Donald Moffitt - Second Genesis

At the end of another couple of hours, the creatures found the ramp to the parking garage under the sports arena. This seemed to excite them. There was another head-to-head conference, with eight long tail sections sticking out and wobbling, the gauntleted claspers working convulsively.

They knew about air locks. Afraid that they might damage the locks leading to the stadium interior, Bram had been about to order that the creatures be let through while someone held the door, but one of them figured out the human machinery at a jelly-eyed glance, and they swarmed inside. They even closed it behind them.

They seemed to be awfully good with machinery.

“They can notice inanimate objects,” Bram puzzled, “but not a crowd of people.”

“You don’t understand,” Heln said. “We are inanimate objects.”

“Yar,” Jao said, as if he were an expert. “We haven’t impinged on them.”

A thought struck Bram. “They must have seen the shuttles parked in the field on their way through. If not man, then man’s works! Why didn’t they take an interest in those ?”

“Held no meaning for them,” Heln supplied. “Wasn’t important. Not like the air lock here. They wanted to get inside.”

Bram spoke to his traffic control-deputies. “Keep the mob outside. I won’t evict anyone who’s already in there, but I think we’d better keep the numbers down.”

Without their space suits, the creatures from Sol were an unnerving sight—spiny legs, globular green eyes, and hard shiny integument bristling with stiff hairs. The four-fingered claspers at their projecting rears were pincers of horn, and the forward manipulating limbs, now revealed, were all tweezers and hooks.

They prowled the floor and balconies of the chamber, taking no more notice of the gawking humans than humans would have taken of moss on a rock. With the boxy helmets off, the clicking noises they made to each other could be heard like a high-speed rattle of broken sticks.

Their insect ancestry was fully apparent. “You see,” Jorv said ecstatically, “how evolution modified the exoskeleton in a way that permitted them to grow to size. It became a partially embedded, hinged, mostly external skeleton that operates as a system of levers. The extensor and flexor muscles operate separately, bridging the hinges on opposite sides.”

The skeletal apparitions gave everybody cause to remember their childhood ghost stories in Chin-pin-yin; the word for a foreigner was, literally, a “bones-outside,” and now Bram heard people around him starting to call the Earthlings that.

Jorv could hardly contain himself. “You see the pulsating of the abdomen? I think they breathe through their anus. I wonder what evolution gave them in place of lungs.”

“What are they?” Ame asked.

“I don’t know,” Jorv said. “They may have been aquatic. In that case—”

He was interrupted by a chattering Cuddly that skidded to a stop in front of the group and climbed up the nearest person to reach the shelter of human arms. The person happened to be Ame, who petted the fluffy little beast and cooed, “There, there, nothing’s going to hurt you.” The Cuddly had ventured too close to a prowling insect-thing and had had second thoughts about approaching it.

The insect-beings, in fact, had quite an audience of Cuddlies by this time. When the strange creatures had arrived and shucked their space suits, the couple of dozen Cuddlies that normally mooched around the chamber looking for handouts had immediately disappeared. After a while, when nothing much happened and the human beings seemed unconcerned, a few cautious little furry heads had popped up.

Now the Cuddlies were getting bolder. One fat little creature sat up on its haunches and scolded an insect-being that had paused, for a moment to survey the arena floor.

“Isn’t that cute?” Ame said. “It wants the bones-outside to pay some attention to it.”

“If we can’t get their attention with computer displays and polarized light, there’s not much hope for a Cuddly,” Shira said.

The little beast hopped closer and chittered more loudly.

“It’s getting awfully close to the avoidance zone.” Heln frowned. “I wonder…”

“I think the thing’s showing some reaction,” Jao said.

The face-legs, liberated from their box, swung idly to and fro. There was something about the stick-creature’s stance. It seemed to lower itself a few inches and become utterly still.

Encouraged, the Cuddly made another little hop forward.

There was a blur of motion so fast that Bram saw it only as an afterimage. The masklike face of the alien split vertically, and a long scooplike lip tipped with teeth flicked out and captured the little furry beast.

The hinged lip, longer than a man’s arm, snapped back, bearing the ensnared Cuddly to a barbed mouth. There was a single high-pitched squeal, and then with two crunches, the Cuddly was gone. The lobes of the toothed structure folded over to become a mask again.

The hum of human conversation in the chamber stopped abruptly. People stood frozen. Every Cuddly in sight streaked for a hiding place and disappeared. The insect-being stood preening itself with its hooked facial limbs. Its fellows paused in their rambles and turned their jelly-domed heads in its direction.

In the stunned silence, Jorv stood with dropped jaw, breathing hard. Suddenly he exclaimed, “Odonata!” and before Bram could stop him, he stepped up to the immobilized creature for a close look at its face.

There was another blurred movement as the creature seized Jorv with its facial limbs and bit his head off.

A woman screamed. People came out of their trances. The creature calmly continued crunching its way through Jorv’s neck and shoulder. Jao grabbed one of the picks that the archaeologists had left lying around. Bram found a steel pry bar. Several others joined them, and they ran to recover what was left of Jorv’s body from the leggy horror that was chomping its way through it.

It wouldn’t let go. A couple of men had Jorv’s body by the feet and were trying to pull it away. Bram grabbed the creature by one of its facial palps and tried to lever its jaws open with the pry bar. A hooked leg came up and raked him across the ribs. There was a sound of ripped cloth and a searing pain, but he held on. Jao swung his pick handle and smashed one of the bulging green eyes.

Even then it wouldn’t let go. It rotated in injured circles, still munching, lashing out at the struggling men with its barbed legs. The long abdomen whipped around and a man screamed as its horned pincers tore at his flesh.

Bram went berserk. He beat at the armored hide with his steel bar while Jao, grunting, labored with his pickax at the ruined jelly of the head. The thing refused to die. The limbs slashed blindly at the air. But it dropped its grisly meal, and the long toothed lip struck out again and again, looking for prey. Finally someone got a sharpened pole—one the diggers used for soundings—and ran the creature through, repeatedly, till it stopped moving.

Bram stood wearily, drenched in blood and gore, holding the slippery pry bar. He couldn’t tell how much of the blood was his own and how much had spilled from Jorv.

Shouts and screams echoed through the huge arena. The other insect-creatures, as if by a common signal, had gone on the attack. On a high balcony, the tragedy of Jorv was repeated as a stick-being pursued a fleeing woman and caught her with its facial snare. People came running, too late, to her aid. They beat and stabbed at the creature with whatever came to hand. One of the rescuers was flung away, disemboweled by a stroke of a hind claw. The tattered body tumbled slowly through the air toward the distant floor below.