“Three in camp. Five more outside the maze. They’re working their way inward now.”
“Who allowed this to happen? Call Hosteen! Get those templates working! I want fifty drones built by morning! No, make it eighty! Of all the stupidity, Greenfield!”
“Yes, sir.”
“Get out!”
“Yes, sir.”
Boardman puffed furiously. He dialed for brandy, the thick, rich, viscous stuff made by the Prolepticalist Fathers on Deneb XIII. The situation was growing infuriating. He knocked back half a snifter of the brandy, gasped, filled the glass again. He knew that he was in danger of losing his perspective—the worst of sins. The delicacy of this assignment was getting to him. All these mincing steps, the tiny complications, the painstaking edgings toward and away from the goal. Rawlins in the cage. Rawlins and his moral qualms. Muller and his neurotic world-outlook. The little beasts that nipped at your heels here and thoughtfully eyed your throat. The traps these demons had built. And the waiting extragalactics, saucer-eyed, radio-sensed, to whom even a Charles Boardman was no more than an insensate vegetable. Doom overhanging all. Irritably Boardman stubbed out his cigar, and immediately stared at its unfinished length in astonishment. The ignition cap would not work a second time. He leaned forward, got a beam of infrared from the room generator, and kindled it once more, puffing energetically until it was lit. With a petulant gesture of his hand Boardman reactivated his communication link with Ned Rawlins.
The screen showed him moonlight, curving bars, and small furry snouts bristling with teeth.
“Ned?” he said. “Charles here. We’re getting you those drones, boy. We’ll have you out of that stupid cage in five minutes, do you hear, five minutes!”
2
Rawlins was very busy.
It seemed almost funny. There was no end to the supply of the little beasts. They came nosing through the bars two and three at a time, weasels, ferrets, minks, stoats, whatever they were, all teeth and eyes. But they were scavengers, not killers. God knew what drew them to the cage. They clustered about him, brushing his ankles with their coarse fur, pawing him, slicing through his skin with their claws, biting his shins.
He trampled them. He learned very quickly that a booted foot placed just behind the head could snap a spinal column quickly and effectively. Then, with a swift kick, he could sweep his victim into a corner of the cage, where others would pounce upon it at once. Cannibals, too. Rawlins developed a rhythm of it. Turn, stomp, kick. Turn, stomp, kick. Turn, stomp, kick. Crunch. Crunch. Crunch.
They were cutting him up badly, though. For the first five minutes he scarcely had time to pause for breath. Turn. Stomp. Kick. He took care of at least twenty of them in that time. Against the far side of the cage a heap of ragged little corpses had risen, with their comrades nosing around hunting for the tender morsels. At last a moment came when all the scavengers currently inside the cage were busy with their fallen cohorts, and no more lurked outside. Rawlins had a momentary respite. He seized a bar with one hand and lifted his left leg to examine the miscellany of cuts, scratches, and bites. Do they give a posthumous Stellar Cross if you die of galactic rabies, he wondered? His leg was bloody from the knee down, and the wounds, though not deep, were hot and painful. Suddenly he discovered why the scavengers had come to him. While he paused he had time to inhale, and he smelled the ripe fragrance of rotting meat. He could almost visualize it: a great bestial corpse, split open at the belly to expose red sticky organs, big black flies circling overhead, perhaps a maggot or two circumnavigating the mound of flesh-Nothing was rotting in here. The dead scavengers hadn’t had time to go bad; little was left of most of them but picked bones by now anyway.
Rawlins realized that it must be some sensory delusion: an olfactory trap touched off by the cage, evidently. The cage was broadcasting the stink of decay. Why? Obviously to lure that pack of little weasels inside. A refined form of torture. He wondered if Muller had somehow been behind it, going off to a nearby control center to set up the scent.
He had no further time for contemplation. A fresh battalion of beasts was scurrying across the plaza toward the cage. These looked slightly larger, although not so large that they would not fit between the bars, and their fangs had an ugly gleam in the moonlight. Rawlins hastily stomped three of the snuffing, gorging cannibals still alive in his cage and, in a wondrous burst of inspiration, stuffed them through the bars, giving them a wristflip that tossed them eight or ten meters outside the cage. Good. The newcomers halted, skidding, and began at once to pounce on the twitching and not quite dead bodies that landed before them. Only a few of the scavengers bothered to enter the cage, and these came spaced widely enough so that Rawlins had a chance to trample each in turn and toss it out to feed the onrushing horde. At that rate, he thought, if only new ones would stop coming he could get rid of them all.
New ones finally did stop coming. He had killed seventy or eighty by this time. The stink of raw blood overlaid the synthetic stench of rot; his legs ached from all the carnage, and his brain was orbiting dizzyingly. But at length the night grew peaceful once more. Bodies, some clad in fur, some just a framework of bone, lay strewn in a wide arc before the cage. A thick, deep-hued puddle of mingled bloods spread over a dozen square meters. The last few survivors, stuffed on their gluttony, had gone slinking away without even trying to harass the occupant of the cage. Weary, drained, close to laughter and close to tears, Rawlins clung to the bars and did not look down at his throbbing blood-soaked legs. He felt the fire rising in them. He imagined alien microorganisms launching their argosies in his bloodstream. A bloated purpling corpse by morning, a martyr to Charles Boardman’s over- reaching deviousness. What an idiot’s move to step into the cage! What a doltish way to win Muller’s trust!
Yet the cage had its uses, Rawlins realized suddenly.
Three bulky brutes paraded toward him from different directions. They had the stride of lions, but the swinishness of boars: low-slung sharp-backed creatures, 100 kilograms or so, with long pyramidal heads, slavering thin-lipped mouths, and tiny squinting eyes arranged in two sets of two on either side just in front their ragged droopy ears. Curving tusks jutted down and intersected smaller and sharper canine teeth that rose from powerful jaws.
The trio of uglies inspected one another suspiciously, and performed a complex series of loping movements which neatly demonstrated the three-body problem as they executed circular interlocking trots by way of staking out territory. They rooted about a bit in the heap of scavenger corpses, but clearly they were no scavengers themselves; they were looking for living meat, and their disdain for the broken cannibalized little bodies was evident. When they had completed their inspection they swung about to stare at Rawlins, standing at a three- quarters-profile angle so that each of them had one pair of eyes looking at him straight on. Rawlins was grateful for the security of his cage. He would not care to be outside, unprotected and exhausted, with these three cruising the city for their dinner.
At that moment, of course, the bars of the cage silently began to retract.
3
Muller, arriving just then, took in the whole scene. He paused only briefly to admire the seductive vanishing of the cage into the recessed slots. He contemplated the three hungry pigs and the dazed, bloody form of Rawlins standing suddenly exposed before them. “Get down!” Muller yelled.
Rawlins got down by taking four running steps to the left, slipping on the blood-slicked pavement, and skidding into a heap of small cadavers at the edge of the street. In the same moment Muller fired, not bothering with keying in the manual sighting since these were not edible animals. Three quick bolts brought the pigs down. They did not move again. Muller started to go to Rawlins, but then one of the robots from the camp in Zone F appeared, gliding cheerfully toward them. Muller cursed softly. He pulled the destructor globe from his pocket and aimed the window at the robot. The probe turned a mindless blank face at him as he fired.
The robot disintegrated. Rawlins had managed to get up. “You shouldn’t have blasted it,” he said woozily. “It was just coming to help.”
