XVII
That day began like any other for Nestamay, although an hour earlier than most, for it would again be her turn to keep overnight watch after sunset, and shortly after midday she would have to try and catch up on her sleep; that apart, everything was as usual.
Washed, and having attended to baby Dan’s vegetable-like needs, she fetched their day’s rations and prepared a quick breakfast. She hardly spoke to Grandfather—indeed, since that unexpected cracking of his self-control which had followed her accusations against Jasper, he seemed deliberately to have hardened the shell around himself again, and spent more time than ever in silent anxious musing.
Their frugal meal was almost over when there was a bang on the door of the hovel, patched together like the rest of the building from salvaged scrap. The caller didn’t wait for an invitation to enter, but stepped in at once.
It was Keefe, a burly man with only one eye, the other having been lost years ago to a newly-hatched
thing.
He carried a large cracked plastic dish in which rested a clump of soil containing a sickly plant.
“Sorry to disturb you, Maxall,” he said. “We found this out towards the East Brokes, or rather my kid found it. She doesn’t think she’s seen one like it before, and nor do I.”
Grandfather grunted. “It could happen,” he said sceptically. “Let’s have a look at it.” He reached out a casual hand and took the dish.
Rubbing his hands, Keefe waited. It was logical that he should bring a problem of this kind to Grandfather, Nestamay knew—nobody else had so much information so clearly memorised. But it was obvious he didn’t like the chore. If only Grandfather didn’t have this gift of making even grown, knowledgeable men feel like ignorant children …!
“Nestamay!” Grandfather’s sharp voice broke into her meditation. “Get my microscope, will you?”
Nestamay jumped to her feet and went to the row of shelves at the back of the hovel on which were kept the few serviceable scientific instruments their family had culled from the mess below the dome. She took down the microscope gingerly and bore it to the old man wrapped in its antirust cloth.
“Is it something new?” Keefe ventured.
“D’you think I’d be bothering with the microscope if I was sure?” Grandfather retorted, picking off a sample leaf and sliding it into place under the objective.
Keefe rolled his eye as though seeking strength from above, then caught Nestamay’s attention and gave her a grin which he probably intended to be sympathetic. But the girl had a sudden attack of family loyalty and tossed her hair haughtily.
“Hah!” Grandfather said a moment later. He put aside the leaf and held out a hand towards Nestamay. When she didn’t immediately understand the gesture, he snapped his fingers. “Knife, you little fool!” he exclaimed. “Do I have to tell you every time what it is I want?”
Flushing, Nestamay fetched the knife. Maybe she shouldn’t have made such an unfriendly response to Keefe after all, she thought. Grandfather could be incredibly maddening. Sulky, she dropped back to her seat.
His age no handicap to his deft fingers, Grandfather sectioned the stem of the plant and selected a tiny roundel to examine with the microscope. Adjusting the focus minutely, he addressed Keefe.
“Out towards the East Brokes, you said?”
“That’s right. The way the
thing
went after we kicked it out of Channel Nine the other night. I thought it might have come through on the
thing’s
hoof, perhaps—in a lump of mud.” He hesitated. “That is, if it
is
something new.”
“It’s new,” Grandfather confirmed, leaning back with a sigh. “Either that, or else an unreported life-stage of some plant we already know. But that’s improbable. It’s a matter of years since we had the last stranger, and any variant form would have been spotted before this.”
Nestamay bent to the plastic dish and stared at the innocent-looking plant in it. Rather commonplace: quite small as yet, standing a mere four or five inches high, with dark green stems and curious little red thorns. But she knew better than to voice such a reaction. The first—and last—time she had doubted the necessity of keeping a check on any and every intrusive plant, Grandfather had taken her by the ear and marched her around the dome to the point from which the pullulating miniature jungle within the Station could be most clearly seen. There he had stopped. He had said, “Once
those
were harmless-looking seeds!”
That was one lesson of Grandfather’s which she had never needed to revise.
“What ought we to do about it, then?” Keefe inquired.
“Nestamay, what are your assigned duties this morning?” Grandfather said, turning.
“Uh—well, it’s my watch-night tonight. So I’m on half-day general assistance.”
“Perfect. Keefe, get this plant of yours out on a stand at the mouth of Channel Nine—about two o’clock of the dome. Nestamay, make the rounds of the community. Everyone is to have a sight of this plant within the next hour. I mean everyone, down to and including toddling children. But particularly I want to make sure that there’s no infection in the hydroponic trays, so call there first. All free-day worker adults are to report to Keefe and study the plant and conduct a ground-search for any further specimens. Begin on the trail of the East Brokes
thing,
and work outwards in a fan-pattern. Send that little girl with the good sketching talent here to me so she can draw the anomalous micro-features and we can file them for reference, and tell her that she’ll be wanted to draw the thing
in vivo
as well.”
Nestamay nodded. “That’s—uh—Danianel you want to do the sketching, right?”
“Yes. Well, don’t just sit there! Get moving!”
When they heard the news, most people sighed and shrugged and accepted the necessity of doing as Grandfather ordered. There were a few half-hearted objections, naturally; Egrin, sweating as always in the humid environment demanded by the hydroponic trays, wiped his face and snarled, “If the old fool thinks I could have overlooked a strange plant in my own trays he must be crazy!” But even he, after boiling off his annoyance, went compliantly to study the specimen and memorise its characteristics for future reference.
It wasn’t until she had completed her round of the community that Nestamay realised she had not yet located and spoken to Jasper.
Frowning, she wondered where she could have missed him. She had called at his family’s hovel, she had notified the chief of the party with which he usually worked … Where could he have got to?
She went in search of one of his kinfolk, and found his mother returning from her dutiful trip to inspect the plant and listen to Keefe.
“Where’s Jasper?” Nestamay demanded. “I haven’t told him yet.”
“It’s his free-day,” Jasper’s mother countered.
“So?” Nestamay was impatient. “I know that—I’ve spoken with people from his working party. But Grandfather said I was to tell absolutely everyone, and I particularly don’t want to leave out Jasper because—”
“I know why not!” his mother rasped. “If I’d known our genes were going to tie him down to the choice of you for a mate, I’d have chosen differently myself!”
“Tie him down!” Nestamay blazed. “What about him making Danianel skip her watch the other night? What’s tying him down there? I’m not—I’d as soon live single!”
“You’ve got no right to spread these foul-mouthed stories about my son!”
“A good way to stop them spreading would be to stop him behaving the way he does,” Nestamay said, and marched away before the flabbergasted woman could reply.
She felt rather pleased with herself for ending the argument with such a telling phrase. As a result, it was some minutes before she recalled she still hadn’t found Jasper. And if she didn’t manage to find him and send him off to join the party scouting in the East Brokes direction for more of the intruding plants, there was bound to be someone who would leak the information back to Grandfather and earn her a bawling-out.
He couldn’t possibly be around the far side of the dome in this secret love-nest of his, could he? Nestamay paused, a frown furrowing her young brow. If so, he was there on his own—all the eligible girls of the community were accounted for and had gone to report to Keefe.
Even so, she would have to check that possibility.
She took a firm grip on herself and went around the dome, her mind full of thoughts of Jasper as he related to her future. The past day or two a possible solution had suggested itself to her. Even if the community dared not risk losing Jasper’s genetic lines, or blending them with anyone else’s but her own, did that necessarily imply that she had to live with Jasper as his permanent mate? Couldn’t she mother two children by him and continue to live with Grandfather, and then have her own home when Grandfather died? It was against custom and precedent, but it was possible Grandfather might give his consent—after all, the community was approaching a really desperate pass, and old-fashioned ways of organising such things might have to be sacrificed anyway …
“Why, it’s Nestamay! I didn’t know it was your free-day!”
The mocking words recalled her to the present. She spun to see Jasper emerging from a dark hole among the tangle of ruined machinery and collapsed dome-struts which marked this side of the Station.
“It isn’t my free-day,” Nestamay said after a pause. “I wish you’d told somebody where you were going! I’ve had to hunt all over the place for you.”
A broad smile spread across Jasper’s face. “Well, well! What happened? Did Danianel give you such glowing reports of this little hideaway of mine that you couldn’t resist having a look at it—is that it?”
He moved towards her. Automatically she took a step back.
“Stop it!” she rapped. “Listen! I have to tell you to go and see Keefe around the dome near Channel Nine. He found a new plant. All free-day workers have to report to make a search for it.”
“What?” Jasper’s smile vanished. “On a free-day? Who says so?”
“Here and now
I
say so!” Nestamay exclaimed.
“Oh! It’s your old fool of a grandfather again, I suppose!” Jasper wiped his lips with the back of his hand. “Well, I’m not going to turn out and sweat over bare ground all day for his sake! Let him look for the damned plants himself!”
“You won’t get away with that,” Nestamay warned. “The order says for everyone to go, including you.”
“I didn’t get the order,” Jasper said bluntly. He waved at the dome. “Nobody in sight, is there? Nobody except us! You can say you told me as much as you like, and I’ll say you gave up looking before you found me. How’s your beloved grandfather going to like that, hey?” The smile oozed back.
“But I tell you what!” he went on, before the dismayed girl could think of a foolproof answer. “I will go … on one small condition. That’s if you come in there with me for—oh, an hour or so, not more. Then if anybody asks what took you so long, I’ll be quite honest. I’ll say I was in there and you didn’t know where exactly to find me and it took a long time to track me down. There, how’s that for a bargain? Afterwards I’ll show up like a good boy for this damned search-party, and you’ll get a pat on the head from your grandfather for devotion to duty.”
He put his hand out to take her arm and lead her inside the dome to his vaunted secret lair.
Abruptly, at his touch, a flood of rage and loathing boiled up in Nestamay. She had tumbled with all the other children of her age-group, boys and girls alike, in their crude wrestling games, and had often overcome opponents older and heavier than herself. On becoming a nominal adult she was supposed to have put all that behind her, but the grip of Jasper’s hand seemed to trigger a reflex response. She hardly knew what she was doing, she was so furious, but seconds later Jasper was cartwheeling over her back, taken totally by surprise, and sliding on his face in the dust.
Panicking, she jumped away, thinking he would fling himself on her and seek revenge. But he didn’t do so. Panting, getting slowly to hands and knees with a huge graze-mark bleeding down his cheek, he fixed her with coldly cruel eyes.
“You’ll be sorry for that, Nestamay,” he whispered. “I warn you! You’ll wish you were dead before I finish getting even with you for this!”
There was something in his look and his voice which made him seem suddenly inhuman. Nestamay repressed a desire to scream, spun on the spot and took to her heels.
XVIII
She was still too shaken to think clearly when she found herself outside her home a few minutes later. She had never seen such a savage look on anyone’s face in all her young life. It was as though a newly-hatched
thing
had taken human form. The shock had made her physically giddy.
Little by little she forced herself back to a state of comparative calm. She grew aware that Grandfather’s irascible voice could be heard from within the hovel, ordering Danianel to hurry with her sketching and get out to join the search party under Keefe.
Taking a firm grip on herself, she thrust open the door and blurted out her news.
“Grandfather, Jasper refuses to report for the search party! He said he wouldn’t admit that I’d found him and told him your instructions unless I—I went with him for an hour first.”
Danianel, a slight, quite pretty girl a little older than Nestamay, looked up startled from the eyepiece of the microscope. Several sheets of neatly executed drawings were piled up alongside the instrument.
“Go with you?” Grandfather said frostily. “Where to? I suppose I don’t have to ask what for!”
“I don’t know where exactly,” Nestamay muttered. “He has this hideaway inside the dome. Ask Danianel—she’s been there!”
“What do you mean?” Danianel demanded indignantly, cheeks colouring. Nestamay ignored her.
“Please, Grandfather, you must help me!” she exclaimed. “I had to beat him off, and I hurt him, I guess, and he said I’d wish I was dead before he finished getting even.”
Grandfather pulled himself to his feet. “You stay here and finish that drawing, Danianel,” he rapped. Tm getting tired of young Jasper, and I think it’s about time he was told to behave himself.”
Immensely relieved, Nestamay fell in behind him as he set off with long strides to the place where Keefe was assembling the search party.
But as they rounded the dome he checked and put up a hand to shade his eyes. “I thought you said Jasper had refused to join the party!” he snapped. “Look there!” He flung out an arm.
It was definitely Jasper, meekly listening with everyone else to Keefe’s exposition.
“I swear he told me he wouldn’t do it on his free-day,” Nestamay gulped. “Please go and ask him how he came by the graze on his face, at least!”
“Now see here, child,” Grandfather said, turning to face her. “I know you dislike Jasper. I know you hate the idea of having him as a mate. But we’ve been over all that, and I’ve explained why it’s got to be that way and there’s no alternative. Are you deliberately trying to incite me against him?”
Nestamay went slowly white. Between clenched teeth she forced out, “Go and ask him how he hurt his
face
!”
“He’s turned out for the search,” Grandfather answered curtly. “That’s as I ordered. Leave it at that.”
“Don’t you care about him trying to rape me?” Nestamay blazed. “Doesn’t it matter to you? Doesn’t it matter any more than sending my father out to his death in the desert? You and your talk about being able to show pride when we finally meet other people again—oh, how I hope you’ll be dead before then so I won’t weep with shame to hear you say you’re human too! You’re not! You’re a machine—you’re a
thing
!”
With all her force she slapped him stingingly across the face, and turned to flee.
Terror at what she had done haunted her the rest of the day. She dared not go home when she should have done—at noon, to try and sleep before keeping the night watch. Instead, she cowered alone in a concealed nook on the far side of the dome, shivering uncontrollably and sometimes giving way to dry-eyed sobs.
Only one coherent thought filled her mind during the slow-passing hours. She hadn’t reached the decision consciously, but rather by an instinctive leap.
She was not going to stay and endure Jasper’s revenge, whatever form it took. If he caught up with her and tried to attack her physically—which she thought unlikely, for he had always seemed a coward—she would use her knife on him this time. But in the more probable case that he resorted to some subtler and crueller indirect attack, she was going to leave the Station as her father had: walk away into the desert and take her chance of dying of thirst or hunger.
There was no one to whom she could turn. If even Grandfather thought she was slandering Jasper to get out of living with him, she might as well be dead already.
And there was nothing she could do to forestall Jasper, either. How he would go about getting even with her she could not guess, but the most likely way was simply by a series of petty persecutions kept up over months, becoming intolerable as they accumulated. If the community had liked her family, such a plan would not have worked, but Grandfather had been overbearing and domineering for years, and while everyone had to respect his vast knowledge nobody actually liked him. And this reaction extended now to include herself.
By late afternoon she was immensely thirsty. Wondering if she could get to water without anyone seeing her, she peered out of her refuge. A group of weary searchers returning from their hunt around the Station was passing, heading southwards around the dome. She ducked back out of sight, but not before she had recognised Jasper among them. He was too far distant for her to see his expression, but a mere glimpse of him was enough to make her tremble again.
She was glad he hadn’t been looking in her direction. In a little while now Grandfather would be calling for her—it was after all her night to keep watch in the office; that hadn’t changed. But people would hardly take to the idea of being sent out to hunt for her in the dark.
And there were footsteps close by.
She froze, wondering what she would do if she was discovered by chance; the possibility had scarcely crossed her mind. But whoever the footsteps belonged to wasn’t looking for anybody. The angle of the sound changed constantly, approaching the side of the dome, then entering it and continuing, blurred now, inside.
It couldn’t be Jasper. Could it?
Yet who else would venture so confidently into the Station from this side with darkness near?
With extreme caution Nestamay craned past a large rusty machine at the back of her own hiding-place and tried to confirm her suspicion. But it was useless; in the long-shadowed evening gloom under the dome all details blended.
Then the footsteps were returning, and she ducked again. Straining her ears, she heard a muttered sentence.
“That’ll fix the bitch!”
Beyond any doubt, that was Jasper. She let her hand fall to the handle of her hatchet. Where was he going now? Out of the dome to rejoin the returning search party, or straight to the north, back to the clustered hovels?
North, and without a pause. She saw his shadow stride past a few seconds later and heard him begin to hum, apparently very pleased with himself. What could he have done to “fix” her? Rigged a trap of some kind, perhaps? Nestamay frowned intently, attempting to turn familiar routes within the dome back to front, so as to determine whether Jasper had been able to reach any of the mazy paths up to the office in the short time he had spent inside. She failed to decide; it was a problem she had never tackled before, relating this unfrequented side of the Station to the safe paths within it. The answer, however, came of its own accord, and only minutes later.
It took the form of a tremendous crash, followed by grinding and tearing noises. Nestamay leapt to her feet. Was that the result of Jasper’s visit—the springing of some sort of deadfall trap aimed at her, but operated by someone else or of its own accord?
The idea had barely framed itself in her mind before she realised it was false. For the grinding and tearing noises continued, and a fresh sound joined them: an animal bellowing.
That left only one explanation. A
thing
had just hatched inside the dome—and as the alarm hadn’t sounded to signal the random operation of the mysterious process responsible, that meant Jasper must have disconnected it!
Everything else driven out of her mind, Nestamay broke from her hiding-place and raced in search of someone—anyone—to warn. It didn’t matter now about escaping into the desert, or avoiding Jasper. He had done something completely unforgivable, thinking perhaps that the odds were against a
thing
appearing in the short time before Nestamay was due to begin her watch and hoping that she might find herself trapped inside the Station with an unsignalled monster.
Surely even Grandfather couldn’t stomach a crime like this!
Panting, she came in earshot of the returned search party gathering at the south side of the dome. She shrieked at them as loudly as she could.
“There’s a
thing
just hatched! Big—inside the dome still!”
Keefe, at the centre of the group listening to reports of the day’s search, turned his one eye on her in amazement.
“There’s been no alarm!” he snapped.
“It’s not working!” Nestamay gasped. “Jasper turned it off.”
“What?” An incredulous chorus greeted the assertion. “But that isn’t possible!”
“Well, maybe he broke it!” Nestamay snapped. “But the
thing
is there and the alarm didn’t work and Jasper was in the dome a short while ago. Get around and spread the word!”
She took to her heels again, heading north in search of Grandfather.
But long before she located him, the
thing
in the dome had proved its existence beyond doubt. It was the most monstrous to be spawned by the incomprehensible forces of the Station in living memory. Fully twenty feet tall, it was recognisable as animal only because it moved and roared; that apart, it was a confused tangle of long grasping tentacles set so thickly on its body it was impossible to see its underlying shape. It was immensely strong, too. From its point of origin in the zone of the dome made inaccessible by the tangled alien vegetation it had headed straight for the exterior, breaking or throwing aside whatever was in its way. By the time Nestamay saw it, it was already out in the open, and a huge sagging gash in the dome wall marked its point of emergence. Even if they had had the alarm to warn them, there would have been no question of herding this into one of the dome’s exit channels and tormenting it with the electrofence—it was simply too big!
Frantically men came running from all directions, some carrying heatbeams, some with hatchets or other makeshift weapons, only to stop irresolutely on seeing how vast this
thing
really was. Towering over them, it seemed that not even a heatbeam on full power could possibly do more than madden it.
A frightened man swung around and saw Grandfather approaching behind Nestamay. In a scream like a child’s, he demanded to be told what to do. Grandfather, taking in the size of the monster, paled, and Nestamay felt a pang of spiteful amusement.
“Heatbeams!” Grandfather shouted at last, and Keefe caught the order. He had already anticipated it; he was manhandling one of the bulky projectors with its trailing umbilical cord of insulated cable. Now he supplemented it.
“Get between it and the dome! Drive it away!” he yelled.
Grim-faced, men moved to obey. Down came a lashing tentacle, sweeping clear an area twenty feet in radius, and caught at the cord of one of the heatbeams. It snapped like thread. The man bearing the useless weapon shouted and tried to run; he stumbled. The tentacle cracked across his back like a whip, and he lay still.
“Don’t stand looking—do something!” Grandfather bellowed.
Keefe was already doing it. He had used the distraction of the past few seconds to get his beam set up between the thing and the hole in the dome. Now he switched the power on.
The thing’s narrowest, topmost tentacles blackened instantly. It howled. It lashed out. The heat increased inversely with the square root of the tentacles’ distance from the projector, and four tentacles at once shrivelled to ash. Another projector started up, blazing away their accumulated power at something like a megawatt in three minutes.
But the heatbeams told. The thing began to sidle away; paused on discovering that the pain lessened; lashed out anew and lost more tentacles. Men dived out of its path as it began to retreat, and screamed with excitement and relief. They picked up rocks and hurled them from safely beyond the range of its tentacles. Others who had taken the time to fetch weapons now joined in pursuit, using javelins and arrows fashioned from scrap metal. Nestamay found she had been biting her lip so hard she could taste blood, and forced cramped jaw muscles to relax as the danger dwindled.
“Why was there no alarm?” Grandfather shouted—at Keefe, wrestling with his heatbeam.
Nestamay clutched his arm. “Grandfather, I told you! Jasper turned the alarm off!”
“You’re out of your mind, girl!” Grandfather blazed. “No one could turn it off. No one would think of turning it off and putting all our lives in danger.”
“Then where is Jasper?” Keefe rasped. He set down the heavy projector and wiped his face, his one eye on the fleeing thing as it headed for the East Brokes. “You’ve got to tackle him on this point, Maxall! The alarm’s never failed before, and I for one want to know why it failed this time!”
There was no doubt that the monster was in flight now. It was outdistancing its pursuers, and their rocks, javelins and even arrows were falling short. Watching it, Grandfather licked his lips.
“Not this time!” Nestamay said fiercely. “What’s the good of my having Jasper’s children and keeping up the line if he’s going to wreck the Station with his insane behaviour?”
“That’s right,” Keefe said, and spat sidelong. Grandfather’s mouth worked, but no words came out.
And then there were two explosions in the distance.
A pause.
Two more.
They whirled to stare in the direction from which the noise had come—the direction taken by the injured
thing.
They were just in time to see it stumble, if such a polypodal beast could stumble, on the lower slopes of the East Brokes. It halted, swayed, began to topple.
Two more explosions, and it fell writhing, and from beyond it, from among the random rocks, a figure rose into sight. And another. Nestamay felt the world begin to spin around her.