John Brunner - To Conquer Chaos

Frantically men came running from all directions, some carrying heatbeams, some with hatchets or other makeshift weapons, only to stop irresolutely on seeing how vast this thing really was. Towering over them, it seemed that not even a heatbeam on full power could possibly do more than madden it.

A frightened man swung around and saw Grandfather approaching behind Nestamay. In a scream like a child’s, he demanded to be told what to do. Grandfather, taking in the size of the monster, paled, and Nestamay felt a pang of spiteful amusement.

“Heatbeams!” Grandfather shouted at last, and Keefe caught the order. He had already anticipated it; he was manhandling one of the bulky projectors with its trailing umbilical cord of insulated cable. Now he supplemented it.

“Get between it and the dome! Drive it away!” he yelled.

Grim-faced, men moved to obey. Down came a lashing tentacle, sweeping clear an area twenty feet in radius, and caught at the cord of one of the heatbeams. It snapped like thread. The man bearing the useless weapon shouted and tried to run; he stumbled. The tentacle cracked across his back like a whip, and he lay still.

“Don’t stand looking-do something!” Grandfather bellowed.

Keefe was already doing it. He had used the distraction of the past few seconds to get his beam set up between the thing and the hole in the dome. Now he switched the power on.

The thing’s narrowest, topmost tentacles blackened instantly. It howled. It lashed out. The heat increased inversely with the square root of the tentacles’ distance from the projector, and four tentacles at once shrivelled to ash. Another projector started up, blazing away their accumulated power at something like a megawatt in three minutes.

But the heatbeams told. The thing began to sidle away; paused on discovering that the pain lessened; lashed out anew and lost more tentacles. Men dived out of its path as it began to retreat, and screamed with excitement and relief. They picked up rocks and hurled them from safely beyond the range of its tentacles. Others who had taken the time to fetch weapons now joined in pursuit, using javelins and arrows fashioned from scrap metal. Nestamay found she had been biting her lip so hard she could taste blood, and forced cramped jaw muscles to relax as the danger dwindled.

“Why was there no alarm?” Grandfather shouted-at Keefe, wrestling with his heatbeam.

Nestamay clutched his arm. “Grandfather, I told you! Jasper turned the alarm off!”

“You’re out of your mind, girl!” Grandfather blazed. “No one could turn it off. No one would think of turning it off and putting all our lives in danger.”

“Then where is Jasper?” Keefe rasped. He set down the heavy projector and wiped his face, his one eye on the fleeing thing as it headed for the East Brokes. “You’ve got to tackle him on this point, Maxall! The alarm’s never failed before, and I for one want to know why it failed this time!”

There was no doubt that the monster was in flight now. It was outdistancing its pursuers, and their rocks, javelins and even arrows were falling short. Watching it, Grandfather licked his lips.

“Not this time!” Nestamay said fiercely. “What’s the good of my having Jasper’s children and keeping up the line if he’s going to wreck the Station with his insane behaviour?”

“That’s right,” Keefe said, and spat sidelong. Grandfather’s mouth worked, but no words came out.

And then there were two explosions in the distance.

A pause.

Two more.

They whirled to stare in the direction from which the noise had come-the direction taken by the injured thing. They were just in time to see it stumble, if such a polypodal beast could stumble, on the lower slopes of the East Brokes. It halted, swayed, began to topple.

Two more explosions, and it fell writhing, and from beyond it, from among the random rocks, a figure rose into sight. And another. Nestamay felt the world begin to spin around her.

Two strangers. Two strangers! Two new human beings!

To Conrad, seeing the towering monster approach, it had been for an instant as though the rest of the universe had ceased to exist. All his childhood terror of things from the barrenland leapt up to dominate his mind. Here was that terror incarnate, howling and flailing its uncountable limbs. The dome, the people, the outside world ceased to matter. There was only Conrad and the raging menace.

Then Yanderman spoke softly beside him. “Aim carefully, boy. Aim at the underside. At this range your slug will strike high rather than low.”

Aim? Slug? With a start Conrad remembered. He had been given a gun salvaged from Duke Paul’s camp, an eternity and an infinity ago. Gasping, thinking the monster was almost on him, he flung down his other equipment and jammed the gun’s stock to his shoulder as Yanderman had told him.

“Work the bolt and cock the gun,” Yanderman whispered. With a handful of thumbs Conrad managed it, a full second after Yanderman. He closed one eye and squinted along the barrel. Underside? What underside did a beast like that have? It was nothing but a seething mass of-

“Now!” Yanderman barked, and more by reflex than anything else Conrad fired. The two shots sounded very slightly apart, but it wasn’t the combined noise that startled Conrad; it was the way the gun had hit back at him, bruising his shoulder.

“Hold it tighter this time,” Yanderman instructed, as coolly as if the oncoming thing had been a harmless bit of game. “Work the bolt now. Aim again.”

The second time was much better. The two shots were simultaneous. The thing uttered a pain-crazed scream and seemed to lose control of its numerous legs. It swayed and lowered some of its tentacles, revealing huge smears of bluish-grey ichor on the front of its body.

“We’re getting it!” Conrad yelled, and without waiting for Yanderman’s order fired again. A moment later, having taken more care with his aiming, Yanderman let go his own third shot.

And the thing gave a bubbling moan and fell sidelong to the ground.

Conrad jumped up, clutching his gun in both hands, to stare at the dying monster, and would have gone rashly forward had not Yanderman caught his arm.

“It may take a long time to die!” he warned. “Keep well clear of those tentacles. See what I mean?”

As though to illustrate the lesson, a lashing limb had whipped through the air and cracked whipwise to the ground at least thirty feet from the prostrate body. Conrad shivered and took a reflex step back.

“I doubt if it’s in a fit state to come after us,” Yanderman murmured. “All we have to worry about now is the reception committee. I just hope they weren’t saving this beast for some special purpose!”

Conrad blanched. Yanderman sounded appallingly serious, though it was hard to imagine what purpose a thing like this could possibly be wanted for. Nonetheless, it was true that the people who had come in pursuit from the dome at the foot of the slope and who now had seen the two newcomers were approaching with some wariness, pausing to retrieve javelins and arrows expended on the fleeing monster.

“Wait for them to react first,” Yanderman recommended. It was a strain on Conrad, but he complied.

The reaction was a peculiar one. Instead of coming close at once, or even calling out a greeting, the dome people halted the other side of the dying thing, out of reach of its tentacles, and stared up the slope. There was some discussion among themselves in tones too low for Conrad to catch, while still more people moved from the direction of the dome to join them.

“Ah, I see,” Yanderman said with a nod. “Waiting for a leader of some kind, I imagine. See the old man, the one with grey hair, being helped along by another man and a girl?” He pointed. Conrad did see the trio he was referring to.