Гарднер Дозуа - The Good Old Stuff

Grandma sighed gently and reminded herself again that Headquarters was as unlikely to miscalculate the overall probability of success as it was to select the wrong person to achieve it. There was only the tiniest, the most theoretical, of chances that so something might go wrong and that she would end her long career with the blundering murder of her own homeworld.

But there was that chance.

“There seem to be more down there every minute!” the pony was saying.

Grandma drew a deep breath.

“Must be several thousand by now,” she acknowledged. “It’s getting near breakthrough time, all right, but those are only the advance forces.” She added, “Do you notice anything like a glow of light down there, towards the center?”

The pony stared a moment. “Yes,” it said. “But I would have thought that was way under the red for you. Can you see it?”

“No,” said Grandma. “I get a kind of feeling, like heat. That’s the transmitter beginning to come through. I think we’ve got them!” The pony shifted its bulk slowly from side to side. “Yes,” it said resignedly, “or they’ve got us.”

“Don’t think about that,” Grandma ordered sharply and clamped one more mental lock shut on the foggy, dark terrors that were curling and writhing under her conscious thoughts, threatening to emerge at the last moment and paralyze her actions.

She had opened her black bag and was unhurriedly fitting together something composed of a few pieces of wood and wire, and a rather heavy, stiff spring ....

“Just be ready,” she added.

“I’ve been ready for an hour,” said the pony, shuffling its feet unhappily. They did no more talking after that. All the valley had become quiet about them. But slowly the hollow below was filling up with a black, stirring, slithering ride. Bits of it fluttered up now and then like strips of black smoke, hovered a few yards above the mass and settled again.

Suddenly, down in the center of the hollow, there was something else.

The pony had seen it first, Grandma Wannattel realized. It was staring in that direction for almost a minute before she grew able to distinguish something that might have been a group of graceful miniatures spires. Semi-transparent in the darkness, four small domes showed at the corners, with a larger one in the center. The central one was about twenty feet high and very slender.

The whole structure began to solidify swiftly ....

The Halpa Transmitter’s appearance of crystalline slightness was perhaps the most mind-chilling thing about it. For it brought instantly a jarring sense of what must be black distance beyond all distances, reaching back unimaginably to its place of origin. In that unknown somewhere, a prodigiously talented and determined race of beings had labored for human centuries to prepare and point some stupendous gun. and were able then to bridge the vast interval with nothing more substantial than this dark sliver of glass that had come to rest suddenly in the valley of the Wend.

But, of course, the Transmitter was all that was needed; its deadly poison lay in a sluggish, almost inert mass about it. Within minutes from now, it would waken to life, as similar transmitters had wakened on other nights on those lost and burning world s. And in much less than minutes after that, the Halpa invaders would be hurled by their slender machine to every surface section of Noorhut—no longer inert, but quickened into a ravening, almost indestructible form of vampiric life, dividing and sub-dividing in its incredibly swift cycle of reproduction, fastening to feed anew, growing and dividing again-Spreading, at that stage, much more swiftly than it could be exterminated by anything but the ultimate weapons!

The pony stirred suddenly, and she felt the wave of panic roll up in it. “It’s the Transmitter, all right,” Grandma’s thought reached it quickly. “We’ve had two descriptions of it before. But we can’t be sure it’s here until it begins to charge itself. Then it lights up—first at the edges, and then at the center. Five seconds after the central spire lights up, it will be energized too much to let them pull it back again. At least, they couldn’t pull it back after that, the last time they were observed.

And then we’d better be ready—” The pony had been told all that before. But as it listened it was quieting down again.

“And you’re going to go on sleeping!” Grandma Wannattel’s thought told Grimp next. “No matter what you hear or what happens, you’ll sleep on and know nothing at all any more until I wake you up .... “ Light surged up suddenly in the Transmitter—first into the four outer spires, and an instant later into the big central one, in a sullen red glow. It lit the hollow with a smoky glare. The pony took two startled steps backwards.

“Five seconds to go!” whispered Grandma’s thought. She reached into her black bag again and took out a small plastic ball. It reflected the light from the hollow in dull crimson gleamings. She let it slip down carefully inside the shaftlike frame of the gadget she had put together of wood and wire. It clicked into place there against one end of the compressed spring.

Down below, they lay now in a blanket fifteen feet thick over the wet ground, like big, black, water-sogged leaves swept up in circular piles about the edges of the hollow. The tops and sides of the piles were stirring and shivering and beginning to slid e down toward the Transmitter.

“... five, and go!” Grandma said aloud. She raised the wooden catapult to her shoulder.

The pony shook its blunt-horned head violently from side to side, made a strangled, bawling sound, surged forward and plunged down the steep side of the hollow in a thundering rush.

Grandma aimed carefully and let go.

The blanket of dead-leaf things was lifting into the air ahead of the pony’s ground-shaking approach in a weightless, silent swirl of darkness which instantly blotted both the glowing Transmitter and the pony’s shape from sight. The pony roared once as the blackness closed over it. A second later, there was a crash like the shattering of a hundred-foot mirror—and at approximately the same moment, Grandma’s plastic ball exploded somewhere in the center of the swirling swarm.

Cascading fountains of white fire filled the whole of the hollow.

Within the fire, a dense mass of shapes fluttered and writhed frenziedly like burning rags. From down where the fire boiled fiercest rose continued sounds of brittle substances suffering enormous violence. The pony was trampling the ruined Transmitter, making sure of its destruction.

“Better get out of it!” Grandma shouted anxiously. “What’s left of that will all melt now anyway!”

She didn’t know whether it heard her or not. But a few seconds later, it came pounding up the side of the hollow again. Blazing from nose to rump, it tramped past Grandma, plunged through the meadow behind her, shedding white sheets of fire that exploded the marsh grass in its tracks, and hurled itself headlong into the pond it had selected previously. There was a great splash, accompanied by sharp hissing noises. Pond and pony vanished together under billowing clouds of steam.

“That was pretty hot!” its thought came to Grandma.

She drew a deep breath.

“Hot as anything that ever came out of a volcano!” she affirmed. “If you’d played around in it much longer, you’d have fixed up the village with roasts for a year.”

I’ll just stay here for a while, till I’ve cooled off a bit,” said the pony. Grandma found something strangling her then, and discovered it was the lortel’s tail. She unwound it carefully. But the lortel promptly reanchored itself with all four hands in her hair. She decided to leave it there. It seemed badly upset.