The COMPLEAT Collected SFF Works, page 283
"If we were moving outboard there should be more intersections," said Hollis. "One at every deck level."
The Twos were in sight behind them again, boiling along the corridor like tumbleweeds in a hurricane, bouncing from wall-net to wall-net as their tentacles hurled them on. Unlike the humans they did not worry about hurting themselves or protecting the two remaining usable space-suits, so they were gaining steadily.
"OBVIOUS that the Twos broke out and virtually exterminated all other animal life-forms with the exception of the Threes which, although non-hostile where we and the intelligent e-t life-form are concerned, can defend themselves against the Twos. The Twos bred unrestrained, living off the automatic food dispensers and any other experimental animal which had escaped the initial slaughter, their numbers controlled by their habit of fighting and eating each other.
"One of the half-eaten carcasses in the animal enclosure belonged to a large, caterpillar-like life-form which was quite obviously unsuited to the cage in which it was found. Around it were the bodies of Twos which, in addition to being cannibalized, showed numerous punctured wounds in musculature and bone structure, of the kind made by a solid projectile-firing weapon.
"It is now obvious that this caterpillar life-form, which later data proves to be intelligent, was killed trying to contain the original breakout. The weapon may have been used by this being against the Twos and later retrieved by the second intelligent e-t from its body, or the second e-t used it in an attempt to rescue or avenge the first one ...."
"No good," said Hollis breathlessly as he ducked out of yet another useless compartment "Only one door."
The room might have given them indefinite protection if they could have defended the door against Twos, but there were no wall-nets inside storage and dormitory compartments and no means of bracing themselves against attack. If the Twos succeeded in battering their ways in, the result would be a shambles of twisting, spinning bodies and stabbing, slashing spears and tentacles. Most of the casualties would be on the human side.
If they had to fight Twos it was better done in a corridor.
"... Before listing the data and reasoning which leads us to believe that there were only two intelligent e-ts crewing the Ship, and that one of them still survives in a physically and mentally damaged condition, we must deal with what is known and deduced about their home planet's environment and culture ..."
At McCullough's signal they checked themselves against the wall-net, faced inward and laced their feet and legs through the strands so as not to be torn free during the attack. The butts of their spears were jammed against the net's supporting brackets or any other convenient projection. And they waited, McCullough thought, for all the world like a bunch of medieval foot soldiers about to soak up a cavalry charge.
"Since we left the crew's quarters ..." began Hollis, then finished with a rush, "I think we picked up some kind of scent in there. It's driving them mad. I recognize Twos we wounded a couple of weeks ago, and every blasted Two in the Ship must be after us. This is a good chance for us to wipe them out completely."
"Have you counted them?" said Berryman bitterly.
"Sixteen," said Drew.
"... whose gravity, pressure and atmospheric composition is similar to Earth's—which is probably the chief reason for the Ship's presence here. Observation of pictures of planetary flora and fauna suggest a world subject to frequent or perhaps constant high winds ..."
The leading Twos were only yards and split seconds away.
Chapter Twenty-Two
THEY COULD not be sure where exactly the Threes and Ones fitted into the picture, but the position of the intelligent caterpillars and the Twos was now plain.
The tentacled animal with the single, underslung horn was a carnivore, of course, and the natural enemy of the intelligent e-ts. They had adapted well to weightless conditions, but on the home planet their normal method of locomotion was to use the large, curved horn as a sort of skid while propelling themselves with their tentacles. The skid also served as a weapon when jumping onto their prey. Or, when plunged into soft ground during periods of high wind, as an anchor which allowed the Two to seize smaller animals with its tentacles as they blew helplessly past.
The plant life was uniformly alien.
Smaller plants consisted of a long, flexible stem which, because of the wind, lay on or close to the ground. The stem carried a number of large, thick leaves with thorns or rootlets on their undersides and seemed to combine the process of photosynthesis with the digestion of ground-burrowing insects. At the other end of the scale were the giant trees towering hundreds of feet into the air, with trunks fifty feet in diameter and massive, stubby branches in proportion.
Because of their tremendous thickness the trunks and branches bent only slightly in the wind. Their leaves were enormous airfoils controlled either by the vegetable nervous system of the tree or by some automatic stabilizer system in the leaf itself, so that they streamed out to leeward while maintaining a formation which kept every leaf in sunshine.
The leaves were the only opaque parts of the trees. Trunk and branches were translucent, except for dark areas occurring at irregular intervals—which could have been parasitic growths or caused by small animals being dashed against the trunk by the wind. Other dark patches were various forms of animal life existing inside the trees.
Another growth or structure which had puzzled them until pictures became available which gave a true indication of its size was the heap of varicolored, translucent spaghetti. This mass appeared flexible and open enough for the wind to blow through it without putting too much strain on the individual tubes, which divided and sub-divided at intervals and contained hundreds of bulbous swellings along their length before rejoining into a single stem again or linking up with another stem. From the top of this squirming and strangely beautiful mass hundreds of metallic blooms on ridiculously thin stems trailed in the wind.
Eventually they realized that they were seeing an alien city. A great, artificial tree with trailing windmill blooms supplying power to a structure which must extend a considerable depth below the surface.
The wind was such an integral part of the aliens' lives that on the Ship the sounds it made were played like background music ...
"... Originally the intelligent e-ts must have developed from a species of burrowing tree-dweller. Physically they resemble outsize, leathery caterpillars whose heads are very well supplied with teeth which now show signs of advanced atrophication. They have four mandibles, terminating in flexible digits which appear both strong and highly sensitive ..."
The first one came at them along the center of the corridor, shell first like a tentacled cannonball. Their spears were useless against that bony carapace so they flattened themselves against the net and let it sail past. The next one came spinning at them edge on the tentacles flailing, close to the wall occupied by Drew. He guided his spear into the soft area below the edge of the shell and between the tentacles. The momentum of the Two's dive did the rest. He pitchforked the dying animal down the corridor.
"... this deeply rooted racial agoraphobia—they are burrowers, after all, even if they do burrow through nearly transparent trees. The murals, illustrations and especially the close-fitting hammocks support this.
"It could be argued that the process of overcoming this agoraphobia and achieving the level of technology evident here was a slow one, which means that they could be much farther advanced in the sociological sciences than we are, and a peaceful first contact would be possible—if it wasn't for the suspected mental damage ..."
THEY CAME at them two and three at a time, seeming to fill the corridor from wall to wall with flailing tentacles.
McCullough got his spear to a vital spot, but in the act of pushing the furiously dying thing away he felt a tentacle crash excruciatingly against his legs. When he could see again there was a Two crawling up his legs, and he had too long a hold on his weapon for it to bear. He twisted frantically to the side, pulled one leg out of the net and drew it up until the knee touched his chin, then stamped down hard on the base of the Two's horn. Reaction from the blow dislodged his other foot from the net, but the kick must have inflicted severe internal damage because the two went into violent convulsions and died.
"Dirty fighting, sir," said Drew, who had just finished off another by more conventional methods. "I must remember that trick."
Both his legs were sticking out into the corridor. Before McCullough could swing them back another Two grabbed his foot. This time the spear would bear all right, but he jabbed himself in the leg before he was able to kill it. Strangely the only pain he felt was one of loss—there was only one functioning spacesuit left now. But there was no time to think about that for long. The corridor was a solid mass of struggling alien and human bodies, a nightmare of tentacles, legs, arms, furry carpets, stabbing horns and spears. And over the high-pitched gobblings and furious voices of the combatants there was the quiet voice of McCullough expounding his theories regarding alien psychology.
"... So far as we can tell the Two life-form is the enemy of everything which lives and moves, but particularly of the intelligent e-ts who made up the crew of the Ship. It is small wonder, then, that the single remaining alien refuses to come out of its quarters. A high level of fear must be added to the loneliness and lack of support from its fellows which it is suffering—feelings which we ourselves are in a very good position to appreciate. If we also assume them to belong to a bisexual race, and there is no evidence against this, then the crew were probably mated ..."
McCullough fended off a violently dying alien with a Three on its back, and saw that Drew was in serious trouble.
He had lost his spear. A Two had its tentacles wrapped around his hips and waist. He was trying frantically to push it off him, both hands flat against its underbelly and arms stiffened. This was how Morrison had died. McCullough thought sickly as he swung up his spear and took careful aim so as not to stab Drew.
But before he could do anything a second Two landed on Drew's back and drove its horn right through his chest. Drew's arms went limp and he was caught, sandwiched and impaled between the two of them. For an instant he looked appealingly at McCullough, his face yellow-white with shock, and tried to say something. But only blood came out, and McCullough killed both the Twos without worrying about jabbing Drew.
THEN SUDDENLY the corridor was clear. The Twos had dived and spun and blundered their way past. The half dozen or so that had survived were clinging to the netting a short distance along the corridor, preparing to attack again.
"... if the crew member has lost its mate, especially if the survivor is the weaker or less technically qualified of the two, this would further aggravate its emotionally disturbed condition as well as explain the lack of interference during our exploration.
"There is also a strong possibility that the survivor is physically as well as mentally damaged. But it is, of course, the mental aspect which concerns us at the present time ..."
"Here they come," said Berryman in a voice which was too weary to show emotion.
McCullough dragged his eyes away from the gruesome three-body problem which was Drew and tried desperately to pretend that none of this was happening, that soon he would wake up somewhere, anywhere, else.
But he did not wake up. The Twos rushed down on him, figments of a nightmare which was not even of Earth. Their tentacles spread and coiled like the legs of great, fat spiders and that horrible, obscene horn jabbed and quivered and gave every attack the added horror of indecent assault.
"... psychology is far from being an exact science, and it is difficult enough to cure the aberrations of a human being ..."
Twice his spear made a wet, thudding sound and another pair of Twos spun out of sight. He began to think that they might, after all, succeed in exterminating the animals. It was obvious that they were all here, attracted by the scent the humans had picked up in the crew quarters. With the Twos out of the way they could investigate the Ship at leisure, building up a picture of the culture of its home planet and getting to know and understand the alien crew-member before actual contact was attempted.
But then everything went suddenly wrong.
Berryman speared a Two just as another came spinning close to the net on McCullough's side. The doctor lunged, missed and had to fend it off with his feet. Both animals crashed together just as a third arrived on the scene, and within seconds the remainder of the Twos were adding to the pile-up. McCullough lost his spear—he couldn't bring it to bear anyway—and somebody screamed and then went on cursing. McCullough wanted to laugh, because that meant the wound had not been immediately fatal.
He threw his arms around a passing Two, hugging its bony shell close to his chest so that its horn and threshing tentacles formed a defensive shield. He shouted, "Get out of here! Crawl along the wall-net! Get clear!"
They kicked and wrestled their way free of the jam, Berryman first, then Hollis and McCullough trailed by their madly flapping Threes. Already the first Twos were beginning to give chase.
"We have to find shelter," Berryman gasped as they sailed along the corridor. "A good, strong door—"
Hollis was looking back over his shoulder. He said, "Only ... only five of them left ..."
"In here!"
Berryman had stopped and was clinging to the net beside a door, one arm out to check Hollis. They pulled the door aside and within seconds the pilot's head, shoulders and spear showed around the edge as he prepared to defend it until the others arrived.
Behind them the Twos went suddenly berserk.
"No!" McCullough shouted urgently. "Berryman, get out of there!"
But it was too late.
A Two hurled itself past both Hollis and himself without bothering even to strike at them. It impaled itself on Berryman's spear, driving the haft backward between the wall and the sliding panel. Berryman yelled that he couldn't free his spear—and the door was jammed open.
Hollis had caught the netting beside the door and was about to go through when McCullough arrived behind him. The doctor gripped the net firmly, planted both feet in the small of the physicist's back and pushed hard. Berryman looked at McCullough as if he had just committed murder.
"Contact Walters!" McCullough yelled as Hollis went spinning down the corridor. "Clear the short in the generator! And don't worry about the Twos—they aren't interested in you now!"
They would not follow Hollis—because Berryman had just opened another way into the crew quarters.
IT WAS a different entrance, opening into a compartment they had not seen before. One wall was covered with the bright, translucent murals McCullough had come to know so well, and the rest of the small room was devoted to storage cabinets. There was a sound of wind blowing through alien trees. It was unoccupied.
McCullough pointed to the room's inner door and said, very seriously, "They mustn't kill the last survivor. We've done enough harm to the Ship as it is. We've got to kill every last one of them here and now."
"... And in conclusion we must state that the surviving e-t, for physical or mental reasons or both, is almost certainly helpless ..."
It was a large doorway. The spear jammed across it did not form an effective barrier.
The first attacker blundered onto Berryman's spear, the second batted it aside with one tentacle and reached for him with the other three. With no net to steady him, suspended weightless and helpless in the middle of the room, Berryman was being pulled onto its horn when a Three got between them and was caught instead. It fluttered like a furry flag and died while Berryman struggled free. The rest of the Twos were swarming in.
McCullough took a blow on the shoulder, nearly paralyzing his arm, and suddenly there was a Two with its tentacles around his head and shoulder and its horn only inches away from his face. He let go his spear and grabbed for the horn with both hands. It was dry and hot and felt like rough wood. The whole, twitching mass of its underbelly was oily with alien sweat or saliva and the stink made him want to be sick. The room rotated slowly around them as their struggles made them spin.
Berryman swam into sight beside a dying Two. He was terribly wounded and large, red bubbles were forming and breaking away from his abdomen and chest. A Three was trying to spread itself over him so as to staunch the flow of blood, and wriggling because Berryman, an expression on his face that was almost sublime, kept running his fingers through the fur on its back. The pilot swung into sight three or four times before McCullough saw that he had died. And still the doctor gripped the Two's horn and tried desperately to push it away.
But it clung and tightened its hold and hung above his head like a vile, alien umbrella. His legs were encircled, and another Two swarmed awkwardly along his body. He tried to kick it away, but it was too high up. Then he saw that there was a Three on its back, the flat, furry body oozing between the Two's tentacles, blinding and smothering it in tight, clinging fur until it drifted away dead.
But the Threes were fluttering and flapping all over the compartment, unwilling for some reason to come to his aid. His spear was drifting a few feet away, but he dared not let go of the horn for even a second and expect to live. The Two kept changing its grip and each time the horn came a little closer. His arms were very tired ...
"... In general terms its psychological troubles stem from loneliness, grief, and fear caused by its being surrounded by enemies. It must feel that there is nobody who cares whether it lives or dies.
"We know so little about this being that curative therapy is beyond us. But if its basic needs are enough like ours and if its mental condition has not already reached the point of no return we might, by our actions alone, show it that ..."
McCullough tried to count slowly to ten. He thought that if he could just hold off that horrible yellow horn for ten seconds he would be able to do it for another ten seconds. But the muscles in his back were cracking and his arms felt as if they were on fire. He closed his eyes tightly because he was horribly afraid of seeing himself being killed.
