’t back out now.”

  “Damn right I can!” I said, taking care this time to hold the whisper.

  “Then go. Leave me here. It’s my blood that’s on the air. I’ve got the gun. I can handle them.”

  He was wrong. Dead wrong, in a more than metaphorical sense. I was tempted...really tempted. But I was also scared. For all I hated that gun, I couldn’t keep the feeling that it was protection, a kind of security. If we split up, wouldn’t we be doubly vulnerable?

  I didn’t want to start running back through the cave on my own. I didn’t want to be here on my own. But there was no way I was going to force Gley to do what I wanted. No way at all. It was one hell of a situation.

  I took a few seconds out to curse my own utter stupidity in letting myself in for this. But it was too late now. It’s no good being stupid and then regretting it—somehow you have to realize in advance how potentially stupid you are. It had never been one of my strong points.

  He moved suddenly, coming ungracefully to his feet. He waded a couple of meters out into the water and picked out the flashlight. He aimed it at a shadow which stirred, and then moved it round in a slow arc. The beam finally settled on the one he’d managed to shoot. It was nothing but a mass of bloody pieces, as though it had exploded. The others hadn’t come to take it.—I couldn’t be sure why not. Predators that hunt in packs are usually economical in the matter of tidying up their failures. This lot apparently didn’t go in for cannibalism. That was a real shame. If we could only get away, leaving the smell of this blood to take the monsters off our track...but it seemed that their instincts were stacked in a less convenient manner.

  Gley took up the rope that had tied us together while we’d made our long descent. He tied a loop in the end and then fixed a crampon to the knot, partly to serve as a grappling hook, partly as a weight. It was the most ungainly substitute for a fishing line I’d ever seen. But he started whirling it round his head preparatory to making a throw.

  It was crazy—in fact, so patently crazy that I even forbore to point out the fact. He seemed quite composed as he hurled it out over the water—not mad, just very stubborn.

  The splash it made seemed horribly loud.

  He’d had to put down the gun to make the throw, but he picked it up again and looked round as the contraption settled to the bottom. The creatures didn’t stir from their hiding places. He gave them a couple of minutes, then set the gun down again and began hauling his dredge slowly across the floor of the pool. He didn’t look at me at all. I watched helplessly for a moment or two, then began cudgeling my brain in the hope of thinking of something to do that would bring a measure of sanity, no matter how small, back into the situation.

  The only idea which occurred to me was that I might improvise something from the medical supplies that I could smear on the outside of my suit to act as a deterrent or a poison. It was not the greatest inspiration I’d ever had but I was under a lot of pressure at the time. It might have been a good idea had I still had the medical kit that had been provided for the Daedalus mission. But I didn’t—that was lost somewhere beneath the ocean of Attica, along with so much else that was essential. All I had with me was a hastily improvised first-aid kit that could just about stave off the more banal forms of disaster.

  I watched Gley bring the dredge up to the edge of the pool, and listened to him curse quietly as he realized that the unevenness of the bottom would make it virtually impossible for him to snag anything but pebbles. There wasn’t even enough mud to shake off the rope.

  “Gather up the stuff,” he said. Hope rose within me—but was quickly dashed. “We’ll move round the pool,” he added, and try to find a better spot.”

  It was, at least, an experiment of sorts. I didn’t really hold out much hope that the bat-things wouldn’t follow us, but at least they had the option of letting us go in peace.

  I managed to get most of the stuff back into Gley’s filthy and wet packsack, and repacked my own. At least we were now ready to run if fate decreed that we must. But when we moved along the edge of the pool we were putting extra distance in between ourselves and the trail we had blazed in getting here.

  It wasn’t easy, at first, to tell whether the predators were going to keep us within easy reach. The shadows moved behind us, but we could not hear the beat of their wings and the shadows which changed were mere projections from which it was not always easy—or even possible—to judge the distance of the things which cast them. I was able to hope for five minutes or so that we were getting further away from our nemesis.

  But the shadows kept fluttering at the limits of the lamplight’s reach. They weren’t letting us get away.

  We came into an area where the roof was lower, the stalactites reaching down almost to the level of our heads. The ground here was flatter and strewn with broken rock, with lumpy globular stalagmites growing up around and among them. Gley paused, and passed the shotgun to me. I accepted it, ready enough to use it if the black silhouettes came at me. Gley waded out into the water, testing the bottom. It was still no good. He came back and we went on for another forty or fifty meters. He was looking at the pool; I was looking mostly up into the air, watching the signals fluttering across the colored rock faces. Only occasionally did I bother to look down. That’s how it was that I didn’t realize exactly where we were treading until something cracked beneath my feet.

  I looked down.

  It was—or had been—shaped exactly like a pebble. It had been about the size of a hen’s egg, and internally it was remarkably similar. The shell had been perhaps a little softer and more elastic. Like the egg of a reptile, or a very primitive mammal. I remember correcting, mentally, the metaphor I’d drawn earlier. Not flying piranhas at all. Flying platypuses with piranha-like teeth. Quite a bizarre notion, when I really got down to thinking about it.

  “Gley,” I muttered hoarsely. “We’re in the middle of their goddam breeding ground!”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  I let the beam of the flashlight fall to illuminate the ground, and Gley let the lamp down a little. The first thing we saw was a cluster of white bones close to my right foot. Farther away we could see more bones and more. I scanned the rock-strewn floor looking for more eggs, but couldn’t see any. Then the light picked out a dark shape on the floor, just five or six paces in front of us. I’d passed over it twice, thinking it was a shadow, but now something about it made me pause.

  Its wings were extended across the ground as it lay supine, its head held very low. Its head was directed toward us, and amid the tiny scales of compressed keratin I could see two tiny eyes, blinking rhythmically. Gley saw it, too, and took a step forward, dropping his makeshift dredge and reaching for the sho
tgun, which I was still holding. I didn’t let go.

  He turned to face me, looking impatient and rather angry.

  I shook my head. Then I gestured back toward the darkness the way we had come. “If we start attacking them on the nest...,” I murmured.

  “You just trod on an egg,” he pointed out.

  “Either it was abandoned,” I whispered, “or—more likely—you killed the one that laid it.”

  I was still pointing the flashlight at the one that was stretched on the ground a few meters away. I had no faith that it would stay there. The rocks here weren’t particularly warm, but she could probably leave the egg for ten or fifteen minutes at a time without it getting dangerously cold.

  “Those bones,” said Gley, his thoughts now changing direction.

  “Sure,” I muttered. “Not just the produce of the season. Up high on the ledges, where the floodwater doesn’t reach they could be pretty old.” I didn’t add: And there just might be more than bones. There was no point in adding my thought to his when his was more than enough to help us stay in trouble.

  The flashlight didn’t have enough range to find the wall of the cave at that point, though it did pick up a couple of steep steps away to the right. There didn’t seem to be any bones lodged there, but the worst of the floods probably reached that high with ease during the big melt at the end of winter when the snows came off the mountain slopes.

  “Give me the gun,” said Gley, evenly.

  “What do you intend doing?”

  “I’m going to smash its head with the butt,” he said, calmly.

  “And if they attack?”

  “The more we kill on the ground the fewer we’ll have to shoot out of the air.”

  “We can’t fight them,” I said, insistently. “There must be fifteen or twenty in the flock, and maybe half a dozen more warming eggs on the ground. It’s too many.”