Robert Silverberg: Mournful Monster

The monster stooped over, slapping at the foliage as if irritated by the sudden attack rather than angry. One paw swept inches over Marshall’s head. He fired a second bolt into the same place as the first had gone, and saw a break in the scales now. The monster roared in pain and lifted its wounded leg high.

The leg thrashed around, kicking and trampling. Suddenly a sidewise swipe of an open hand caught Marshall and sent him sprawling, half unconscious. He landed near Kyle. The financier, Marshall saw, was not in good shape. Blood was trickling from his mouth and one of his legs was grotesquely twisted. Kyle’s face was a pale white with fear and shock. He did not seem to be conscious.

Marshall struggled to his feet. He became aware that the alien’s struggles had slackened somewhat. Running back to Garvey’s side, he looked up and saw an arrow arch upward and bury itself in the center of one huge yellow eyeball.

“Bullseye!” Garvey yelled.

The scream of pain that resulted seemed to fill the entire jungle. Marshall grinned at the colonist and gripped his blaster again.

He fired—three times. The charges burrowed into the weakened place in the monster’s leg, and suddenly the great being slipped to one knee. Unafraid now, the two men dashed out into the open. Garvey’s final arrow pierced the remaining eye of the giant. A shrill cry of pain resulted. Marshall raised his blaster, centering the sights on the monster’s ruined eye, hoping that his shot would supply the coup de grace.

“Yes,” a deep, throbbing voice said. “Kill me. It would be well. I long to die.”

Marshall was so stunned he lowered his blaster. Turning to Garvey he said, “Did you hear that?”

“It sounded like—like a voice.”

“I was the one who spoke. I speak directly to your minds. Why do you not kill me?”

“Great Jehosaphat!” Garvey cried. “The monster’s talking!”

“It’s a telepath,” Marshall said. “It’s intelligent and it’s able to communicate with us!”

“I ask for death,” came the solemn thought.

Marshall stared at the great being. It had slumped down on both its knees now, and it held its hands over its shattered eyes. Even so, its head was more than twenty feet above the ground.

“Who—what are you?” Marshall asked.

“I am nothing now and soon will be even less. Twenty thousand years ago my people ruled this world. Today I am the only one. And soon I too will be gone—killed by tiny creatures I can hardly see.”

Marshall heard a rustling sound behind him and glanced over his shoulder to see Lois and Garvey’s wife come hesitantly out of hiding, now that the danger seemed to be past.

Marshall felt a twinge of awe. To think of a world ruled by beings such as these—and to think of them all gone except this one, their cities buried under thousands of years of jungle growth, their very bones rotted by the planet’s warmth and lost forever. What a sight it must have been, a city of titans such as these!

“Why do you not kill me?” the being asked telepathically.

“What’s happening?” Lois asked.

Marshall said, “Garvey hit the creature in the eyes with arrows and I knocked him down by blasting his legs. But he seems to be intelligent. And he’s pleading with us to put him out of his misery.”

“That thing—intelligent?”

“Once we had sciences and arts and poetry,” came the slow, mournful telepathic voice. “But our civilization withered and died. Children no longer were born, and the old ones died slowly away. Until at last only I was left, eating animals and living the life of a beast in the jungle….”

“How can you be sure you’re the last?” Marshall asked. “Maybe there are other survivors.”

“When others lived my mind was attuned to them. But for many years I have known nothing but silence on this world. I did not know beings your size could be intelligent….I beg your pardon if I have injured the companion of yours who I seized in my curiosity. Will you not give me the satisfaction of death at last?”

Marshall felt deep sadness as he watched blood stream down the alien’s face—yellow-brown blood. If only they had known, if only the being had not been so fearsome in appearance, if only it had made telepathic contact with them sooner—

If. Well, it was too late now.

“Isn’t there some way we can help it?” Lois asked.

Marshall shook his head. “We’re hundreds of miles from civilization. We’ll be lucky to get back alive ourselves. And I crippled it with my blaster.”

“Only thing to do is put it out of its misery,” Garvey said flatly.

“Yes. I am in great pain and wish to die.”

Marshall lifted the blaster regretfully. Only a few moments before he had been shooting to kill, shooting what he thought was a ferocious and deadly creature. And, he thought, unwittingly he had destroyed the last of an ancient and awe-inspiring race.

Now he had no choice. It was wrong to permit this noble creature to suffer, to be eaten alive by the blood-hungry jungle creatures.

His finger tightened on the blaster.

“I thank you for giving me peace,” the alien telepathed. “My loneliness at last will end.”

Marshall fired.

The energy bolt pierced the already broken eye of the monster and seared its way through to the brain. The vast creature toppled forward on its face, kicked convulsively as the message of death passed through its huge and probably tremendously complex nervous system. In a moment it was all over except for a quivering of the outstretched limbs, and that soon stopped.

Marshall stared at the great body face down on the jungle floor. Then he turned away.

“Let’s go see how Kyle is,” he said. “The alien picked him up and dropped him again when we opened fire. I think he’s in bad shape.”

The four of them stepped around the corpse of the fallen alien and made their way to the place where Kyle lay. The financier had not moved. Marshall bent over him, pointing to the livid bruises that stood out on Kyle’s body.

“Fingerprints,” Marshall said. “The big boy had a pretty strong grip.”

Kyle’s eyes opened and he looked wildly around. “The monster,” he said in a thick, barely intelligible voice. “Don’t let it touch me! Don’t—”

Kyle slumped over, his head rolling loosely to one side. A fresh trickle of blood began to issue from between his lips, but it stopped almost at once. Marshall knelt, putting his ear to Kyle’s chest.

After a moment he looked up.

“How is he?” Garvey asked.

Marshall shrugged. “He’s dead, I’m afraid. The shock of the whole thing, and the internal hemhorrage caused by the creature’s grip on him—”

“And he fell about twenty feet,” Garvey pointed out.

Marshall nodded. “We’d better bury him before the local fauna comes around for their meal. And then we’ll get back on the path to New Lisbon.”

They dug a grave at the side of the clearing and lowered Kyle’s body in. Garvey bound two sticks together crosswise with a bit of vine, and planted them at the head of the grave. No one even suggested a burial for the dead alien. It would have been totally impossible to move a creature of such bulk at all. Its weight was probably many tons, Marshall estimated.

It was nearly nightfall by the time they were finished interring Kyle, but the party moved along anyway, since no one was anxious to camp for the night close to the scene of the violence. Few words were spoken. The brief and tragic encounter with the huge alien, and Kyle’s death, had left them drained of emotion, with little to say to each other.