The Haunted Earth

noise like popcorn popping. 'Just bring me those papers, will you?'

'Sir, yes,' the adjunct said. But it just stood there.

'Well?' Tesserax asked.

'Knee joint my bent is some, sir,' the robot said, mournfully. It made an obvious effort and broke the temporary paralysis, tottered hesitantly forward toward the alien. 'Are you here, sir,' it said, handing him the crumpled pile of print-outs. 'Thought drop them would I.'

'But you didn't.'

The robot was very self-satisfied. 'No, sir. Held them did tight I and fool no make myself of.'

'Very good,' Tesserax said, sorting the print-outs into two groups.

The robot suddenly coughed and fell into the table, knocked the bottles of liquor over and frightened Helena. It slid slowly to the floor, like a drunkard passing out, landed on its backside and fell backwards, its metal skull thunking the blue tiles.

'When appropriations time comes around,' Tessie Alice Armbruster said, 'I'm going to call all of you as witnesses.'

Tesserax slid a complete set of print-outs across the table to Jessie. 'There you are. Five hundred a day, apiece.'

'It looks in order,' Jessie said.

They got out of their shape-changing chairs, and Jessie came around the table to shake hands with the maseni official. 'I think you'll see that your money was well spent with us, Mr. Galiotor.'

'I sincerely hope you're right,' Galiotor Tesserax said. 'Not only for the sake of the maseni treasury, but for the sake of all the beast's potential victims and for the sake of future maseni-Earth relations.' He let go of Jessie's hand as if he found contact with bone-jointed fingers less than pleasant. 'You'll leave on the starship Poogai tomorrow morning.'

'And good sir to you, luck!' the robot said, staring up at them from the floor, waving one five-fingered metal hand.

PART TWO: THE BEAST AT MIDNIGHT

Chapter Seventeen

Riding the escalator down the Poogai's long debarking tube into the largest terminal on the maseni home world, Tesserax said, 'Oh, dear! I forgot to warn you about the Protector.'

Jessie said, 'Who?'

Tesserax slapped the top of his hairless, bulbous head and said, 'Oh, damnation and thunderpunt! I really should have remembered it. It's all quite traumatic if you aren't expecting it — and even if you are.' He looked anxiously ahead at the rapidly approaching terminal entrance, and he said, 'Now don't be alarmed, sir, when it charges at you with all those sharpened teeth and claws.'

'Teeth and claws?' Helena said.

'Teeth and claws?' Jessie said, clutching Helena's arm and.wondering if they should turn around and fight the traffic the whole way to the top of the moving stairs.

'Protector?' Brutus asked. 'What's the matter with this toothy son of a bitch, anyhow?'

'The Protectors are one of our more colorful racial myths,' the alien said. 'There's one of them at every space port. You see, in the early days of maseni space travel—'

But the steps had run out, and they were forced through the door by a crush of other Poogai passengers on the escalator behind them. They walked into the arrivals hall before Tesserax could tell them anything more.

The arrivals hall was a masterpiece of aesthetic engineering, fully five hundred feet on a side, the walls cut by enormous windows shaped like the windows in an Earth cathedral and soaring from the floor to a point just a few feet short of the lofty ceiling, some hundred feet overhead. Thick, transparent pillars supported the massive, luminescent arches which held up the domed ceiling. All of this was more than mere supportive architecture. The windows, just like cathedral windows, were made of thousands of bits of colored glass cemented together to form abstract patterns which cast eerie images across the great, white floor. The transparent pillars and the luminescent white arches high over them were carved with hundreds of small figures, maseni flesh-and-blooders as well as maseni supernaturals: one great, panoramic, twisting, twining bas-relief that took the breath away and made one think the pillars were moving, the arches shimmering and twisting with the strivings of thousands of little living beings….

'The Protector—' Jessie began, not having forgotten the warning about teeth and claws despite the beauty that had taken his breath away.

However, before he could finish what he had been about to ask Tesserax, a huge, dark-winged monstrosity, which had been perched on one of the high arches, leapt away from its glowing white rafter and dropped toward them like a stone, screaming at the top of its voice, like an aircraft plunging toward file earth….

'Good God!' Jessie said, having forgotten altogether that Pritchard Robot had proven God was no good. He stepped backward into the passengers who were crowding into the terminal behind him.

'Never fear,' Tesserax said. 'It's a terrifying experience, but the thing won't harm you.'

The beast was fully as large as an elephant, but much meaner looking, craggier than any pachyderm, with a great head much like that of an enraged lion and a mouth that took up half of its fluttercar-sized skull. With one bite, it could devour all of them, with nothing left sticking between its gravestone teeth. Its eyes were a pair of dinnerplate red discs without any pupil delineation, and they appeared to be focused directly on Jessie and Helena. The monster's wings flapped open, to slightly break its fall, though it still plummeted at them too fast for comfort. In the last second before it would be on them, it extended two telephone-pole legs tipped with talons as long as pitchfork tines and as thick as fat winter icicles. And then—

— it slammed into an invisible barrier five feet above their heads, flopped around as if in its death throes.

'The Protector,' Tesserax said.

They were directly beneath the beast as it regained its senses, and now it turned its red eyes straight upon them, looking even meaner from this vantage point. It began to claw at the barrier with its big talons; it hissed at them, showing row on row of razored teeth and a tongue tipped with what appeared to be a steel barb.

The other passengers from the Poogai passed them, with hardly a glance at the thunder monster apparently lying on thin air only a few feet overhead.

'In the early days of maseni space travel,' Tesserax continued, peering into the vicious red eyes glaring down at them, 'our people encountered a murderous alien race somewhat superior to our own. A galactic war ensued, and we were nearly defeated. The enemy, a race much like your mythical centaurs but far more violent, drove us to our home world and then landed here to claim complete victory and to exterminate our people. Strangely, however, none of these aliens could remain on the surface of our home world for more than a few minutes; they died in the most terrible agony. At first, it was thought that some bacterium or some trace gas in the home world atmosphere was extremely toxic to these invaders. But when they donned space suits and used special tanked air from their own world, they still crumpled up and died when they set foot on our soil. Only one of them lasted long at all, and he managed to hold on for eight long hours, raving about horrendous steel claws that were ripping up his insides — and great mad, red eyes staring relentlessly down at him, dark wings, many teeth…. Nothing more than the lunatic rantings of a creature driven mad by pain. However, over the thousands of years since then, the myth of the Protectors has grown and been nourished by the simpler people. Grown and nourished, in fact, until, now, we really have them.'

The Protector screamed and clawed the invisible shield more furiously than ever.

'But what was the real cause of those alien's deaths?' Jessie asked.