Something new had entered human affairs—a thing that could kill at a distance.
It was over in another fifteen minutes—not without more human casualties. The last insect survivor, seeing that it was alone, fled.
“Don’t let it get to its space suit!” Heln cried.
A bunch of people took off in pursuit, but it evaded them. Later, Bram reconstructed what had happened. The insect-thing had killed two people it found in the tunnel on the inner side of the air lock, retrieved its space suit, and charged into the crowd outside. With its coffer of a helmet on—its facial limbs caged up, and, perhaps, its senses muffled—it was no longer aggressive. Nobody outside knew what had been going on. The crowd parted to make way for it, and the deputies were pleased to see that nobody interfered with it. It hightailed it back to its barrel-wheeled vehicle and drove out of town.
The killing spree had left seven dead aliens and more than thirty dead and dismembered human beings. It was going to be hard to tell the enact number until the body parts that were strewn over the chamber were matched up. Bram moved among the weeping people, viewing the butchery. One of the dead was Alb, the junior archivist whom Bram had reprimanded. Somehow he had slipped past the deputies and gotten inside; poor Alb, he had thought it all a lark.
“I suppose it was the space suits,” Heln said, white as flour. “We didn’t look appetizing to them inside ours, and their own feeding impulses were stifled with a sheet of plastic cutting off their sensory world.” She shuddered. “They like their food live and moving. I wonder what kind of livestock they carry with them in that tube vehicle of theirs.”
Nobody had thought about that part of it. Ame looked ill. Bram remembered the creatures’ behavior just before they had taken time out to return to their vehicle for a rest break.
“Maybe animals about the size and shape of a Cuddly,” Bram said. “Possibly even mammals.”
“Yah, the Cuddly popping up in front of that thing was what tripped the switch,” Jao said.
Heln gave the others a bleak look. “Yes, that and poor Jorv, sticking his face inside their unobstructed striking range. Their brains are rewired now. They’ve been programmed to see human beings. As food.”
They spent the next day burying the dead—what could be found of them. Bram found some words in King James that seemed to express what everybody was feeling and read them aloud over his suit radio while the surviving human population stood around the grave site, heads bowed inside their helmets. The terrestrial biology group under Jorv’s assistant took charge of the insect carcasses and began to do autopsies.
When Bram called Yggdrasil, Jun Davd urged him to close down the digs and return at once. “It’s an unlucky place now, I fear. If Heln is correct, the danger’s just beginning.”
“I’m sending the first shuttle loads out today. We should all be evacuated by the day after tomorrow. In the meantime, I’ve posted a guard. The main thing is not to let them get inside the pressurized buildings with us.”
“You ought to know that radio traffic between the colony and the father ship has resumed.”
“They’ve renewed their connection?”
“For the time being. They had something to say to each other. You can imagine what it is.”
“I take your meaning, Jun Davd. I’ll try to speed up the evacuation.”
“It’s hard to abandon what we’ve found of our heritage, I know. But we were going to leave soon, anyway.”
Bitterness clogged Bram’s voice. “Yes, but we always meant to come back one day. Now…”
“Yes,” Jun Davd said somberly. “They’ll have spread to the other disks by then. But Bram, we’ve done wonders in the year we’ve been here—thanks in large part to the spadework the rat archaeologists did for us. We’ve got the great libraries of mankind and a whole biological repository of extinct life forms…”
“I know, Jun Davd. We never thought we’d regain so much of our heritage. Still…” He felt suddenly weary. For the first time, the centuries of wandering seemed to have caught up with him—more than six of them by now, while the clock of the universe had ticked off its tens of millions of years.
“What did Jorv mean, ‘Odonata’?” Bram said.
Jorv’s assistant, Harld, faced him, a scalpel in his hand, still looking pale and shaken. He had a thick white bandage on his head, covering the scalp wound he’d received trying to save a woman from the jaws of an insect-creature, and there were deep scratches down one long bony cheek.
Harld put the scalpel down, looking thoughtful. He paused to look around behind himself where the other two surviving members of the zoology department continued their dissection of one of the insect corpses. The body cavity was laid open, with internal organs spread out fanwise, and Bram did not care for too close a look.
“Odonata? Is that what he said?”
“Yes. Just before he died. He said it after he saw the way the creature grabbed the Cuddly, as if that had made him remember something.”
“It comes from a root in a pre-Inglex language called Greek. It means ‘tooth.’ Original Man used Greek prefixes a lot in scientific classification. Ever since Jorv got back from his trip to the insect camp, he’d been poring over the old archives for insect references, especially from an institution known as the Smithsonian. But there was just so much material to absorb…”
“What does ‘tooth’ have to do with it?”
“It sounds as if it may be the name of the insect order.”
“Can you…”
“There’s nothing to it, now. It’s all alphabetical. Come back in an hour.”
Bram spent the hour arguing with one of the curators from the art team, who wanted to pack an entire shuttle with a collection of paintings and photoplastic art that had been discovered at the last minute.
“It’s irreplaceable,” the man pleaded. “Originals that were on loan from Earth museums. Art that was produced here on the diskworld over a period of several centuries—some of it of the very highest order. We can make a selection—let me assure you that we’re prepared to be very stringent with ourselves—and have it vacuum crated within a Tenday.”
Bram tried to explain that there was neither the space nor the time. “There are still crates of last-minute finds out next to the shuttle pad that are going to have to be abandoned,” he said. “Can’t you make microreproductions of it?”
“You don’t understand!” the curator wailed. “These are originals!”
In the end, it was decided that the curator and his staff would be allowed to take a selection of some of the smaller objects with them as their personal baggage. “The Rembrandt engravings,” the curator decided. “The little votive figurines from the Falwellite thearchy. The photoplastic diskscapes from the neo-literalist period. And some of the small table sculpture. Oh, dear, how will I ever winnow it down?”
Bram suggested that the museum staff load all the excess artwork that they could manage during the next twenty hours on one of the unused rocket-assisted pallets. Some tens of the pallets were slated to be left behind along with a lot of cargo walkers and heavy machinery. “See Jao,” Bram said. “He’ll compute a rough trajectory for you. We’ll have to shoot it off unmanned, but with luck, one of the interbranch vehicles from Yggdrasil will snare it and bring it in.”
“B-but it could be lost forever,” the curator said. “Better to leave it here.”
“No,” Bram said, looking him in the eye. “It wouldn’t.”