"Come on. Cad," Mary Ann wheedled. "Put the rifle down for a minute, so that we can get—"
"The hell with that!" he screamed weakly. "I'm not letting this out of my hands until that thing is dead, do you hear me? Dead."
Zack whispered to Jerry just before the veterinarian slipped the needle into Cadmann's arm, and set the control on the rectangular box of the plasma pump. It hummed gently, sending healing fluid into Cadmann's veins.
"Don't look at me that way—" Cadmann's voice was pleading, slurred and drunken. He tried to raise his head but it seemed monstrously heavy. It thumped back to the table. The rifle slipped in his grasp a little, and he groaned, tightening his grip.
"Ernst had a bullet hole in him, Cad. We were hoping you could help us with that."
Cadmann, slipping further toward unconsciousness, didn't really hear the irony in Zack's voice. "The monster. It was eating him." He yawned deeply. "Must have hit Ernst. Maybe even tried to. He screamed, Zack. Screamed like a woman. He wanted to die—"
Zack made his move, snatching at the rifle. Cadmann twisted the stock and with a short, choppy movement drove the butt into Zack's stomach. Zack staggered back, grunting, face whey-colored.
Cadmann tried to roll from the table and stand, but fell heavily, ripping the I. V. from his arm. Dark fluid drained from the needle and dribbled onto the white tile of the clinic floor. He struggled to gain his feet, make it to his knees before Carlos landed on his shoulders, pinning him down. Zack stumbled back in, wresting the rifle away as Cadmann sobbed and collapsed to the floor.
"Please. Don't... just trying..." His head sank back to the ground, and he was unconscious.
"Jesus Christ," Carlos whispered, for once his accent forgotten. "What kind of man is he? How much somazine did you pump into that plasma, Jerry?"
"I didn't want to overdo it. Come on. Help me get him on the table."
Sylvia watched Carlos and Terry tie him down. Terry tightened the shackle loop until Cadmann's skin creased.
"Why so tight, Terry?"
"You haven't told us yet," he said nastily. "Is that a piece of Ernst or isn't it?"
"No." Sylvia shook her head, more from fatigue than relief. "I've tried human antigens. It's not calf meat, it's not dog. It reacts to all of them. It's not turkey or chicken, and it's not catfish. So it's alien."
"So he killed a pterodon. So what?"
"I'm tired, Terry. Back off." Her voice was numb. "Jerry—get the liquid nitrogen, would you?"
She tweezed a piece of the meat to a dissection tray, and sliced a quarter-inch piece away. Jerry carried over a ceramic thermos and tipped the lid. The liquid nitrogen, boiling at the touch of room temperature air, foamed white vapor. Sylvia slipped the sample into the pot.
"We're going to do this right. Cassandra has a complete analysis of every life form we've found on this planet. I'm going to run a gene analysis. It will take about ninety minutes, and we'll have our answer. Is that all right with you, Terry?"
"Don't make me out for a villain," Terry said flatly. "Something terrible just happened here, and I want the truth."
Sylvia removed the frozen section of flesh, and Jerry started up the automated apparatus. A conveyer belt hummed, trundling into a rectangular box of chrome and white enamel. She placed the smoking sample gingerly on its tray, and it disappeared inside. There was a tiny, high-pitched hum as the laser saw sliced the meat into specimens only a few cells thick.
Cassandra would build a holographic model and then compare it in depth with the others in her memory banks. Then they would know. Sylvia wasn't sure that she wanted to.
She turned back to the magnascope, to the tissue sample displayed in a quilt of reds and pale browns. She looked disgusted, tired, heartbroken. "It could be anything. Pterodon. Samlon. Or something we never even dreamed of." It may have only been the terrible fatigue, but a tear welled at the bottom of her eye, and she wiped it away harshly.
"What are we doing here?" She snatched the sample tray from under the scope and hurled it across the room. It broke with a tinkle of crystal, and a spatter of clear fluid against the yellow plaster. "Just why the hell did we come?"
"We're all tired," Zack said. "It's going to be a couple of hours before we have answers?"
"Close enough," Jerry agreed.
"Then let's get some rest. Before this is over, we'll need every bit of it we can get. All right?"
Carlos looked at the wall, at the still form of his friend, strapped now to the table. "What about Cadmann?"
"I honestly don't know," Zack said wearily. "But I know that I'm too tired and sore to think. I need some rest. He'll keep."
"Everyone but Jerry out of here," Sylvia said.
"I want to stay." Mary Ann stood against the wall, her arms folded, eyes fixed on Cadmann.
Zack was still massaging his stomach, feeling for bruised ribs. Every few seconds he wheezed in pain. He said, "Carlos, take care of Mary Ann. We need to clear out so that Syl and Jerry can work."
"No, I'm not—"
Sylvia closed her mind to the sound until she heard the door close behind them.
Then she and Jerry methodically stripped Cadmann, sprayed his burns and minor wounds and covered them with gel. When they were done with the hemostats and the dissolving thread and the unguents, they slipped him into a clean smock and refastened the straps. Then they turned out the lights and left.
She shivered in the fog. Jerry turned to her. "What do you think happened out there? You don't really think Cadmann did that damage to himself?"
"I don't know. I don't know anything right now. We'll know in a little over an hour. Just let me close my eyes for a few minutes."
Jerry nodded and started back to his cottage, to the dubious, transitory comfort of a warm bed, when Sylvia's voice stopped him.
"I can tell you one thing, Jerry. No matter what we find out, we're not going to like it. I promise you that there aren't going to be any comforting answers."
"Yeah." Jerry hunched his shoulders against the chill. He turned to speak again, but Sylvia had already disappeared around a corner, or into the fog, and he was alone.
Chapter 9
CONTACT
A man that studieth revenge keeps his own wounds green.
FRANCIS BACON
In the shadows beyond the fence, something watched. Something alive, silent, almost motionless save for the rise and fall of its torn and bleeding flanks.
The creature was badly hurt. It had passed the horizon of pain into territory that was strange indeed. Irreversible changes had taken place in its body. In a distant way, it even understood that it was dying. But first there was an obligation.
It hid in the shadowed fields beyond the reach of the searchlights. When it concentrated it could smell the man, the one who had hurt it. This one, whom it had badly underestimated, was the real threat. And every instinct screamed for it to get to him, to find and kill him.
It began to wiggle forward. It lay between rows of corn, just a few dozen meters southwest of the colony. The searchlights still swept across the ground, and the men still walked the edge of the camp.
How to get past the firevines? It moaned hungrily.
In the next instant the solution presented itself. One of the men ran his forepaw along a section of vine. He touched it—leaned on it. It recognized the section. This was the same stretch of firevine that had bitten it before. It seemed safe now. Perhaps firevines could only bite once...
The man was alone and not even looking in its direction. Now. Now, as the searchlights crisscrossed, there was a moment in which darkness was almost total, when shadow licked the fence, the man, and a stretch leading almost to the fields.