Clifford Simak - All Flesh Is Grass and Other Stories

"We haven't got a chance against them," she said. "They are brutes, strong. They are trained for war. Killing is their business."

The Hellhounds were walking out from their ship, heading cautiously and slowly toward the Earth ship.

"Not too sure of themselves yet," said Gary. "Probably we don't look too formidable to them, but they aren't taking any chances… not yet. In a little while they'll figure that we're comparatively harmless and they'll make their play."

The Hellhounds were dog-trotting now, their scaly bodies glistening redly in the sun, their blunt feet lifting little puffs of dust as they ran along.

"What are we going to do, Gary?" Caroline asked.

"Fort up," said Gary. "Fort up and do some thinking. We can't lick these things, hand to hand and rough and tumble. It would be like trying to wrestle a combined alligator and grizzly bear."

"Fort up? You mean the ship."

Gary nodded. "We got to buy us some time. We have to get a thing or two figured out. As it is, we're caught flatfooted."

"What if they find a way of getting at us, even in the ship."

Gary shrugged. "That's a chance we take."

The Hellhounds separated, spreading out to left and right, angling out to come at the ship from two directions.

"You better get into the lock," said Gary. "Grab hold of the closing lever and be ready. When I come, I may have to move fast. There's no telling what these gents are fixing to uncork."

But even as he spoke, the two reptiles charged, angling in at a burst of speed that almost made them blur, a whirlwind of dust spiraling up behind them.

"In we go!" yelled Gary.

He heard Caroline's feet beating a tattoo on the steps.

For a split second he stood there, still facing the charging Hellhounds, then whirled and leaped up the steps, catapulting himself into the lock. He saw Caroline swinging the lever down. The ladder ran up into its seat and the lock slammed home. Through its closing edge he caught sight of the beasts as they swung about in a skidding turn, cheated of their kill.

Gary wiped his forehead. "Close thing," he said. "We almost waited too long. I had no idea they could move that fast."

Caroline nodded. "They figured that we wouldn't. They saw a chance to catch us at the very start. Remember how they waddled. That was to make us think that they couldn't move too fast."

The voice said to them: "This is no way to fight."

"It's common sense," said Gary. "Common sense and good strategy."

"What is strategy?"

"Fooling the enemy," said Gary. "Working things so that you get an advantage over him."

"He'll be waiting for you when you come out. And you'll have to come out after a while."

"We rest and take it easy," said Gary, "while he tears up the ground outside and wears himself to a frazzle. And we do some thinking."

"It's a lousy way to fight," the voice insisted.

"Look," said Gary. "Who's doing the fighting here?

You or us."

"You, of course," the voice agreed, "but it's still no way to fight."

They sensed the mind withdraw, grumbling to itself.

Gary grinned at Caroline. "Not gory enough to suit him," he said.

Caroline had sat down in a chair and was staring at him, elbow on her knee, chin cupped in her hands.

"We haven't much to work with," she declared. "No electricity. No power. No nothing. This ship is deader than a doornail. It's lucky the lock worked manually or we'd been goners before we even started."

Gary nodded in agreement. "That voice bothers me the most," he said. "It has power, a strange sort of power. It can stop a spaceship dead in its tracks. It can fix guns so that they won't work. It can blanket out electricity; Lord knows what else it can do."

"It can reach into the unknown of space and time," said Caroline. "Into a place no one else could even find and it did that to bring us here."

"It's irresponsible," said Gary. "Back on Earth we'd call it insanity but what you and I would term insanity may be normal here."

"There's no yardstick," said Caroline. "No yardstick to measure sanity. No way in which one can establish a norm for correct behavior or a correct mentality. Maybe the voice is sane. Maybe he has a purpose and a method of arriving at that purpose we do not understand and for that we call him crazy. Every race must be different, must think differently… arrive at the same conclusion and the same result, perhaps, but arrive at them differently. You remember all those beings that came to confer with the Engineers. All of them were capable, perhaps more capable than we. Independently they might have been able to arrive at the same solution as we and perhaps much more easily and more effectively… and yet the Engineers sent them home again, because the Engineers could not work with them. Not because they were not capable, but because they thought so differently, because their mental processes ran at such divergent tangents that there was no basis for co-operation."

"And yet we thought like the Engineers," said Gary.

"Enough like them, at any rate, that we could work together. I wonder why that is."

Caroline wrinkled her forehead. "Gary, you are certain these goblin things out there are the same race that came to the city of the Engineers?"

"I would swear it," Gary told her. "I got a good look at the one that was there. It sort of… well, burned itself into my mind. I'll never quite forget it."

"And the voice," said Caroline. "I wonder if the voice has anything to do with the goblins."

"The goblins," said the voice, "are my pets. Like the dogs and cats you keep. A living thing to keep me from loneliness."

It did not surprise them to hear the voice again and each of them knew then that they had been waiting for it to speak up again.

"But," protested Caroline, "one of the goblins came to the city of the Engineers."

The voice chuckled at them. "Of course, human thing, of course. As my representative, of course. For I must have representatives, don't you see. In a material world, I must be fronted for by something that can be seen, that can be perceived. I could not very well go to a meeting of that great importance as a disembodied voice, as a thought stalking the corridors of that empty city. So I sent a goblin and I went along with him."

"What are you, voice?" Caroline asked. "Tell us what you are."

"I still don't think," said the voice, "that what you are doing is a good way to fight a duel. I think you're making a great mistake."

"What makes you think so, Butch?" asked Gary.

"Because," the voice said, "the Hellhounds are building a fire under your ship. It will be just a matter of time until they smoke you out."

Gary and Caroline glanced swiftly at one another, the same thought in their mind.

"No power," said Caroline, weakly.

"The heat absorption units," Gary cried.

"No power," said Caroline. "The absorption cells won't work."

Gary glanced toward the forward vision ports. Thin streamers of smoke were curling up outside the glass.

"The mushrooms burn well," the voice told them, "when they get old and dry. There are lots of old and dry mushrooms around. They'll have no trouble in keeping up the fire."

"Like smoking out a rabbit," said Gary, bitterly.

"You asked for it," the voice declared.

"Get out of here!" yelled Gary. "Get out of here and leave us alone, can't you."

They sensed it leave, mumbling to itself.

Like a bad dream, Gary thought. Like a Wonderland adventure, with he and Caroline the poor bewildered Alice stumbling through a world of vast incredibility.

Listening, they could hear the crackling of the fire. Now the smoke was a dense cloud through the forward ports.

How do you fight when you have no weapon? How do you get out of a spaceship-turned-into-an-oven? How do you think up a smart dodge when your time is numbered in hours, if not, indeed, in minutes?