A Better Mantrap

AMPHITHEATRE

The retro-thrusters were unpleasantly fierce in operation, setting up vibrations which Bernard Harben could feel in his chest cavity.

He had little knowledge of engineering, but he could sense the stress patterns racing through the structure of the shuttle craft, deflecting components and taking them close to their design limits. In his experience, all machines – especially his cameras – gave of their best when treated with the utmost gentleness, and he wondered briefly how the shuttle pilot could bear to subject his craft to such punishment. Every man to his trade, he thought, for the moment incapable of originality, and as if to reward him for his faith the precisely-timed burst of power came to an abrupt end. The shuttle was falling freely, in sweet silence.

Harben looked upwards through the crystal canopy and saw the triple cylinder of the mother ship, the Somerset, dwindling to a bright speck as it slid ahead on its own orbit. The shuttle was brilliantly illuminated from above by the sun, and from below by the endless pearl-white expanses of the alien planet, which meant that every detail of it stood out with a kind of phosphorescent clarity against the background of space. Up at the front end the pilot was almost hidden by the massive back of his G-seat. He sat without moving, yet controlling their flight. Harben felt an ungrudging admiration for his skill, and for the audacity which enabled him to drive a splinter of metal and plastics down through the all-enveloping cloud layers to a predestined point on an unknown world.

At that moment Harben felt a rare pride in his humanity. He turned to Sandy Kiro, who was in the seat next to him, and placed his hand over hers. She continued to stare straight ahead, but the fullness of her lips altered a little and he knew she shared his mood.

“Let’s claim this planet tonight,” he said, referring to a secret game in which love-making established their title to any place in which it occurred.

Her pale lips parted slightly, giving him the answer he wanted, and he relaxed back into his own seat. In a few minutes the silence of their descent was replaced by a thin, insistent whistle as they penetrated the uppermost layers of the stratosphere, and the ship began to stir in response. Presently its movements became more assertive, more violent, and when he looked up front Harben saw the pilot had abandoned his Godlike immobility and was toiling like any other mortal. Quite abruptly, they were surrounded by greyness and the space shuttle had become an aircraft contending with wind, cloud and ice. Their pilot, his stature reduced in proportion, might have been a twentieth-century aviator trying for a touchdown in an unpredicted storm.

Sandy, unaccustomed to blind planetfalls, turned anxiously to Harben.

He smiled and pointed at his chronometer. “It’s almost time for lunch. We’ll eat as soon as we set up camp.”

His apparent preoccupation with domestic routine seemed to reassure her, and she settled back with a tentative preening of her shoulders. Again his trust in the pilot was justified. The ship broke through the cloud cover and steadied in its course as a grey-green landscape materialized below – ranges of hills, terraces and ramparts formed by broken strata, dark vegetation, and a pewter filigree of small rivers. Harben assessed the view with professional speed, took a panoramic camera from his breast pocket and recorded the rest of their descent. In a surprisingly short time the pilot had grounded the shuttle amid a turmoil of vertical jets, and the three of them were outside and testing their Northampton-made boots against wafers of alien shale.

“That’s the Bureau’s radio beacon,” the pilot said, pointing at a squat yellow pyramid which clung like a limpet to the rocky surface a hundred metres away. He was a competent-looking boy with fine gold hair and a bored manner which, in view of his extreme youth, Harben thought to have been cultivated.

“You dropped square on to it, didn’t you?” Harben said, testing his theory. “Nice flying.”

The pilot looked gratified for an instant, then got back into his vocational stride. “It’s ten minutes off local noon. The shuttle will be back here at noon six days from now – that’s giving you ten minutes more than the charter called for.”

“Generous.”

“We’re like that, Mr Harben.” The boy went on to explain the cost penalties involved if they failed to rendezvous promptly, and to check that their chronometers were properly set to cope with Hassan IV’s day of almost thirty hours.

“The shuttle will be here on time,” he concluded. “You can be assured of that – though I don’t know if I’ll be the pilot.”

“Oh, I hope it is you.” Sandy said, joining in Harben’s game. “I was really impressed. David, isn’t it?”

“That’s right.” The pilot was unable to hold back a wide smile. “I have to go now. Good hunting!”

“Thank you, David.” They picked up their field packs, retired to a safe distance and watched the shuttle rise vertically for a few metres before vectoring its thrust and swooping upwards into the clouds. It was lost to view long before the irregular, surging echoes from its jets had subsided, but it was not until the final whisper had faded – dissolving their perceptual link with the rest of mankind – that Harben became fully aware of the planet on which he was standing.

Visibility was surprisingly good, considering the amount of moisture in the air, and he could see complex perspectives of grey hills, interlocking wedges of vegetation, and bodies of water which were leaden, black or soft-glowing silver depending on the direction of the light. The temperature was in the region of ten degrees and a breeze was blowing steadily from the east, laden with ozone and the smell of mosses and wet rock. There were no birds, nor any immediately visible signs of animal life – though Harben knew the area was the haunt of one very special creature, the one whose killing technique he had been commissioned to film.

“What a nice boy,” Sandy said lightly.

“He’s gone,” Harben reminded her, gently making the point that it would be best to put the ways of Earth behind them and concentrate on successfully interacting with the new environment. Their marriage covenant had only two months to run and, although he had repeatedly sworn to her that he intended to renew, he suspected she did not fully believe him and had come along on the current expedition with some idea of cementing a bond. He would have been pleased had it not been for the fact that a previous team had disappeared without a trace while filming ET Cephalopodus subterr. petraform. His attempts to persuade her not to come had been resisted on grounds he believed were emotional rather than logical, and in the end he had assented on condition that she bore a full working load, both mental and physical.

“Let’s go,” Harben said. “With any luck we’ll find a good site in less than an hour, then we can eat.”

Sandy shouldered her pack willingly and they set off in a direction which was virtually due north by their compasses. Harben could actually see the point he was aiming for – a notch in an east-west rampart about eight kilometres away – but he made a careful note of the bearing so that they could return in the foggy conditions which were common throughout the region. In keeping with the agreement that Sandy was not to be sheltered in any way, he insisted that they carry their energy guns at the ready – hers set for a slightly divergent beam which would compensate for any lack of expertise, his own adjusted for maximum-intensity convergence at five hundred metres. There was no evidence to suggest that the Visex team of two years earlier had encountered a fate more sinister than, say, falling into one of the numerous underground rivers, but Harben had agreed with his employers that they should take as few chances as possible.

Sandy and he continued north, zigzagging on tilted platforms of sedimentary rock, and gradually reached a softer terrain where the tricky shale gave way to a blackish sand in which thrived shrubs and ground-hugging creepers. In some places the surface was infested with saltatorial insects which leaped from underfoot with audible pops, causing Sandy to flinch away from them. Harben assured her their metallized field suits were proof against much larger creatures, and after a short time she began to take his word for it. She was a travel journalist whose previous experience had been on resort worlds, and he was relieved to see how quickly she adapted to Hassan IV.

Presently they drew near the natural gateway to the north and, as he had hoped to do, Harben found signs of ET Alcelaphini, the gnu-like animals which were the principal prey of petraform. The tracks fanned outwards from the notch in the encircling cliffs and dispersed into the rocky tableland from which Harben and Sandy had just emerged.

“This is good,” Harben said. “I think we’re on a main migration route to the south.”

Sandy glanced around her. “Shouldn’t we have seen some of them?”

“No – that’s the whole point. The females slow down a lot when they’re getting ready to drop their young, and they and their mates become super-cautious. That could be why our friend petraform evolved the way he did.”

An expression of distaste appeared briefly on Sandy’s classically feminine features. “Don’t refer to those things as our friends, please.”

“But they’re going to bring us a lot of money,” Harben protested, smiling. “And that’s the second friendliest thing anybody can do for you.”

“They’re horrible.”

“Nothing in nature is horrible.” Harben raised his compact binoculars and felt a pang of excitement as he scanned the flat ground immediately south of the pass. The angles were too acute for good observation, and his view was obscured by boulders and vegetation, but he thought he could see no less than three horseshoe formations of grey rocks. They were like miniature and incomplete versions of terrestrial Druid circles, each about five metres in diameter. Harben’s pleasure mounted as he counted the stones and confirmed that there were seven in each circle. Most significant of all was the fact that in each case the gap, where the eighth stone should have been, faced due north – in the direction from which the quasi-gnu came every spring in search of the lush pastures needed by their young.

“In fact, everything in God’s garden is lovely,” Harben said.

“What do you mean?”

“I think we’ve hit the jackpot first time. Let’s go – I’m hungry.”

As they approached the circles Harben discovered that the site was even better for his purpose than he had at first supposed. He had four automatic cameras in his pack and right away could see vantage points in the shape of trees and boulders where they could all be hidden and serviced. There was even a small, wind-hewn monolith just to the north of the group of circles which would enable him to get high-angle shots to improve the visual texture of the completed film. He became so absorbed in plotting camera locations that his attention wandered from Sandy and it was only when he noticed she was unconcernedly walking straight ahead that he became alive to the danger.

“Sandy!” He touched her arm. “Where do you think you’re going?”

She froze, sensing the warning in his voice. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing – but stay here with me.” He waited until she had positioned herself slightly behind him, then pointed out the three circles. “Those are what we’ve come to film.”

She stared at the flat ground, uncomprehending, for almost a minute before – guided by his gyrating index finger – she picked out the loose patterns among the natural scatter of rocks. Her pallor grew more pronounced, but he was glad to see that she held her ground without flinching.

“I thought they’d look more like spiders,” she said. “Or octopuses.”

He shook his head. “If they looked like anything but ordinary rock formations they’d starve to death. Their whole survival plan depends on suitable prey walking straight into their arms.”

“Then… those rocks aren’t real.”

“No. They’re arms in which most of the power of movement has been traded off against the ability to simulate stone. I suspect you could even tap them with a hammer and not know any difference – as long as you were standing outside the circle.”

“What would happen if you were inside it?”

“The eighth arm would probably get you.” Harben continued the impromptu lesson in extraterrestrial zoology by pointing out the shallow depression at the ‘entrance’ to each circle. It was there, under a camouflage of pebbles and grass, that the whip-like eighth arm was coiled in readiness to snap itself around any creature unwary enough to enter the circle.

Sandy was quiet for a moment. “What happens then?”

“That’s what we’re here to check out and put on film,” Harben said. “Petraform seems to have the same body plan as an ordinary cephalopod, which means the mouth is in the centre of the circle, but we don’t know how long the processes of killing and ingestion actually take. For all we know, when it gets hold of an animal it simply waits until the beast has died of fright or starvation, and then absorbs it.” Harben paused for breath, his eyes still assessing the photographic potentialities and limitations of the scene.

“You know, Sandy, this is the big one I’ve been looking for – the one that’ll set me up for life. I can see it going out on every TV network there is.”

“I’d like a hot drink now,” Sandy said. “Can we put up the shelter?”

“Sure.” Harben led the way to a suitable spot, spread out the shelter’s base sheet and triggered a built-in gas cartridge to erect the pliant hemispherical roof. He was an exceptionally tall man, with a long back and slightly stiff limbs which did not readily fold into cramped spaces, but he was undisturbed by the prospect of six nights in the tiny inflatable. The rewards promised to be so great that his next field trip, assuming he chose to go out again, would be made in ostentatious luxury. He took twelve flat autotherm trays – guarantee of two hot meals a day – and handed them to Sandy, who stacked them in the shelter with her own supplies. While she was heating cans of coffee he moved off to an appropriate distance and manually dug a latrine, an ancient procedure still in favour because of its superb cost-effectiveness.

He was folding up the lightweight spade when a wisp of sound reached him. With a tingling sense of shock he realized that Sandy, who was a good fifty metres away from him, was speaking to someone in normal conversational tones. Harben ran a short way towards her, then stopped as he saw that – as had to be the case – she was completely alone. She was kneeling with her back to him, apparently opening the coffee cans.

“Sandy,” he shouted, not sure of why he was alarmed, “are you all right?”

She turned and he saw the look of surprise on her face. “Bernard? What are you doing over there? I thought you were…” Sandy stood up, looked all around her and began to laugh.

He crossed the intervening space and accepted a coffee. “Most people take years of this sort of life before they go crazy.”

“I thought you were right behind me.” She sipped her drink, somehow managing to look feminine, even fashionable, in the silver-grey quilting of a field suit, and her eyes steadied on the flat space dominated by the stone circles. ’Bernard, why are there no animal bones over there?”

“They get eaten. If they were left sitting about they might scare off other prey, but it’s most likely that they get absorbed for the mineral content. Hassan IV has some funny gaps in its geochemistry, especially where metals are concerned.”

“What a place!”

“All part of nature’s rich tapestry, lover.” Harben finished his coffee, appreciating its warmth, and put the can down. “I’m going to set up the auto-cameras in case there’s some action soon.”

“I’ll stay here and put some notes together for an article.” Sandy gave him a wry smile. “I might as well make some money, too.”

Harben nodded. “I’d want you to stay here anyway. It’s best to leave as little spoor and scent as possible around the place.”

He took the four automatic cameras from his pack, slung the rifle on to his shoulder and walked towards the circles. The cloud ceiling had come down low enough to hide the tops of the tallest trees, but close to the ground the air had the clarity of glass. He kept his gaze fixed on the innocuous-looking rock formations, wondering if the bizarre creatures waiting below ground could feel the vibrations of his footsteps and were preparing themselves in anticipation of his walking into a trap. Tough luck, rocktopus, he thought. I’m not going to feed you – you’re going to feed me.

There were two trees conveniently positioned on each side of the subject area, and he clamped cameras to their trunks, checking the coverage they provided as he did so. The small monolith to the north was easy to climb by the outer face and he installed a third camera on top of it. Two largish boulders were available on the south side as camera mounts. He chose one which was beside a deep-looking pool, hoping that some of the quasi-gnu would be attracted towards the water, thus providing extra film sequences he could use. An advantage of the holofilm system he employed was that it had unlimited depth of focus and a very wide recording angle, which meant that long shots, close-ups, panoramas and framed sequences could be prepared afterwards, at will, through selective processing of one roll of film. Harben was leaning on the boulder and smoothing out the plastic dough of a mounting pad when he became aware of Sandy standing behind him.

“What do you want, Sandy?” he said, not hiding his annoyance. There was no reply. He turned to remind her that she should have kept away from the area, but there was nobody near him. A sudden heightening of his senses made the moisture-laden breeze cooler and the murmur of streams louder. He allowed the strap of his rifle to slip from his shoulder, transferring the weight of the weapon to his hand, and at the same time he scanned the vicinity, satisfying himself there were no places of concealment. A full minute dragged by while he held the defensive pose, but there was no movement except for the slow drift of downward-reaching fingers of mist.

Finally, with the clamour in his nerves gradually abating, he turned back to the camera and completed the task of setting it up. When he had finished he checked the operation of the hand-held remote controller and walked thoughtfully back to the shelter. One explanation for what had happened was that Sandy and he were more jumpy than they realized – walking the face of an alien world was a supremely unnatural experience; another was the possible presence of hallucinogens in the atmosphere. Official survey samplings had indicated a standard mixture of gases, but that did not exclude local or temporary variations. He decided to monitor the performance of his own sensory apparatus for a few hours before saying anything to Sandy.

As soon as he had rejoined her she triggered one of the autotherm trays and they ate their first meal on Hassan IV. Harben periodically checked the approach from the north with his binoculars, and between times tried to decide if he was perceiving his surroundings in a completely normal manner. There was no repetition of the delusion, but as he moved around the camp there were moments, always as he was relaxing his vigilance, when he got an unaccountable feeling he was in a party of three. The impressions were so vague and fleeting that they could have been a consequence of his edginess, and he learned to dismiss them. Sandy, dictating notes into a recorder, appeared to be untroubled.

Late in the afternoon Harben detected a movement in the folds of grey rock to the north, and he made ready with his main camera, snorting with excitement as he checked its settings. A few minutes later two animals which bore a superficial resemblance to antelope came through the pass, delicately picking their way over the broken ground. One was a doe, and even at a distance it was obvious she was soon to give birth.

Being careful to remain in cover, Harben filmed their progress. As the animals began to draw level with him he saw that what he had taken to be the doe’s tail was actually two spindly legs of her nascent fawn projecting from the vagina. His heart began a steady pounding as the animals reached the flat area where the petraforms lay in waiting. He pressed a button on his remote controller, setting the four automatic cameras in operation, and watched through his viewfinder as the quasi-gnu reached the deadly circles.

As though guided by a powerful instinct, they threaded a path through the danger zone – passing within a metre or so of the ill-defined perimeters – and continued south-wards into the safety of the higher ground. Harben shut down his cameras, wondering if the disappointment he felt was being shared by the three immobile predators lurking below the surface. He turned to Sandy, who had been watching the animals through her own binoculars.

“Too bad,” he said. “Still, we couldn’t really expect to connect first time.”

She looked at him with sombre eyes. “Bernard, was the female giving birth?”

“She wasn’t far off it.”

“But that’s awful! Why don’t they stop and rest?”

Harben smiled at her concern, suddenly reminded of how little she knew about wildlife. “Animals like that, which stay alive through being able to run fast, usually keep on the move. Especially if they feel threatened. When she drops the fawn it’ll have maybe five minutes to learn to walk – then they’ll be on their way again.”

Sandy glanced about her and shivered. “I don’t like this place.”

“It’s the same on any Earth-type planet,” he told her. “You can see the same sort of thing back in Africa.”

“Well, I’m glad that one got away. It would have been too horrible if those monsters had caught the mother.”

It was not a good time for an argument, but Harben decided he should straighten out Sandy’s thinking before she actually witnessed a kill. “In nature there aren’t any monsters,” he said. “There aren’t any good guys or bad guys. Every creature is entitled to take its food, and it doesn’t matter whether that creature is a robin or a rocktopus.”

Sandy shook her head, lips compressed. “There’s no comparison between a robin and one of those… things.”

“They both have to eat.”

“But a robin is only a…”

“Not from a worm’s point of view.”

“I’m cold,” Sandy said, looking away from him. All at once she seemed absurdly small and defenceless, and he felt a pang of remorse over having allowed her to accompany him to a world which was so foreign in every way to her own milieu.

There were no more sightings that day, and as soon as it began to get dark Harben laid out the alarm cord in a large circle around the shelter. Sandy crawled into their artificial cave almost immediately, but Harben sat on the ground outside it for another hour, staring into the total blackness and listening to the complex, conflicting whispers of nearby streams. Once he developed a conviction that he was being watched, but none of the green-glowing needles on the alarm panel even trembled, and he concluded there was still some tension lingering in his nervous system.

When he moved in beside Sandy she moulded her body into his so that they fitted together as neatly as two spoons. The love-making they had planned earlier in the day would have relaxed Harben and made it easier for him to sleep, but – sensitive to her mood – he made no advances. He lay awake for a long time, enduring the stretched-out hours and waiting impatiently for the morning.

The return of daylight, the aromas of hot food and coffee, the purposeful domesticity of the morning chores – all combined to elevate Sandy’s spirits, and Harben felt a corresponding lift within himself. He moved around a lot, driving the stiffness from his limbs, and talked rather more than was necessary about their plans for the next few years. Sandy may have realized he was scheming to influence her attitude towards his work as a whole, and to the Hassan IV expedition, but there was no adverse reaction on her part. She even started a running joke based on the notion of treating the planet as a luxury resort in an article for a travel magazine.

Harben’s principal concern while this was going on was that during the night the cloud ceiling had descended almost to ground level. He kept a watchful eye on it as he ate and was relieved to find that the sandwich of clear air was – in response to the action of the invisible sun – gradually growing wider, revealing more and more of the high branches of trees. It gave him the sense of being at the bottom of a glass of aerated water which was steadily clarifying from the base upwards. As soon as the northern hill slopes beyond the pass had come into view he raised his binoculars and at once saw a small herd of quasi-gnu patiently filtering down through rocky obstacles.

“I think we’re in business,” he said, sliding his hand through the wrist-strap of his main camera. “Perhaps you should stay here.”

He doubled over and ran to a hummock from the lee of which he had a good view of the flat area and the sentient circles. A glance at the remote controller told him the automatic cameras on their vantage points were ready to function and, as a precaution against being forgetful in the forthcoming excitement, he switched them on early. He sensed Sandy taking up a position close behind him, but was too busy getting long shots of the approaching herd to speak to her. The quasi-gnu were emerging from the pass and their leaders were heading straight for the waiting circles.

Harben watched the entire scene in enlargement through his viewfinder as the herd of about twenty came level with him and began crossing what, for them, was the danger zone. Again, as though protected by an extra sense, the animals threaded tangential courses between circles. He was beginning to think none of them would make the fatal mistake when a large buck, which was being followed by a pregnant female, walked into the nearest circle. Harben’s mouth went dry as the creature, unaware of its peril, stepped over the depression marking the petraform’s eighth arm. It crossed the ring of stones which were not stones and, moving with a stately nonchalance, passed safely out the other side.

Harben’s disappointment was as sharp as a blow. Could the petraform be dead? Would he have to look for another site?

He tensed again as the doe followed her mate’s footsteps into the circle. There was an explosive flurry of movement in the entrance depression. A slim black tongue snapped upwards and, with an easily audible whipcrack, coiled around the legs of the partially-born fawn which protruded from the doe’s haunches. The doe screamed in terror and immediately came to a standstill.

I’m going to be rich, Harben exulted, as he jumped to his feet to improve his camera angle.

At the doe’s cry of pain and fear the rest of the herd, with the exception of her mate, bolted off to the south. Their hooves drummed briefly, then there was silence broken only by the plaintive bleating and snuffling of the captured animal. The buck watched her, helplessly, from a safe distance as she shifted her feet, inching backwards as the leathery black arm of the petraform increased its tension, threatening to drag the fawn from her womb. Harben guessed she could have ejected it easily and made her escape, but that the maternal instinct in the species was too strong to permit the sacrifice of her young. And as he watched, keeping his camera trained on the struggle, the doe’s dilemma became more urgent – the petraform’s other seven legs had begun to stir like giant snails. The living stones churned the wet soil as they closed in on the trapped animal.

“Bernard!” Sandy’s voice came from some distance behind Harben, and was followed by the sound of her footsteps as she ran towards him. On one level of his consciousness he was slightly surprised – he had been certain Sandy was close by him – but his attention was concentrated on the natural drama being enacted before him.

“Bernard!” Sandy arrived at his side, breathing heavily. “You’ve got to do something!”

“I’m doing it,” he said. “I’m not missing a thing.”

As the doe became aware of the arms closing in on her, elongating as they came, she gave a convulsive movement and the full length of her fawn’s forelegs came into view, followed by its head. Sandy gave a low sob and stepped past him, and from the corner of his eye he saw the metallic lustre of the rifle in her hands. He risked looking away from the viewfinder long enough to grasp the weapon, and used his superior strength to twist it out of her grasp.

“You’ve got to help her, Bernard.” Sandy beat ineffectually on his shoulder with her fists. “I’ll never forgive you if you don’t help her.”

“There’s no point.” He fended Sandy off, knowing that subsequent processing would eliminate the effects of camera movement. “This is the way nature intended the rocktopus to provide for itself. What you’re seeing now has happened billions of times before we got here, and it’ll happen billions of times after we’ve gone.”

“I don’t care,” Sandy pleaded. “Just this once…”

“Look at that, for God’s sake!” Harben shouted.

Through the viewfinder he saw the ground suddenly begin to open beneath the doe’s feet. The rocktopus was ready to feed. As the surface supporting her began to shift and dissolve, the doe’s courage failed her and she lurched towards safety. The fawn fell behind her and, on the instant of being born, disappeared into the waiting mouth. Freed of her constraint, the doe leaped effortlessly over the advancing arms of the petraform and galloped to the waiting buck. Both animals fled into the surrounding greyness and were lost to sight.

“I’ve got to have this.” Harben was only dimly aware of Sandy’s whimpering as he ran forward, past a tree, into the flat area to get a downward view into the predator’s maw. She kept beside him, pulling desperately at the rifle in his left hand.

He pushed her away, intending to continue running to the centre of the flat area, but his wrist was gripped with a force which brought him to a standstill with an arm-wrenching jolt. Sandy screamed his name with a new urgency. Harben swung round angrily and found he had been snared, anchored to the ground, by a thin black cord. He tugged at it disbelievingly and an identical cord sprang from another point and encircled his ankles. Within a second a dozen others, pulsing with eager life, had coiled themselves around his limbs, rendering him helpless. He looked about him in desperation and saw that Sandy was going to her knees amid a similar web of tendrils.

“The gun!” Her voice shrilled into the topmost registers. “Burn them off!”

As though her words had been understood by a mind other than his own, new cords wrenched the rifle out of his grip. Harben was barely aware of this – because all of the flat space surrounding the three stone circles had begun to writhe with black feelers which waved in the air like wind-blown grass. And then, as the ultimate horror, the trees and boulders forming the outer circle began to change shape, to move inwards. Even the surface of the dark pool humped upwards into a pseudopod of black jelly.

The shifting and loosening of the ground beneath his feet brought a total, though belated, understanding to Harben – the entire area was part of one huge, complex and hungry beast of prey.

He fell to his knees as the glistening cords increased their multiple tensions, and he felt the surface gently parting to receive him, yearning, beginning to exert suction. Sandy was almost hidden from view by skeins of black threads. A strange, sad humming filled the air.

Harben raised his gaze skywards as he gave vent to one last bellow of fear and despair, but the protest died in his throat as he saw something – something incredible – moving in the cloud ceiling above him.

There was a humanoid figure, unnaturally tall, difficult to focus on because it slanted in and out of visibility in a way which had nothing to do with obscuration by mist. It was sheathed in prismatic colours and carried glimmering artefacts. A tongue of blue-white incandescence stabbed downwards from it, a scream which Harben felt rather than heard vibrated through the vastness of the plasm beneath him, and suddenly he was free to move. The thickets of black tendrils had vanished into hidden pores.

He staggered to his feet, caught Sandy’s hand, and they half-ran, half-waded towards the safety of the firm ground beyond the circle of boulders and trees. As they passed a weirdly misshapen, but now immobile, tree Harben glanced back and glimpsed the rippling, polychromatic figure suspended among a swirl of vapours. He could not distinguish the eyes, but he knew the being was looking directly at him, into him, through him.

Know that you were wrong, my friend. The door to an intellectual furnace was opening, and its fire washed through Harben’s mind. I, too, am a recorder, but my experience far surpasses yours. Entropy demands that all living things shall die – but Life is counter-entropic, and that must apply in particular as well as in general. If you surrender the ability to sympathize with the individual, you will become isolated from Life itself… There was a shifting of super-geometries, and the figure vanished.

By the time Harben had broken camp the arena in which they had almost died looked exactly as it had done before. The trees looked like ordinary trees, the boulders and pool were indistinguishable from natural features of the landscape, and in the centre the three stone circles were quiescent. A thin, steady drizzle was gradually erasing all signs of disturbance from the surface layer of soil.

The sedatives she had taken had quelled the trembling of Sandy’s limbs, but her face was pale and distracted as she looked at the deceptively peaceful scene. “Do you think,” she said, “that it’s all part of the same organism?”

“I doubt it,” Harben replied as he opened a valve to deflate the shelter. “I’d say the three in the middle have some kind of symbiotic relationship with the big brute.”

“I don’t see why it let the herd pass on through, then went for us.”

“Neither do I – yet. It might be because it’s mineral-hungry and we carry so much metal. Look at the way the material of our suits perished in a matter of seconds.” Harben got to his feet as the shelter subsided. “Can you roll this up?”

Sandy nodded, and her troubled gaze steadied on his face. “Where are you going?”

“To pick up the automatic cameras.”

“But…”

“It’s all right, Sandy. I’ll be safe as long as I stay outside the circle.”

She approached him and took his hand in hers. “Are you going to take the film back with you?”

“You’re still in shock, little girl.” Harben laughed incredulously, withdrawing his hand. “That stuff is worth a fortune, especially if our visitor registered on it. Of course I’m taking it back.”

“But… don’t you remember what he said?”

“I’m not sure that he said anything, and what there was of it didn’t make too much sense to me.”

“He meant we all have to die – but not for the benefit of an audience.”

“I told you it didn’t make sense.”

“It’s very simple, Bernard.” Sandy’s eyes were dulled with drugs, and yet were oddly intent. “When you point your camera at any creature you make it special. You enlist the sympathy of millions of viewers, and if our sympathy isn’t worth anything… what are we worth?”

“I’ve never had myself valued.”

“He was filming us, but he didn’t let us die.”

“Sandy, this is just…’ Harben began to walk away, then he saw that she was crying. “Listen to me,” he said. ’The fawn is dead and gone, and there’s nothing anybody can do about it. And you’ll notice that he didn’t kill that brute off. It’s all right again, and it’s going to go on feeding itself in the only way it knows how. For all we know, that’s what happened to the Visex team a couple of years ago.”

“It’s a pity you weren’t here to film that.”

“You’ll feel better when I get you away from here,” Harben said curtly. He turned from her and collected his cameras at the points where they had fallen, being careful not to set foot within the circle of menace. Sandy’s last remark had stung him, but his thoughts were becoming preoccupied with new plans for the future. Quite apart from having yielded the fleeting but newsworthy contact with the super-naturalist, Hassan IV was an even richer treasure house than he had dreamed, one which could be exploited only through years of dedicated work. Already it was obvious that Sandy would not want anything to do with it, and that fact posed serious problems with regard to their marriage covenant.

Later, as they were crossing the uplands on the approach to the radio beacon, he realized he had come to a decision. He felt unexpectedly guilty at the prospect of broaching the subject while she was still so badly shaken, but he was entering a vital phase of his career and would have to learn to move quickly in everything he did.

“Sandy,” he said quietly, taking her elbow, “I’ve been thinking things over, and…”

She pulled her arm away from him without turning her head. “It’s all right, Bernard – I don’t want to stay married to you, either.”

Harben stood still for a moment, staring at her retreating back, experiencing an emotion compounded of puzzlement and relief; then he adjusted his camera pack to a more comfortable position and continued picking his way across the wet, grey shale.