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.