Cosmic Engineers

Chapter Fourteen

The next morning the Hellhounds came, a small ship quartering down out of the dawn light of the great red sun. It came down on a long smooth slant and landed not more than half a mile away, plowing a swath through the mushroom forest as it grounded. There was no mistaking its identity, for its lines were distinctive and the insignia upon its bow was the insignia that both Caroline and Gary had seen many times on the ships that screamed down to lay bombs upon the mighty city of the Engineers.

"And us," said Gary, "with nothing but hand guns in the locker and a ship that we can't lift.”

He saw the stricken look on Caroline's face and tried to make amends.

"Maybe they won't know who we are," he said. "Maybe they…”

"Don't let's fool ourselves," Caroline told him. "They know who we are, all right. More than likely we're the reason that they're here. Maybe they…”

She hesitated and Gary asked, "Maybe they what?”

"I was thinking," she said, "that they might have twisted the tunnel. The mathematics might have been all right. Somebody might have brought us here.

It might have been the Hellhounds who trapped us here, knowing what we had, knowing the knowledge that we carried. They might have brought us here and now they've come to finish up the job.”

"They were not the ones who brought you here," said a voice out of nowhere.

"You were brought here but they were not the ones who brought you. They were brought themselves.”

Gary whirled around. "Who said that?" he shouted.

"You cannot find me," said the voice, still talking out of nowhere. "Don't waste your time in trying to find me. I brought you here and I brought the others here and only the one of you may leave… the humans or the Hellhounds.”

"I don't understand," said Gary. "You are mad…”

"You are enemies, you and the Hellhounds," said the voice. "You are equal in number and in strength of arms. There are two of you and there are two of them. You have small weapons only and so have they. It will be a fair encounter.”

Fantastic, thought Gary. A situation jerked raw from a latter-day Alice in Wonderland. A nightmare twisted out of the strange and grotesque alienness of this splotched planet. A planet filed with goblins and with nightmares — a fairyland turned sour.

"You want us to fight?" he asked. "Fight the Hellhounds? A sort of — well, you might call it a duel?”

"That is exactly it," the voice told him.

"But what good will it do?”

"You are enemies, aren't you, human?”

"Why, yes, we are," said Gary, "but anything that we do here won't affect the war one way or the other.”

"You will fight," said the voice. "You are two and they are two and…”

"But one of us is a woman," protested Gary. "Female humans do not engage in duels.”

The voice did not answer, but Gary sensed frustration in a mind — perhaps a presence rather than a mind — that was near to them.

He pressed his advantage. "You say that our arms are equal, that they have small arms only and so have we. But you can't be sure that the arms are equal. Their arms, even if they are no bigger than ours, may be more powerful. Size is not a measure for power. Or their arms may be equal, but the Hellhounds may be better versed in their use.”

"They are small weapons," said the voice. "They are…”

"You want this to be a fair fight, don't you?”

"Why, yes," said the voice. "Yes, of course, I do. That is the purpose of it, that everything be even, so that in all fairness the two species may test their true and proper fitness for survival.”

"But, you see," said Gary, "you can't be sure it's even. You never can be sure.”

"Yes, I can," the voice told him and there was an insane ring of triumph in it. "I can make sure that it will be even. You will fight without weapons.

None of you will have weapons. Just bare hands and teeth or whatever else you may have.”

"Without…”

"That's it. Neither of you will have weapons.”

"But they have guns," said Gary.

"Their guns won't work," the voice said. "And yours won't either. Your ship won't work and your guns won't work and you will have to fight.”

Terrible laughter came from the voice, a gleeful laughter that verged on hysteria. Then the laughter ceased and they knew that they were alone, that the mind — or the presence — with the voice had withdrawn from them, that it had gone elsewhere. But that it still was watching.

"Gary," Caroline said softly.

"Yes," said Gary.

"That voice was insane," she said. "You caught it, didn't you. The overtones in it.”

He nodded. "Delusion of grandeur. Playing at God. And the worst of it is, he can make it stick. We've stumbled into his yard. There isn't a thing we can do about it.”

Across the mushroom forest, the entrance port of the Hellhound ship was swinging open. From it came two beings, tall and waddling things that glimmered in the feeble light of the great red sun.

"Reptilian," said Caroline and there was more disgust than horror in her voice.

The Hellhounds stepped down from the ship and stood uncertainly, their snouted faces turning toward the Earth ship, then swinging from side to side to take in the country.

"Caroline," said Gary, "I'll stay here and watch. You go in and get the guns. They are in the locker.”

"They won't work," said Caroline.

"I want to be sure," Gary told her.

He heard her turn from his side and go, climbing up the ladder into the entrance lock.

The Hellhounds still stayed near their ship. They're confused, too, Gary told himself. They don't understand it any more than we do. They're nervous, trying to figure out just what to do.

But they wouldn't stay that way long, he knew.

Shadows flitted in the mushroom forest. Some of the natives, perhaps, sneaking around, keeping under cover, waiting to see what happened.

Caroline spoke from the lock. "The guns aren't any good. They won't work.

Just like the voice said.”

He nodded, still watching the Hellhounds. She came down the steps and stood beside him.

"We haven't got a chance against them," she said. "They are brutes, strong.

They are trained for war. Killing is their business.”

The Hellhounds were walking out from their ship, heading cautiously and slowly toward the Earth ship.

"Not too sure of themselves yet," said Gary. "Probably we don't look too formidable to them, but they aren't taking any chances… not yet. In a little while they'll figure that we're comparatively harmless and they'll make their play.”

The Hellhounds were dog-trotting now, their scaly bodies glistening redly in the sun, their blunt feet lifting little puffs of dust as they ran along.

"What are we going to do, Gary?" Caroline asked.

"Fort up," said Gary. "Fort up and do some thinking. We can't lick these things, hand to hand and rough and tumble. It would be like trying to wrestle a combined alligator and grizzly bear.”

"Fort up? You mean the ship.”

Gary nodded. "We got to buy us some time. We have to get a thing or two figured out. As it is, we're caught flatfooted.”

"What if they find a way of getting at us, even in the ship.”

Gary shrugged. "That's a chance we take.”

The Hellhounds separated, spreading out to left and right, angling out to come at the ship from two directions.

"You better get into the lock," said Gary. "Grab hold of the closing lever and be ready. When I come, I may have to move fast. There's no telling what these gents are fixing to uncork.”

But even as he spoke, the two reptiles charged, angling in at a burst of speed that almost made them blur, a whirlwind of dust spiraling up behind them.

"In we go!" yelled Gary.

He heard Caroline's feet beating a tattoo on the steps.

For a split second he stood there, still facing the charging Hellhounds, then whirled and leaped up the steps, catapulting himself into the lock. He saw Caroline swinging the lever down. The ladder ran up into its seat and the lock slammed home. Through its closing edge he caught sight of the beasts as they swung about in a skidding turn, cheated of their kill.

Gary wiped his forehead. "Close thing," he said. "We almost waited too long. I had no idea they could move that fast.”

Caroline nodded. "They figured that we wouldn't. They saw a chance to catch us at the very start. Remember how they waddled. That was to make us think that they couldn't move too fast.”

The voice said to them: "This is no way to fight.”

"It's common sense," said Gary. "Common sense and good strategy.”

"What is strategy?”

"Fooling the enemy," said Gary. "Working things so that you get an advantage over him.”

"He'll be waiting for you when you come out. And you'll have to come out after a while.”

"We rest and take it easy," said Gary, "while he tears up the ground outside and wears himself to a frazzle. And we do some thinking.”

"It's a lousy way to fight," the voice insisted.

"Look," said Gary. "Who's doing the fighting here?

You or us.”

"You, of course," the voice agreed, "but it's still no way to fight.”

They sensed the mind withdraw, grumbling to itself.

Gary grinned at Caroline. "Not gory enough to suit him," he said.

Caroline had sat down in a chair and was staring at him, elbow on her knee, chin cupped in her hands.

"We haven't much to work with," she declared. "No electricity. No power. No nothing. This ship is deader than a doornail. It's lucky the lock worked manually or we'd been goners before we even started.”

Gary nodded in agreement. "That voice bothers me the most," he said. "It has power, a strange sort of power. It can stop a spaceship dead in its tracks. It can fix guns so that they won't work. It can blanket out electricity; Lord knows what else it can do.”

"It can reach into the unknown of space and time," said Caroline. "Into a place no one else could even find and it did that to bring us here.”

"It's irresponsible," said Gary. "Back on Earth we'd call it insanity but what you and I would term insanity may be normal here.”

"There's no yardstick," said Caroline. "No yardstick to measure sanity. No way in which one can establish a norm for correct behavior or a correct mentality. Maybe the voice is sane. Maybe he has a purpose and a method of arriving at that purpose we do not understand and for that we call him crazy. Every race must be different, must think differently… arrive at the same conclusion and the same result, perhaps, but arrive at them differently. You remember all those beings that came to confer with the Engineers. All of them were capable, perhaps more capable than we.

Independently they might have been able to arrive at the same solution as we and perhaps much more easily and more effectively… and yet the Engineers sent them home again, because the Engineers could not work with them. Not because they were not capable, but because they thought so differently, because their mental processes ran at such divergent tangents that there was no basis for co-operation.”

"And yet we thought like the Engineers," said Gary.

"Enough like them, at any rate, that we could work together. I wonder why that is.”

Caroline wrinkled her forehead. "Gary, you are certain these goblin things out there are the same race that came to the city of the Engineers?”

"I would swear it," Gary told her. "I got a good look at the one that was there. It sort of… well, burned itself into my mind. I'll never quite forget it.”

"And the voice," said Caroline. "I wonder if the voice has anything to do with the goblins.”

"The goblins," said the voice, "are my pets. Like the dogs and cats you keep. A living thing to keep me from loneliness.”

It did not surprise them to hear the voice again and each of them knew then that they had been waiting for it to speak up again.

"But," protested Caroline, "one of the goblins came to the city of the Engineers.”

The voice chuckled at them. "Of course, human thing, of course. As my representative, of course. For I must have representatives, don't you see.

In a material world, I must be fronted for by something that can be seen, that can be perceived. I could not very well go to a meeting of that great importance as a disembodied voice, as a thought stalking the corridors of that empty city. So I sent a goblin and I went along with him.”

"What are you, voice?" Caroline asked. "Tell us what you are.”

"I still don't think," said the voice, "that what you are doing is a good way to fight a duel. I think you're making a great mistake.”

"What makes you think so, Butch?" asked Gary.

"Because," the voice said, "the Hellhounds are building a fire under your ship. It will be just a matter of time until they smoke you out.”

Gary and Caroline glanced swiftly at one another, the same thought in their mind.

"No power," said Caroline, weakly.

"The heat absorption units," Gary cried.

"No power," said Caroline. "The absorption cells won't work.”

Gary glanced toward the forward vision ports. Thin streamers of smoke were curling up outside the glass.

"The mushrooms burn well," the voice told them, "when they get old and dry.

There are lots of old and dry mushrooms around. They'll have no trouble in keeping up the fire.”

"Like smoking out a rabbit," said Gary, bitterly.

"You asked for it," the voice declared.

"Get out of here!" yelled Gary. "Get out of here and leave us alone, can't you.”

They sensed it leave, mumbling to itself.

Like a bad dream, Gary thought. Like a Wonderland adventure, with he and Caroline the poor bewildered Alice stumbling through a world of vast incredibility.

Listening, they could hear the crackling of the fire. Now the smoke was a dense cloud through the forward ports.

How do you fight when you have no weapon? How do you get out of a spaceship-turned-into-an-oven? How do you think up a smart dodge when your time is numbered in hours, if not, indeed, in minutes?

What are weapons?

How did they start?

What is the basic of a weapon?

"Caroline," Gary asked, "what would you say a weapon was?”

"Why," she told him, "that seems simple to me. An extension of your fist.

An extension of your power to hurt, of your ability to kill. Men fought first with tooth and nail and fist and then with stones and clubs. The stones and clubs were extensions of man's fist, an extension of his muscles and his hate or need.”

Stones and clubs, he thought. And then a spear. And, after that, a bow, A bow!

He swung on his heel, walked rapidly back along the ship, jerked open the door to the supply cabinet. Rummaging inside it, he found the things he wanted.

He brought them out, a fistful of wooden flagpoles, each with small flags fastened to one end, the other end steel-tipped for easy sticking in the ground.

"Explorer flags," he explained to Caroline. "You go out on an alien planet and you want to be sure that you can find your way back to the ship. You plant these things at intervals and then follow them back to the ship, picking them up as you go along. No chance of getting lost.”

"But…" said Caroline.

"Evans figured he was going to use this ship to go to Alpha Centauri, He took some of these things along, just in case.”

He placed the steel-shod tip of one of the poles on the floor, threw his weight against the top end. It flexed. Gary grunted in satisfaction.

"A bow?" asked Caroline.

He nodded. "Not too good a one. Not too accurate. Maybe not too strong.

When I was a kid I used to go out into the woods and whack me off a sapling. No curve, no nothing. Bigger at one end than the other. But it worked as a bow, after a fashion. Used reeds for arrows. Killed one of my mother's chickens with one once. She whaled me good and proper.”

"It's getting warm in here," Caroline told him. "We can't waste any time.”

He grinned at her, exuberant now that there was something to do.

"Hunt up some cord," he told her. "Any kind of cord. If it's not strong enough, we'll twist several strands together.”

Whistling under his breath, he got to work, tearing the flag off the end of one of the more supple poles, notching either end to hold the cord.

From another stick he split long wands off the straight-grained wood, fashioning them into arrows. There'd be no time for feathering… in fact, there were no feathers in the ship, but that was a refinement that would not be needed. He would be using the bow at close range.

But he did have arrowheads. With snippers, he clipped off the sharp tips with which the poles had been shod, drove them into the head of each arrow.

Testing them with a finger, he was satisfied. They were sharp enough… if he could get some power behind them.

"Gary," said Caroline, and her voice was almost a whimper.

He swung around.

"There's no cord, Gary. I've looked everywhere.”

No cord!

"Everywhere?" he asked.

She nodded. "There isn't any. I looked everywhere.”

Clothing, he thought, desperately. Strips torn from their clothing. But that would be worse than useless. It would unravel, come apart between his fingers when he needed it the most. Leather? Leather was too stiff to start with, and it would stretch. Wire? Too stiff and no zip to it.

He let the bow-stick fall from his hands, reached up to wipe his face.

"It's getting hot in here," he said.

He twisted around and stared at the forward visors. The smoke was a cloud and there was a ruddy reflection in it, the reflection of the fire that blazed around the ship.

How much longer, he wondered. How much longer before they'd have to open the port and make a dash for it, knowing even as they did that it was a hopeless thing to do, for the Hellhounds would be waiting just outside the port.

The shell of the spaceship crawled with a dull, dead heat, the kind of heat that comes up off a dusty road on a still, hot day in August.

And soon, he knew, it would be a live heat, not a dead heat any longer, but a blasting furnace heat that would pour from every angle of the steel around them, that would shrivel the leather of their shoes and scorch the clothing that they wore. But long before the leather of their shoes shriveled and curled, they would have to make their break, a hopeless dash for freedom that could end in nothing but death at the hands of the things that waited by the port.

Like an oven, like two rabbits roasting in an oven.

We must turn, thought Gary. We must keep turning about so that we will roast evenly on all sides.

"Gary!" cried Caroline.

He swung around.

"Hair?" she asked. "I just thought of it. Would hair make you a bowstring?”

He gasped at the thought. "Hair," he shouted. "Human hair! Why, of course… it's the best material there is.”

Caroline's hands were busy with her braids. "It's long," she said. "I was proud of it and I let it grow.”

"It'll have to be braided," said Gary. "Twisted into a cord.”

"Your knife," she said, and he handed it over.

The knife flashed close to her head and one of the braided strands dangled in her hand.

"We'll have to work fast," said Gary. "We haven't got much time.”

The air was dry and hard to breath. It burned one's lungs and dried out the tissues of the mouth. When he bent over and placed a hand against the steel plates of the ship's deck, the steel was warm, like the pavement on a summer's day.

"You'll have to help," said Gary. "We have to be fast and sure. We can't afford to bungle. We won't have a second chance.”

"Tell me what to do," she said.

Fifteen minutes later, he nodded at her.

"Open the port," he said, "and when you do stand back against the wall.

I'll need all the arm room I can get.”

He waited, bow in hand, arrow nocked against the cord.

Not much of a bow, he thought. Nothing you would want to try against a willow at three hundred paces. But these things outside aren't willow wands. It will last for a shot or two… I hope it lasts for a shot or two.

The port clanged open as Caroline shoved the lever over. Smoke billowed in the opening and in the smoke he saw the bulk of the ones who waited.

He brought the bow up and the wood bent with the sudden surge of hate and triumph that coursed in his being… the hate and fear of fire, the hate of things that wait to do a man to death, the fury of a human being backed into a corner by a thing that is not human.

The arrow made a whispering sound and was a silver streak that spurted through the smoke. The bow bent again and there was another whisper, the whisper of cord and wood and the creak of human muscles.

On the ground outside, two dark shapes were threshing in the smoke.

It was just like shooting rabbits.