Zach Hughes - Tiger in the Stars

stays here on the Pride. I just use the mobile form as an eye. I have no idea of the range of this thing. If your brains are down there on the planet we might lose contact as we put stellar distances between these forms and the actual brain tissue.» Plank busied himself scanning the planet below with life-detector gear. For long minutes, the surface was silent. Then, acting on a sudden hunch, he directed the gear toward the two artificial bodies. «Ah,» he said. «He took the direct method and put them right with your bodies.» «That's both good and bad,» Heath said. «It makes things neat, but we'll have to be careful. You can send your mobile form into a dangerous situation and know that if it is destroyed, you're still alive.»

«We'll be careful,» Plank said. «Now let's see if that thing is still on the planet.» He set coordinates into a weapons bank and fired a single beam downward toward the accelerator, which the creature had been so anxious to defend. A portion of the accelerator disintegrated. Carefully Plank played the beam, making rubble of the entire installation. He got a great

deal of satisfaction out of the job, lingering over it, reducing the rubble to fine grains of sand. «That's enough, John,» Hara said, finally.

«Yes,» he said, «but I'd like to hear its roar when it returns and finds its favorite toy gone.» He began to set up the series of blinks that would carry them home, back to Earth. When all was ready, the sequence programed into the computer so that the trip would be automatic, he paused. «This is its home base,» he said. «Down there somewhere we could discover a lot about the thing if we had the time. It's obvious that it's gone. There's probably enough scientific information down there to make man its equal, over a period of time, but on the other hand, how much of its power does it draw from its home base?» «I think I follow you,» Hara said. «You're wondering if we should look to the future and try to preserve valuable information, or destroy the planet now on the small chance that the monster would be handicapped if cut off from its home base.» «We're not sure there'll be a future,» Heath said. Plank aimed a dozen killer missiles downward, each missile capable of driving into the planet's molten core. The explosions shattered a world, spewed magma into empty space, cooling even as the planet shattered. «It valued some of the installations enough to become very angry when I attacked them,» Plank said, in wonder. «And yet it went off and left them unguarded. Doesn't make sense.» As he directed the movement of the Pride he realized that many things didn't make sense. True, they were dealing with an alien mind, a mind of vast power, but the inconsistencies bothered him. The monster's chief form of enjoyment seemed to be eating, and according to its own words, it

did not need to eat. It had, apparently, used up the supply of the little food creatures, or at least thought it had, until Plank stumbled onto a world, previously untouched. A rational being, loving the «game» as much as the monster, would have used the creatures of Plank's World for seed stock. The monster leaped immediately into an orgy of gluttony and would have extinguished the life of the planet if Plank had not surprised him in the southern islands. That shortsighted orgy of eating was the act of an irresponsible mind. The act of a child. The act of a madman. And the great battle of the tinker-toy planet, in retrospect, was almost farcical. The monster had drawn on the childhood horrors in Plank's mind; it had taken Plank only a brief time to realize that none of the dangers he faced were real. Plank had been given a visual demonstration of the ability of the creature to move through space. At such speeds, with those powers of observation, the entire galaxy could have been given a minute search in what was to the creature a relatively short period of time, perhaps about 250,000 years. At any time during that period, there would have been enough men on Earth to provide a meal. But the creature had not made the diligent search necessary to locate one small planet far out toward the fringe of the galaxy. During the conflict on the tinker-toy planet, when Plank persisted in his stubborn efforts to destroy something the monster valued, there resulted what could only be described as a temper tantrum. The creature had joined Plank's efforts to destroy, doing much more damage in a few minutes than Plank had done in hours. And Plank remembered that petulant tone of voice when he was asked, «Why can't you be nice?» The enemy had vast power. The enemy could blaze a sun and move planets and shift men around with the power of its mind, but the enemy had a short attention span. The enemy, in a hurry to enjoy its favorite game, had left his home base unprotected, and that base was now drifting rubble in space. If a hope existed, the hope was in the creature's arrogance.

All-powerful, it felt it could divert his attention from its «servants,» leaving them to their own devices. Perhaps it would make one fatal mistake. Obviously it felt man to be the ultimate game, much more desirable than the food creatures. If the enemy were engrossed enough in its «enjoyment,» then Plank might have a chance. The problem was two-fold: to quickly find the creature on Earth and to quickly destroy it. But destroy it with what? With its own weapons? Surely it would be attuned to its own. Surely the creature would have, in that fantastic range of mental powers, a sense that would warn it if it were about to be attacked with weapons of its own making. There was even time for some philosophical questioning. Was the nature of all intelligent life warlike? For centuries man had made war on himself. Alone on his small world he had killed his fellows, finding new ways to maim and kill as technology developed. For three-quarters of a century there had been no war, and yet the arms development had gone on. Each ship that went into space was armed. The laser beams of Earth were akin to the beams mounted on the weapon pods of the Pride, though not so deadly. Man's atomic missiles were almost as destructive as the planet-killing missiles Plank had fired from the Pride. So the ancestors of the remaining member of another race must have fought among themselves. They had no enemies in space, other than themselves. But there was the barrier. Had an enemy come from intergalactic distances? Had the creature's race lost and been confined to the home galaxy? As long as man had understood the nature of the galaxy, scientists had predicted millions of habitable planets. Man's theory of the origin of life

made it logical that life had arisen on thousands of those life-zone planets. Man had sent messages into deep space, had built giant observatories to

try to detect signals from other intelligences, and all along there had been only the creature. Only two intelligent species in a galaxy? One of them so arrogant that it considered the other to be mere fodder? Both races warlike. Both adept at killing. And now one outnumbered the other by billions to one. It seemed that there must be a way for superior numbers to win. One thing was certain, man would not quietly await being swept into the maw of that thing. He would fight. CHAPTER FIFTEEN The Eater chose the tailored, densely populated landscape of Equatorial Africa as his beginning point. It appeared in a population band between contoured rows of natural jungle. There the rich farms were surrounded by neat villages, compact, dense with people. When it first materialized in a village square there were screams of terror and then silence. Attempts to flee were frozen in midstride. Quietly, docilely, the people of the village waited for the pawlike appendages to scoop them up. A force closed down over the village, cutting it off. When communications ceased from the first village, the utility companies sent technicians. The technicians did not return or report. Residents of nearby areas knew only that calls to the village were unanswered. In the village, itself, houses were opened as if they were nutshells, the morsels plucked from within. The Eater moved across farmlands, plucking isolated tidbits. It crushed his way through a dividing growth of carefully tailored jungle to numb a second village, leaving emptiness behind. Men