Rough Beast by Roger D. Aycock (red novels TXT) 📗

“It’s all right,” Charlie told him. “Just some fool that don’t know how to handle a boat.”

He leaned his rifle against the wall and brought a split-bamboo chair from the kitchen. He was not too late; the bucket, when he took it from its peg, still slithered satisfactorily with live shrimp.

The squawking of the launch radio roused Ellis. He groaned and sat up, dazed and disoriented by the combined shock of Xaxtol’s telepathic bombshell and his own rude landing, just as Weyman gave up his attempt at radio contact. In the silence that fell, Ellis would have fainted again except for the chilling knowledge that he was unarmed and afoot on the same key with a man-eating alien monster that might make its appearance at any moment.

He collected wits and breath to stave off the black pall of shock that still threatened.

“Come down from there and help me push the launch off,” he called up to Charlie Trask. “We’ve got to get off this key. Fast!”

Charlie separated a menu-sized shrimp from his bucket.

“You grounded her,” he said sourly. “Push her off yourself.”

“Listen,” Ellis said desperately. “That blast was a ship from space, from another star. A wild animal escaped from it, something worse than you ever dreamed of. We’ve got to get out of here before it finds us.”

Charlie grunted and chose another shrimp.

The Morid, as Xaxtol had pictured it, rose vividly in Ellis’ memory, fanged and shaggy and insatiably voracious, a magenta-furred ursine embodiment of blood-lust made the worst by its near-human intelligence.

He described it in dogged haste, his eyes frozen to the tangle of inland underbrush behind the shack.

“No such varmint in these kays,” old Charlie said.

The launch radio blared again in Weyman’s voice, speaking urgently of jet bombers and deadlines. A glance at his watch brought Ellis up from the sand in galvanic resolution.

“In twelve minutes,” he said grimly, “a squadron of planes will pinpoint this key and blast it out of the water. I’m not going to be eaten alive or blown to bits arguing with you. If I can’t push the launch off alone, I’ll swim.”

He scooped up his fallen Telethink helmet and ran for the launch. At the fourth step his foot caught in the iron-hard stump of a mangrove root that had been chopped off inches above the sand and he fell heavily. Pain blinded him; his right ankle lanced with fire and went numb.

He fought to rise and fell again when the ankle collapsed under him.

“Hell,” he said, just before blackness claimed him for the second time. “I’ve broken my leg!”

His twelve minutes had dwindled to seven when Ellis roused. He tried to stand, his twisted ankle momentarily forgotten, and gave it up when the mangroves spun dizzily before his eyes. He couldn’t afford to pass out again.

He made one last-ditch bid for help.

“My leg’s broken,” he yelled up at old Charlie Trask. “Get down here and lend a hand!”

Charlie glowered and said nothing.

Max bounded down the ladder, tail stiffly erect and scarred ears cocked at the underbrush in baleful curiosity.

“The thing is coming this way,” Ellis called. “Your cat scents it. Will you let us all be killed?”

Charlie Trask graded another shrimp.

Swearing bitterly, Ellis caught up his Telethink helmet and slid it over his head. He found the net in a welter of confusion. Washington demanded further information; Vann, at the station, was calling him frantically. His own scramble for help-images only added to the mental babel.

On the Federation ship, confusion was nearly as rampant.

Xaxtol’s dilemma still held: he could not make planetfall—time was too short for aid now, in any case—but neither could he, with clear Galactic conscience, desert the harried primitives below while hope remained.

Ellis’ predicament forced Xaxtol to decision; he could only follow the Morid’s aura and relay its progress.

It could not be helped that the relayed image was blurred of definition and weirdly askew; the Morid’s visual and auditory range differed so sharply from either human or Galactic that even over the ship’s wonderfully selective telecommunicator little of the Morid’s immediate surroundings came through clearly. Its aura arrived with a burning intensity that turned Xaxtol and his group faint with empathetic horror, but the fact that the Morid had just made its first kill obliterated all detail for the moment beyond a shocking welter of blood and torn flesh.

Ellis fared a little better under the second telepathic blast than under the first—he managed to snatch off his Telethink helmet just in time.

“The thing just killed something out there,” he yelled at Charlie Trask. “It’s coming this way. Are you going to sit there and—”

Charlie graded his last edible shrimp, took up his bucket and went inside. The leisurely clinking of homebrew bottles drifted after him, clear and musical on the still, hot air.

Ellis looked at his watch and considered prayer. He had three minutes left.

When the Morid came, Ellis was sitting dumbly on the sand, nursing his broken ankle and considering with a shock-detached part of his mind a fragmentary line of some long-forgotten schooldays poem.

What rough beast is this ... the rest eluded him.

The underbrush beyond the shack rustled and the Morid’s ravening image sprang to Ellis’ mind with a clarity that shook his three net-participants to the core—one of them past endurance.

Vann, in the station, said “Dear God,” and braced himself for the end. In Washington, the operator fainted and had to be dragged from his console.

Aboard the Federation ship, Xaxtol radiated a shaken “Enough!” and tentacled a stud that sent his craft flashing on its way through subspace.

At Charlie Trask’s shack, Max bounded across the clearing and into the brush. There followed a riot of squalling and screaming that brought Charlie out of his shack on the run. Ellis sat numbly, beyond shock, waiting for the worst.

Unaccountably, the worst was delayed.

Charlie came back, clutching a protesting Max by the scruff of the neck, and threw down something at Ellis’ feet. Something small and limp and magenta-furred, smeared with greenish blood and very, very dead.

“There’s your varmint,” said Charlie.

With one minute remaining before the promised bombers roared over, Ellis, with a frozen clarity he had not dreamed he possessed, radiated a final message before he fainted again.

“Call off the jets,” he said, in effect. “It’s over. The beast is dead. The hermit’s cat killed it.”

An hour later at the station, his ankle bandaged and his third cup of coffee in hand, Ellis could review it all with some coherence.

“We didn’t consider the business of relative size,” he said. “Neither did our Galactic friends. Apparently they’re small, and so are all the species they’ve met with before. Maybe we’re something unique in the universe, after all. And maybe it’s a good thing they didn’t land and learn how unique.”

“It figures,” Weyman said. “Washington let it out on the air that DF stations made a fix on the spaceship before it jumped off. It measured only twenty-two feet.”

Vann said wonderingly, “And there were hundreds of them aboard. Gentlemen, we are Brobdingnagians in a universe of Lilliputians.”

“I’ve been trying,” Ellis said irrelevantly, “to recall a poem I read once in school. I’ve forgotten the author and all the verse but one line. It goes—”

“What rough beast is this,” Vann quoted. “You were thinking about it hard enough when the debacle in the brush took place. The image you radiated was rough enough—it shocked the pants off us.”

“And off the Galactics,” Weyman said. “The shoe is on the other foot now, I think.”

He went to the quonset door and looked out and up, listening. “Jets. The Washington brass on its way to cross-examine us.”

“The other foot?” Vann said. “Don’t be cryptic, man. Whose foot?”

“Theirs,” Ellis said. “Don’t you see? One of these days we’ll be going out there to make our own place in the galaxy. With our size and disposition, how do you think we’ll seem to those gentle little people?”

Vann whistled in belated understanding.

“Rough,” he said.