William Tenn - Of Men And Monsters

He tried hard to analyze the feeling and come to grips with it. He was an Eye, after all: some day it might be necessary for him to lead a group right into the middle of a Monster burrow where there was no wall to provide bearings and a sensation of solidity. But the hysteria seemed to remain in spite of all his efforts; each detour caused by a possible trap was as frightening as the one before it.

After passing the last obstacle, he noticed an odd buzzing sound from the wall. Eric stopped and considered it. A new kind of trap, an invisible one? A warning system that the Monsters used to tell them of the approach of humans? He indicated the sound to Walter and Roy by pointing. The Weapon-Seeker listened too, then shrugged and waved Eric on.

But suddenly the stretch of the wall between Eric and the man behind him developed a fissure. It widened rapidly, as if the fabric of the wall were being rolled back. And then the wall in their immediate neighborhood was no longer there, and they were staring into another great white burrow—and at a Moister who was walking placidly in their direction!

Despite all his warrior training, Eric froze. His arms and legs seemed locked into place. He knew, somewhere in his brain, that he hadn’t been noticed, but he stood there, unable to move, while one of the six great legs began to come down immediately over his head. The creature was merely strolling from one Monster burrow to another—it might not even realize it had stepped on a human being.

Walter moved.

He darted away from Roy, who had also become immobilized by terror, and ran around in front of the creature. Then he yelled, waved his arms wildly—and ran straight toward it.

The immense Monster seemed to go into paralysis. It stood rigidly still for a moment as Walter, screaming, waving his arms, his face contorted, kept coming at it. Staring upward, in fear-anguish, Eric could see the flat gray circle that was the underside of its leg—a circle at least twice the thickness of his own body—barely vibrating and poised in the middle of a step as the creature assessed the situation and made up its mind what to do.

Then it reared on its two hind legs, and the entire body as well as the portion of it that had been about to come down on Eric, went up and up into the dizzying distances overhead. A deafening, low register, wailing sound came out of it and rolled massive echoes in all directions. It had jumped, Eric realized, and screamed as it jumped. He saw it turn around in mid-air to face the direction from which it had come: the long, long neck with the tiny head at the end strained forward as if to pull the body behind it as far from Walter the Weapon-Seeker as possible. It came down a substantial distance away in the other burrow, and the floor developed incredible solid waves in response to the impact. Eric was flung off his feet and bounced bone-crackingly from wave to wave. When the waves began to dwindle into ripples and then to mere violent vibrations, when the agitated floor was relatively flat again, Eric got his hands on it and lifted his head.

Far off, in the other burrow, the Monster was still running away from them. Its head, held high in the air by the thin and now-rigid neck, was still bellowing mad panic out of an open mouth. Just behind the head, the little pink growths that encircled the neck were standing out stiffly like so many frozen flames. An incredible stink hung in the air. Then the creature rounded a far-distant corner and was lost to sight.

But the fissure that had opened in the wall—through which the Monster had apparently intended to walk—the fissure was closing. And Walter was on the other side of it!

Eric saw the heavy little Weapon-Seeker scrambling frantically toward him. If the wall closed Walter would be lost to them forever in the unknown depths of Monster territory!

Roy had run up and stood beside Eric. “Move, Walter, move!” the Runner breathed. Walter’s face was torn with fear as he forced his short legs to their utmost.

The gap in the wall through which they were watching the Weapon-Seeker narrowed smoothly. When he was about a pace and a half away, there was barely enough opening for a man’s body to squeeze through.

Without words, both getting the same desperate idea at the same moment, Eric and Roy grabbed the fissure edge at each side and hopelessly tried to keep it from closing further. To their astonishment, no effort was required. The wall stopped coming together the moment their hands were on it: the gap got no narrower.

Walter panted through and flung himself on the floor. Eric and Roy took their hands away. And immediately the wall closed and became solid once more.

Eric poked at it, scratched at it unbelievingly. It was solid enough to break a man’s hand if he hit it too hard. And yet it had opened and closed—and temporarily stopped closing when he and the Runner had merely touched it.

And what had been wrong with the Monster? Had it actually been afraid of Walter the Weapon-Seeker, so tiny in comparison with its own fantastic bulk that it could have crushed, squashed, smeared him with one single casual step?

That was exactly what it had been, Walter assured them, once he had gotten back his breath. “Some of the Monsters are scared to death of us, some aren’t at all. The ones who are afraid will bolt every time if you run directly at them making a lot of noise. Of course, the trick is to know which will bolt and which won’t. The ones’ who aren’t scared will just get a better opportunity to tread on you.”

“I’ve heard of that,” Roy said, nodding. “Some of the older warriors sing stories of being trapped outside the burrows by a Monster and seeing the damned big thing turn tail and take off. But there are other warriors who got trapped and didn’t come back to sing the tale. You never can tell with a Monster.”

“Yes you can. You know those pink tentacles at the top of the neck, right near the head? They’re the things to look for. If they’re short and a dark pink, almost red, then the Monster will bolt when a human being runs at it. Those Monsters are as safe to be around as a newborn baby in the burrows. But if the neck tentacles are long and are colored a whitish pink—look out. A Monster with those kind of tentacles isn’t afraid of you and will step on you every time.”

“Why?” Eric asked. “What’s the size and color of the tentacles got to do with it?”

The Weapon-Seeker spread his hands wide. “How should I know? And who cares why? Not even the Aaron People know—with all their piles of records. It’s a fact, that’s all, a very useful fact.”

“Saved your life, that fact did,” Roy told Eric. “I ll say it’s useful. More useful than most of the facts that your uncle knew—your uncle and the whole people you used to belong to, you know, that bunch you used to call Mankind. Mankind, he used to call them,” Roy said, turning back to Walter. “As if they were the whole human race!”

“Does anyone have any idea, any theory, why it’s so?” Eric kept at the Weapon-Seeker.

Walter glanced back a short distance to where Arthur the Organizer and the rest of the expedition were hurrying up. “What good’s a theory? It’s only worthwhile if you know something for sure. Something that’s usable. Do you remember that other piece of Monster furniture, the first rendezvous back in the larder? Wide and black with green knobs?”

“Yes. I wondered about it.”

“So did I. Last auld lang syne, I was leading a band from my tribe on a weapon bunt. The pickings had been poor, we hadn’t found anything at all good. So on the way back, I thought: who knows, why not, maybe those green knobs are worth something. I sent one of the younger lads shinnying up the piece of furniture. He got all the way to the top, crawled out near the edge and started working away at one of the green knobs. It turned round and round, and he called down that it was getting looser as he turned it. All of a sudden there was a flash of red from the green knob straight up into the air. The lad comes down in a lump, all black and burned, dead long before he hits the floor. Then, the next thing, all the lights go out. Pitch black in Monster territory, none of that whiteness, nothing. We have to pick our way back to the burrows with our forehead glow lamps. And just before we get to the doorway my people use, the light comes back on, all clear and white, as if nothing had happened. Well, what did happen? I don’t know, I don’t care. If I could ever figure out a way to turn it into a usable weapon, I might care a lot. Till then, just another Monster doodad.”