Big Book of Science Fiction (11 page)

Besides these creatures, among
whom the Qul-En expected to find its samples, there were insects. These,
however, the tiny alien being disregarded. It would not be practical to get any
great quantity of the substance it sought from such small organisms.

By nightfall of the day after its
landing, the door of the ship opened and the explorer came out in a vehicle
designed expressly for sampling on this planet. The vehicle came out, stood on
its hind legs, closed the door, and piled brush back to hide it. Then it moved
away with the easy, feline gait of a mountain lion. At a distance of two feet
it was a mountain lion. It was a magnificent job of adapting Qul-En engineering
to the production of a device which would carry a small-bodied explorer about a
strange world without causing remark. The explorer nested in a small cabin
occupying the space—in the facsimile lion—that had been occupied by the real
lion’s lungs. The fur of the duplicate was convincing; its eyes were excellent,
housing scanning-cells which could make use of anything from ultraviolet far
down into the infra-red. Its claws were retractable and of plastic much
stronger and keener than the original lion’s claws. It had other equipment,
including a weapon against which nothing on this planet could stand, and for
zoological sampling it had one remarkable advantage. It had no animal smell; it
was all metal and plastics.

On the first night of its
roaming, nothing in particular happened. The explorer became completely
familiar with the way the controls of the machine worked. As a machine, of
course, it was vastly more powerful than an animal. It could make leaps no mere
creature of flesh and blood could duplicate; its balancing devices were
admirable; it was, naturally, immune to fatigue. The Qul-En inside it was
pleased with the job.

That night Antonio and Salazar
bedded down their sheep in a natural amphitheatre and Antonio slept heavily,
snoring. He was a highly superstitious ancient, so he wore various charms of a
quasi-religious nature. Salazar merely turned around three times and went to
sleep. But while the man slept soundly, Salazar woke often. Once he waked
sharply at a startled squawking among the lambs. He got up and trotted over to
make sure that everything was all right, sniffed the air suspiciously. Then he
went back, scratched where a flea had bitten him, bit—nibbling—at a place his
paws could not reach, and went back to sleep. At midnight he made a clear
circle around his flock and went back to slumber with satisfaction. Toward dawn
he raised his head suspiciously at the sound of a coyote’s howl, but the howl
was far away Salazar dozed until daybreak, when he rose, shook himself,
stretched himself elaborately, scratched thoroughly, and was ready for a new
day. The man waked, wheezing, and cooked breakfast; it appeared that the normal
order of things would go undisturbed.

For a time it did; there was
certainly no disturbance at the ship. The small silvery vessel was safely
hidden. There was a tiny, flickering light inside—the size of a pin-point—which
wavered and changed color constantly where a sort of tape unrolled before it.
It was a recording device, making note of everything the roaming
pseudo-mountain lion’s eyes saw and everything its microphonic ears listened
to. There was a bank of air-purifying chemical which proceeded to regenerate
itself by means of air entering through a small ventilating slot. It got rid of
carbon dioxide and stored up oxygen in its place, in readiness for further
voyaging.

Of course, ants exploded the
whole outside of the space-vessel, and some went inside through the ventilator-opening.
They began to cart off some interesting if novel foodstuff they found within.
Some very tiny beetles came exploring, and one variety found the air-purifying
chemical refreshing. Numbers of that sort of beetle moved in and began to raise
large families. A minuscule moth, too, dropped eggs lavishly in the nest-like
space in which the Qul-En explorer normally reposed during space-flight. But
nothing really happened.

Not until late morning. It was
two hours after breakfast-time when Salazar found traces of the mountain lion
which was not a mountain lion. He found a rabbit that had been killed. Having
been killed, it had very carefully been opened up, its various internal organs
spread out for examination, and its nervous system traced in detail. Its
brain-tissue, particularly, had been most painstakingly dissected, so the
amount of a certain complex hormone to be found in it could be calculated with
precision. The Qul-En in the lion shape had been vastly pleased to find the
sought-for hormone in another animal besides a mountain lion.

The dissection job was a perfect
anatomical demonstration; no instructor in anatomy could have done better, and
few neuro-surgeons could have done as well with the brain. It was, in fact, a
perfect laboratory job done on a flat rock in the middle of a sheep-range, and
duly reproduced on tape by a flickering, color-changing light. The
reproduction, however, was not as good as it should have been, because the tape
was then covered by small ants who had found its coating palatable and were
trying to clean it off.

Salazar saw the rabbit. There
were blow-flies buzzing about it, and a buzzard was reluctantly flying away
because of his approach. Salazar barked at the buzzard. Antonio heard the
barking; he came.

Antonio was ancient,
superstitious, and unwashed. He came wheezing, accompanied by flies who had not
finished breakfasting on the bits of his morning meal he had dropped on his
vest. Salazar wagged his tail and barked at the buzzard. The rabbit had been
neatly dissected, but not eaten. The cuts which opened it up were those of a
knife or scalpel. It was not—it was definitely not!—the work of an animal. But
there were mountain-lion tracks, and nothing else. More, every one of the
tracks was that of a hind foot! A true mountain lion eats what he catches; he
does not stand on his hind-paws and dissect it with scientific precision.
Nothing earthly had done this!

Antonio’s eyes bulged out. He
thought instantly of magic, Black Magic. He could not imagine dissection in the
spirit of scientific inquiry; to him, anything that killed and then acted in
this fashion could only come from the devil.

He gasped and fled, squawking.
When he had run a good hundred yards, Salazar caught up to him, very much
astonished. He overtook his master and went on ahead to see what had scared the
man so. He made casts to right and left, then went in a conscientious circle
all around the flock under his care. Presently he came back to Antonio, his
tongue lolling out, to assure him that everything was all right. But Antonio
was packing, with shaking hands and a sweat-streaked brow.

In no case is the neighborhood of
a mountain lion desirable for a man with a flock of sheep. But this was no
ordinary mountain lion. Why, Salazar—honest, stout-hearted Salazar— did not
scent a mountain lion in those tracks. He would have mentioned it vociferously
if he had, so this was beyond nature. The lion was
un fantasmo
or worse;
Antonio’s thoughts ran to were-tigers, ghosts-lions, and sheer Indian devils.
He packed, while Salazar scratched fleas and wondered what was the matter.

They got the flock on the move.
The sheep made idiotic efforts to disperse and feed placidly where they were.
Salazar rounded them up and drove them on. It was hard work, but even Antonio
helped in frantic energy—which was unusual.

Near noon, four miles from their
former grazing-ground, there were mountain-peaks all around them. Some were
snowcapped, and there were vistas of illimitable distance everywhere. It was
very beautiful indeed, but Antonio did not notice; Salazar came upon buzzards
again. He chased them with loud barkings from the meal they reluctantly shared
with blowflies and ants. This time it wasn’t a rabbit; it was a coyote. It had
been killed and most painstakingly taken apart to provide at a glance all
significant information about the genus
canis,
species
latrans,
in the person of an adult male coyote. It was a most enlightening exhibit; it
proved conclusively that there was a third type of animal, structurally
different from both mountain lions and rabbits, which had the same general type
of nervous system, with a mass of nerve-tissue in one large mass in a skull,
which nerve-tissue contained the same high percentage of the desired hormone as
the previous specimens. Had it been recorded by a tiny colored flame in the
hidden ship —the flame was now being much admired by small red bugs and tiny
spiders—it would have been proof that the Qul-En would find ample supplies on
Earth of the complex hormone on which the welfare of their race now depended.
Some members of the Qul-En race, indeed, would have looked no farther. But
sampling which involved only three separate species and gave no proof of their
frequency was not quite enough; the being in the synthetic mountain lion was
off in search of further evidence.

Antonio was hardly equipped to
guess at anything of this sort. Salazar led him to the coyote carcass; it had
been neatly halved down the breastbone. One half the carcass had been left
intact; the other half was completely anatomized, and the brain had been
beautifully dissected and spread out for measurement. Antonio realized that
intelligence had been at work. But—again—he saw only the pad-tracks of a
mountain lion, and he was literally paralyzed by horror.

Antonio was scared enough to be
galvanized into unbelievable energy. He would have fled gibbering to Ensenada
Springs, some forty miles as the crow flies, but to flee would be doom itself.
The devils who did this sort of work liked—he knew— to spring upon a man alone.
But they can be fooled.

The Qul-En in the artificial
mountain lion was elated. To the last quivering appendage on the least small
tentacle of its body, the pilot of the facsimile animal was satisfied. It had
found good evidence that the desired nervous system and concentration of the
desired hormone in a single mass of nerve-tissue was normal on this planet! The
vast majority of animals should have it. Even the local civilized race might
have skulls with brains in them, and, from the cities observed from the stratosphere,
that race might be the most numerous fair-sized animal on the planet!

It was to be hoped for, because
large quantities of the sought-for hormone were needed; taking specimens from
cities would be most convenient. Long-continued existence under the artificial
conditions of civilization—a hundred thousand years of it, no less—had brought
about exhaustion of the Qul-Ens’ ability to create all their needed hormones in
their own bodies. Tragedy awaited the race unless the most critically needed
substance was found. But now it had been!

Antonio saw it an hour later, and
wanted to shriek; it looked exactly like a mountain lion, but he knew it was
not flesh and blood because it moved in impossible bounds. No natural creature
could leap sixty feet; the mountain-lion shape did. But it was convincingly
like its prototype to the eye. It stopped, and regarded the flock of sheep,
made soaring progression to the front of the flock, and came back again.
Salazar ignored it. Neither he nor the sheep scented carnivorous animal life.
Antonio hysterically concluded that it was invisible to them; he began an
elaborate, lunatic pattern of behavior to convince it that magic was at work
against it, too.

He began to babble to his sheep
with infinite politeness, spoke to blank-eyed creatures as
Senor
Gomez
and
Senora
Onate. He chatted feverishly with a wicked-eyed ram, whom he
called
Senor
Guttierez. A clumsy, wabbling lamb almost upset him, and he
scolded the infant sheep as Pepito. He lifted his hat with great gallantry to a
swollen ewe, hailing her as
Senora
Garcia, and observed in a quavering
voice that the flies were very bad today. He moved about in his flock, turning
the direction of its march and acting as if surrounded by a crowd of human
beings. This should at least confuse the devil whom he saw. And while he
chatted with seeming joviality, the sweat poured down his face in streams.

Salazar took no part in this
deception. The sheep were fairly docile, once started; he was able to pause
occasionally to scratch, and once even to do a luxurious, thorough job on that
place in his back between his hind legs which is so difficult to reach. There
was only one time when he had any difficulty. That was when there was a sort of
eddying of the sheep, ahead. There were signs of panic. Salazar went trotting
to the spot. He found sheep milling stupidly, and rams pawing the ground
defying they had no idea what. Salazar found a deer-carcass on the ground and
the smell of fresh blood in the air and the sheep upset because of it. He drove
them on past, barking where barking would serve and nipping flanks where
necessary—afterward disgustedly tonguing bits of wool out of his mouth.

The sheep went on. But Antonio,
when he came to the deer-carcass, went icy-cold in the most exquisite of terror;
the deer had been killed by a mountain lion—there were tracks about. Then it,
too, had been cut into as if by a dissector’s scalpel, but the job was
incomplete. Actually, the pseudo-mountain lion had been interrupted by the
approach of the flock. There were hardly blow-flies on the spot as yet. Antonio
came to it as he chatted insanely with a sheep with sore eyes and a halo of
midges about its head, whom he addressed as
Senorita
Carmen. But when he
saw the deer his throat clicked shut. He was speechless.