was five and my mother was three days dead. It was the fear of death, stinking, oppressive, and omnipresent. I am always afraid at the beginning of a hunt. It made no difference, this day, that I had gone on two hundred and fifteen others; it was this one that was immediate and frightening. If I was killed in these jungles, Eternity Combine could never reach me in time to restore me to life. If I died here, I stayed dead. Forever is a long, long time.
Why the risk? It does seem strange that, in a galaxy so diversified, so full of things to do and ways to earn a living, anyone would chose something as dangerous as Beast hunting. But there are always reasons. Man, a part of nature, is never totally illogical. He can generally come up with reasons for his actions. Sometimes, of course, the reasons may give rise to questions… Anyway, Crazy had a good reason for coming on this hunt: this Beast had killed his only brother, who had been on the last team that had gone after it. Crazy wanted revenge. No Hamlet, but every bit as determined. Lotus came because she can’t leave us if she knows we’re endangering ourselves. She would go insane waiting for us, so she comes along. Me? Money, in part. There was an enormous bounty on this Beast, and I was determined it would be one-third mine. Besides, I was born on Earth and the faults of the place partially warped me. I like to kill. Not anything but Beasts, you understand. I could never bring myself to murder another human being. But Beasts… Well, Beasts are different…
I loaded the last of the cameras into the floater, looked around for the others. “Lotus! Crazy! Let’s get a move on!”
“All right, all right,” Crazy said, stomping down the steps to the outside entrance of the guest house. We were staying on Congressman Horner’s Earth ranch under the supervision of his aide, Sam Penuel, an altogether strange man, until the completion of the job. Horse, being as he weighed three hundred pounds plus fifty and was blessed with hooves, did not use the highly polished, slippery indoor steps of glittering plastiglass. Oh, his full name was Crazy Horse. No it wasn’t, either. Jackson Lincoln Puicca was his given name — after the famous general, the famous president and humanitarian, and the famous scientist. But we called him Crazy Horse — mostly because he was crazy — and because he sure did look like a horse.
Crazy was a natural mutant, not a product of the Artificial Wombs. One day there had been a nuclear war spreading through the civilized galaxy. Several generations later, there was Crazy — muscular, bright, shaggy- headed, and horse-behinded. Not a Beast, mind you; a valuable man on a bounty hunt.
“Where’s Lotus?” I asked.
“Out picking berries somewhere. You know her.”
“You know
Crazy Horse stomped his hooves, folded his hands in supplication. “What
Lotus settled on the ground next to me. She fingered the delicate, elongated shells that were her elfin ears, looked at Crazy. “Yours are bigger. I don’t think I should make nasty remarks about another person’s ears if mine were distended bladders like yours.”
Crazy snorted, shook his huge head so that his wild mane of hair flopped, fluffed, and covered his baggy ears.
Satisfied, Lotus said, “I’m on time, I trust.”
“Trouble is,” I said, putting an arm around her tiny waist (twenty inches) and looking down on her small form (four feet eleven), “is that you know damned well we’d wait for you all day and not be angry.”
“That’s cause I’m the prettiest girl around,” she snapped, her green-blue eyes adance.
“Not much competition on an all-male ranch,” Crazy muttered.
“And you, Crazy, are the handsomest horse I’ve seen here.” She smiled, and she said it so that he didn’t know whether to be mad or to laugh. So he laughed.
That was Lotus. She was cute as Christmas multiplied by Halloween and Easter — and she knew it, which wasn’t always so bad because she could pull her own weight easily enough. Aside from being one of the best botanists specializing in post-A-war plants, she was our aerial reconnaissance expert since she could fly ahead, land where a floater would never fit, and let us know what was dangerous or interesting that stood in our way. You say, But why a botanist on a bounty hunt? Well, true, we usually stalked killer animals that disturbed the small towns on the rural (since the war) planets. But now and again there were plants which were every bit as deadly as the Beasts. There were those walking plants on Fanner II that latched onto the nearest warm-blooded thing (often human), lashed roots around it, grew through it all night long, absorbed it, and walked away with the sunrise — a few inches taller, sporting a few new leaf buds, and satisfied until darkness came again. Which was every nine hours on Fanner II. Thus, Lotus.
“Let’s get going,” I said. “I want these cameras set before dark.”
“After you, Butterfly,” Crazy said, bowing as low as he could, considering his less-than-human posterior, and sweeping his arm in a courtly gesture of chivalry.
Lotus breezed into the floater like a puff of smoke. Crazy followed, and I went last, dogging the door behind. We had three seats across the front of that tub — Lotus between us. I was pilot.
A floater is a round ball with an inner and outer hull, each independent of the other. This way, if you ever meet an eighteen foot bat, like on Capistrano, you can have an outer hull beaten all to hell and never feel it inside or let it deflect the floater, shunting you off your course. The inner hull carries the drive engines.
I pulled back on the stick, lifted us, set out for the forest-jungle that had spread outward from the Harrisburg Crater. The screens gave us a view of the woods: ugly, festering, and at the edges gray-green ferns with thick leaves interlaced with spidery fluff that held heavy brown spoor balls. Later, these gave way to giant trees that choked the ferns and did away with them but were still just as gray and lifeless.
“You haven’t said much about this Beast that killed Garner,” Crazy said. Garner was his brother. His twin, in fact, though Garner was perfectly normal.
“I’m trying not to think about it.”
“Tell us,” Lotus said, pulling the thin membrane of her wings about her like a cloak. “Tell us all that Mr. Penuel told you.”
“Mainly, we’re the fifth team to be sent after this Beast.”
“The others?” Crazy asked.
“Garner wasn’t its only victim. There were twenty-two in the other four teams all totaled. Twenty were never seen again.”
“The other two?” Lotus asked.
“Rescue parties brought them out — in pieces.”
Below, the world was gray-green…
Five miles into the forest where the huge, gnarled trees were dominant, I set the floater down in a small, rare clearing. Lotus went ahead to check for other clearings and crossings where it might be wisest to place the cameras and their triggers. If anything passes the electric eyes set ten feet before the cameras, it starts the film spinning. Chances were, we would get plenty of strange things on the film, but our killer would be easy to spot in the crowd. We had three descriptions from townspeople — all three making him around eight feet tall, man-like, and ugly. There were a lot of things that fit the first and last parts, but few of these Beasts were man-like. None of the descriptions gave any indication, however, why twenty-two experienced bounty hunters had not killed it.
Crazy was setting up the electric eyes and stringing the trip wire back to me, concealing it with a fine layer of dust. I was rigging the cameras in the rocks and bushes. Both of us had our backs to the same part of the forest.
That was a mistake…
II
Crazy would have heard it first except he still had his hair down over his ears, hindering his usually keen hearing. When I heard it — the snapping and low, fierce keening — it was almost on top of us. Whirling, I brought my gun up…
And up and up and up… Damn, was it big! Big and quiet, which is a combination we hit upon more often
