A worm was staring at us through the windshield-but it didn't push through. It just goggled its eyes and blinked. Sput-phwut. A second worm slid up beside it.
I opened my mouth to reply to Colonel Anderson-and then shut it. I realized how stupid I was about to be. I was going to argue for my right to be terrified and upset. The worms were still only inspecting us. If they'd wanted to come in, they would have. Time enough to scream then. "Go ahead," I gulped.
"We've got you on our horizon now. Stand by-" There was a pause. "Nope. There's still too much schmutz in the air. We'll have to do this on instruments." Another pause. "All right, we're dropping the crab. I'll give you the video-"
Lizard reached out and switched on the main display. She punched through the channels quickly. A bright clear image came up on the screen.
We were looking down from the blimp. A round, spidery-looking robot-it had a lot of arms and legs and attachments-was dangling from four lines that looked too, slender to support it. It was caught in the spotlights of the blimp, and it flashed with spotlights of its own. The only indications of motion were the pale and luminous clouds sweeping past below.
Lizard touched her controls again and a second screen lit up to show the view from the crab's camera. There were pink trees swinging wildly below us.
I leaned forward to peer out the front windshield. "Shouldn't we be seeing them soon?"
Lizard asked the radio, "Can you eyeball us?"
"Not yet. Stand by. We'll give you the computer-scan. Channel three."
Lizard punched up a third display screen. The image was plasticlooking, without detail; the blimp's computer had compiled all its sensory data-sonic, infrared, radar, visual and who knew what else-into a single three-dimensional portrait. The landscape looked rippled and uneven; the computer had painted it a dull orange. A wide depression angled diagonally through the image; we were sliding toward it.
There! Just left of center-that bright white object! That was us! A tiny gunship half-buried in a furrow of red. There were dark shapes crawling all over it. I wished I hadn't seen that.
Lizard studied it for a moment, then pointed back over my shoulder. "The blimp'll be coming in from that angle. You'll see them first from the turret."
I climbed back to the turret and pulled myself up into it. I pulled the shutter back-
-and I was suddenly staring into the large round eyes of a large round worm. It blinked. I blinked. It blinked again. I made a face at it. It blinked a third time. I shined my flashlight at it. It blinked. But it didn't attack.
Why not-?
What was going on here?! "Shoo!" I shouted. "Shoo!" The worm blinked at me again.
"Goddammit! Get out of my way-! You big fat hairy bag of pustulant pink pudding!"
The worm backed away from the turret.
I blinked. In surprise. I didn't know my own strength.
I swiveled around quickly. The worms were all over the chopper-and all around it on the ground. They were huge dark shapes in the night, moving quickly and silently across the pale glow of the dust drifts. The lights of the ship struck highlights off the powder crusted on their sides.
Another worm raised itself up to peer at me-one of the biggest. It leaned its weight against the chopper-and pulled us sideways! Lizard yelped. Duke moaned. I heard it over my own scream. The worm loomed ominous and black outside the turret. It swiveled one eye high and the other eye low to look at me from a very cockeyed angle. It only wanted to study me. It was curious!
These were not ordinary worms. They weren't hungry.
I'd never met a worm before that wasn't crazy with hungeror rage. This was a whole new mode of behavior. We were going to have to rewrite the book.
We'd always assumed that the worms were like the millipedes-so much a victim of their own hunger that everything was perceived as food. But these worms were-beyond that.
How did that happen? How much food did a worm need to eat to be satisfied?
How much did it take to stuff a worm? Seattle? North Dakota? Or maybe the answer was all around me. First, you bury California under two meters of cotton candy powder, so the worms are surrounded by food. Then let them out for a walk, so every time they take a step they get a mouthful. The issue of hunger is taken care of.
Maybe.
Maybe we were safe for as long as there was pink snow on the ground.
Or maybe that was just a false connection. Maybe there was something else going on here too
We just didn't know.
A pink light in the sky pulled me back to the present. It looked like a warm glow behind a veil of smoke.
"I can see the blimp!" I hollered.
As I watched, the glow began to assume brilliance and color and even a hint of size and form. Then it became a cluster of lights. They grew brighter. The blimp moved out of the darkness and became a gaudy, cigar-shaped, rose-enveloped presence. The air glowed pink around it. Its brightest lights were banked along its belly; rows of spotlights, swiveling and pointing in all directions. The crab was a smaller cluster of beams and auras hanging just below.
The ship hung in the sky like a vision-like an angel. Its rays came sweeping through the pale haze like fingers from heaven, turning everything luminous. The beams poured from the sky. They were beautiful! One of them touched me in passing and it was almost too bright to look at.
The whole world glowed with the light-the land, the drifts, the stark and barren trees. Everything looked ghostly and iridescent. Even the dark worms and the darker body of the chopper. A line from something floated through my head. God came out at midnight. I could see him floating in my sky.
All around us, the worms were stopping what they were doing, turning and looking upward. Some of them even backed away from the chopper for a better view. They were puzzling at the light in the sky, trying to make out what it could be-but there was no focus there. No edges, no shapes, no lines-only the light. The beautiful, brilliant, dazzling light!
I felt a surge of joy in my chest and in my throat. My eyes started to water. "It's beautiful," I said.
"What?" asked Lizard.
"It's beautiful!" I called: "I can see the lights of the blimp! It's the most beautiful sight I've ever seen."
"How far are they?"
"Uh-" I brought myself back to reality again. "It's hard to tell. Maybe a kilometer. Maybe two."
"They're past the trees," Lizard said. "They can fire the harpoon any time now."
Something puffed from the bottom of the crab. It hit the ground with a muffled thump and a large cloud of pale powdery smoke rose from the point of impact. The crab slid down the line and disappeared into the cloud, leaving four thin lines hanging in the air, stiffening against the pull of the blimp.
"They got it!" I called. "They're moored."
"Not yet!" Lizard called back. "Two more to go."
The crab released the anchored line and scuttled sideways across the pink drifts. Almost immediately, it disappeared into them, marking its passage by the three lines still anchored to it. They cut through the powder like fishing lines through water-they trailed a moving cloud of brightly glowing dust.
Abruptly, the crab appeared again, coming up suddenly on a rise. Its motion was mad-even comical-but it was fast. It scrambled quickly across the ground, varying its gait to match the terrain: it bounced, it crawled, it scuttled sideways; it paused, it backed up, it dipped and tilted; it tiptoed around a pink lump that once had been a bush-then dashed down the opposite side of the slope in a rapid spurt of action.
The bunnydogs were frozen. The worms stared.
The crab picked its steps like a ballet dancer. It moved like a lunar walker. It raced like a thoroughbred. If it could have cooked, I'd have married it.
It stopped inside another pink drift. The whole powdery area glowed with its light. There was another bright puff-another harpoon-and another line was anchored. This time when the crab came scuttling out, it was trailing only two lines back up to the blimp.