“No.” I turned my back on Klicks, furious.
“Well,” said Klicks, his voice growing closer, “if you feel that strongly about it…”
“Thank you, Miles.” I breathed a sigh of relief, and then, just in time to save me, refilled my lungs. “I appreciate—”
Thick fingers closed around my neck from behind. I tried to cry out, but couldn’t force enough air through my constricted windpipe to generate anything beyond a faint grunt. I brought my hands up to pry Klicks’s fingers free, but he was too strong, much too strong, his arms like a robot’s, crushing the life out of my body. My vision was blurring and my lungs felt like they were going to burst.
I twisted and bent frantically from my waist. In a mad, desperate moment, I tried throwing Klicks—something I knew I’d never be able to do—but damned if he didn’t flip right over my shoulder, me tossing his ninety kilos as if they were less than half that amount. Of course—the reduced gravity!
I gulped air, my vision slowly clearing. Adrenaline pumped within me, fighting off the effects of the sleeping pill. Klicks picked himself up and we squared off, hands on knees, facing each other. He swung, a great sweeping movement of his right arm, like a grizzly scooping fish from a stream. I jumped back as far as I could in the tight confines of the habitat. From bear to tiger in an instant, he crouched and leapt, his body colliding with mine, knocking me to the cold steel floor next to his crash couch, a great thundering bang from the partially empty water tank beneath our feet echoing throughout the chamber. Then he smashed me across the face, the stone in a ring Tess had given him slicing open my cheek.
What the hell had gotten into Klicks? A Martian, that’s what. Of course. The yellow eyes in the dark. If my wrist alarm hadn’t woke me while the aliens were inside the
That was easier said than done, though. As much as I sometimes disliked the man, as much I had fantasized about splitting his skull with the trusty cold chisel I had used for years to open slabs of rock, I had strong moral compunctions about physically hurting another human being. Even in self-defense, I found it hard to fight. My natural reaction was that a reasonable person would respond better to words than to fisticuffs. But Klicks, or at least the Het riding within him, had none of those same misgivings—as the bit of white froth at the corner of his mouth made clear.
He smashed me again in the face, hard. Although I’d never experienced the sensation before, I was sure that was what a breaking nose felt like. Blood soaked my mustache.
Still, I realized, he wasn’t trying to kill me. He could have done that just by shooting me in the back with his elephant gun. Vast suspicions would be aroused if both of us didn’t return from the Mesozoic. Hell, Tess had joked that she’d expected only one of us to come back alive, given how poorly we’d been getting on of late. Of course, nobody on the project knew what I wrote in this diary, or what I said to Schroeder, and the idea of psychological testing, mainstay of the moon shots (back when the world could afford moon shots), was completely foreign to those putting together paleontological digs. Hell, paleontologists routinely go off into the field for weeks on end without anyone taking steps to see if those particular people could get along.
Whether the Hets knew or understood any of that, I couldn’t say. But they obviously wanted me incapacitated so that I could be entered by one of their kind. For that experience, twice had been more than enough. Fear and revulsion at the idea renewed my strength. I reached behind my head for the footrest of Klicks’s crash couch and with all my energy spun the chair on its swivel base, slamming its arm into the side of his head. The armrest was padded, but Klicks, in his lackadaisical way, had left his shoulder strap hanging across it. The aluminum buckle split the skin across the top of his ear where it hit. The blow put him off balance long enough for me to knock him over. I scrambled to my feet, putting the bulk of the crash couch between him and me.
He tried to feint left and right but, as he did so, I noticed his movements were awkward, his torso turning by repositioning his legs instead of pivoting from the waist. It was as if the Het within him hadn’t yet worked out the finer points of controlling a human body.
We circled the small room several times, me rotating the chair to always keep its long dimension between us. I didn’t know whether my fear was valid, but I worried that if he chased me much longer in a counterclockwise direction the damned thing would unscrew from its base.
As we swung by the lab bench, I grabbed our mineralogical scale and threw it at his forehead. If he had been operating under his own volition, Klicks would have easily avoided the impact, but the Het seemed to hesitate about which muscles to move. By the time it pulled Klicks’s head aside, it was too late: the heavy base hit just above Klicks’s one continuous eyebrow. He screamed in pain. Blood welled from the wound and I hoped it would obscure his vision.
No such luck. A thin layer of phosphorescent blue jelly seeped out of the cut, stanching the flow. I was running out of ideas, not to mention stamina. My heart pounded and I felt my strength flagging.
That was my one hope. I gave his crash couch a healthy twist, setting it spinning around, then jumped as far as I could across the room. Klicks wheeled to face me. We danced for position, him swinging his great arms again the way a bear swipes with its paws. Finally he thought he had me trapped in the corner where the flat rear wall met the curving outer wall. He stood spread-eagle, his legs apart, his arms raised, trying to prevent me slipping past. This was the moment. The one chance, the only hope. I ran straight at him and, with all the force I could muster, brought my knee up into his groin, slamming it as brutally as I could, all my inertia and all my strength concentrating on bashing his testicles back up into his body cavity.
Klicks doubled from the waist, his fists moving under human instinct instead of Het command to protect his private parts from further assault. In the brief interval while the Het struggled to regain control of its biological vehicle, I made my final move. I grabbed Klicks’s elephant gun from where he’d left it propped up next to the microwave-oven stand and smashed the length of its steel barrel across the back of his neck. He stood as if frozen for several seconds, then slumped to the ground, possibly dead, certainly unconscious. I suspected that if Klicks had survived the blow, and that was indeed in doubt, it would only be a matter of minutes, or even seconds, before the Het would find a way to turn this biological machine back on.
I hurried to the medicine refrigerator, mounted between doors number two and three. We’d been provided with a complete pharmacopoeia, of course, since no one knew what Mesozoic germs would do to us. I hadn’t spent much time inside the thing before, but thankfully all the drugs were categorized by function. Peering through clouds of my own breath condensing in the cold air from the interior, I scanned the labels. Analgesics, antibiotics, antihistamines. Ah! Antiviral agents. There were several vials in that section, but the one I seized upon was para- 22-Ribavirin—better known as Deliverance, the miracle AIDS cure.
I plunged a syringe through the rubber cap, drawing forth the milky liquid. I knew how to use needles from my work in the comparative-anatomy lab, but—my father’s pain-racked face flashed before me—I’d never injected a human being before. I ran to Klicks, my footfalls echoing in the steel-walled room, and bent over his crumpled form. He was still breathing, but shallowly, slowly, life apparently ebbing from him. I forced the needle through the thick wall of his right carotid artery, pumped the plunger down, and, never taking my eyes off him, slumped back against the door to our garage, the agony from my shattered nose growing, throbbing, multiplying.
It took a while—I’d lost track of the passage of time—but finally small amounts of blue jelly began to seep from Klicks’s temple. But something was wrong. It wasn’t undulating the way I’d seen the Hets move before, nor was it glowing. I rolled him over so that his bruised face was visible. One of his eyelids was stuck shut by dried blood, but the other fluttered open for a few seconds and he spoke in a rasping whisper. “You animals—”
I got an orange garbage bag and a spoon and, taking immense care not to touch it, began scraping away what little of the jelly had escaped. No more than two tablespoonfuls. The rest, dead or dying I hoped, seemed destined to remain inside Klicks’s head until his own antibodies and white corpuscles could deal with it as they would any other inert viral material.
I stuffed the bag into a metal box, went down the ramp to our outside door, and heaved the box as far as I could in the reduced gravity. It sailed out onto the cracked mud plain far below; in the moonlight, I saw it bounce twice when it hit.
