ruptured corpse from which drained a yellow ooze: one of the lumpish bristle-backed creatures he had seen browsing on another hummock. Steam created by the electric energy had burst the creature's heavy gut; nearby a dozen other such creatures grazed undisturbed by the incident.
The fence had not been damaged; Glawen returned to his makeshift couch.
Glawen lay for a few moments listening to the night. From far and near came a variety of sounds: long low eerie moans, coughing grunts and hoarse snarling grinding noises; cackles and squeaks, whistles and fluting cries uncannily similar in timbre to the human voice…. Glawen dozed, and woke only to the light of Syrene rising in the east.
Glawen made a perfunctory breakfast of packaged rations, and sat for a few moments wondering how best to conduct his mission. Beyond the river rose the mass of Shattorak a low cone shrouded in jungle two thirds of the way to the summit.
Glawen disarmed the electric fence and stepped from the cabin to fold it into a bundle. He was instantly struck with a stench of such immoderate proportions that he jerked back into the Skyrie, gasping and wheezing. At last he gained his composure and looked respectfully out toward the corpse. The usual plague of carrion-eaters: insects, birds, rodents, reptiles and the like, was nowhere in evidence; had all these creatures been repelled by the stench? Glawen reflected for a few moments, then consulted the taxonomic almanac included in the flyer's information system. The dead creature, so he discovered, belonged to a small but distinct order, unique and indigenous to Ecce, and was known as a 'sharloc’. According to the index, the sharloc was notorious for ‘an odorous exudation secreted by bristles along the dorsal integument. The odor is both repulsive and vile.'
After a moment or two of reflection, Glawen donned his jungle-suit: a garment of laminated fabric which insulated him from exterior heat and humidity by means of a flowing film of cool air from a small air-conditioning unit. He stepped outside and with a machete hacked the sharloc corpse into four segments, grateful that the filters in his air-conditioning unit excluded all but a trace of the stench.
One of the segments he tied to the forward end of the Skyrie’s frame with twenty feet of light cord; he similarly tied a second gobbet to the after end of the frame. The other two pieces he gingerly caught up in a bag and loaded upon the bed of the flyer.
Syrene now stood an hour high in the east. Glawen looked to the north across the river, here two miles wide and marked only by drifting snags and detritus. Before him, at the back of swamp and jungle, nose the bulk of Shattorak, gloomy, brooding and sinister.
Glawen climbed into the Skyrie, took it aloft, and flew at low altitude back across the river with the two gobbets of sharloc dangling below. Where swamp impinged upon the river he saw a tribe of mud-walkers, hoping and sliding, leaping and marching, from tuft to tuft, running high-legged across the slime with great finesse and style, pausing to thrust down their lances in hopes of harpooning a mud slug. Glawen saw that they were being stalked by a flat black many-legged creature which slid across the slime with stealthy movements. Here, thought Glawen, was a good test of his theory. He changed course, to drift over the flat black predator, the segments of sharloc hanging low. The predator writhed forward suddenly, but the mud-walkers had fled in bounds and jumps; and now, from a distance, inspected the Skyrie with astonished attitudes.
The test, thought Glawen, had been indecisive. He flew on, toward the dark line of dendrons and water- logged trees where swamp merged with jungle. In one of the trees he noticed a monstrous serpent forty feet long and three feet in diameter, with fangs at one end and a scorpion’s sting at the other. It slid slowly down a branch, head dangling toward the ground. Glawen flew close above; it writhed and coiled and flailed its sting into the air and then slid rapidly away.
In this case, thought Glawen, the trial had seemed to yield positive results.
Skimming the treetops Glawen searched the area below and presently noticed a large hammer-headed saurian directly ahead. He lowered the Skyrie slowly above the mottled black and green back, until the sharloc segments dangled only three feet from the saurian’s head. It became agitated, lashed its heavy tail, roared and charged a tree; the tree fell crashing to the ground. The saurian pounded onward, whipping its tail to right and left.
Once again the test might be interpreted positively, but whatever the case, Glawen deemed it prudent to delay his expedition up the side of Shattorak until mid-day, when — so it was said — the beasts of Ecce became torpid. In the meantime, he must find cover for the Skyrie, to keep it safe from molestation. He approached the edge of the jungle, and landed in a small open area.
The mud-walkers had been watching with curiosity and a constant interchange of rattles and squeaks. With grotesque celerity they scampered around to the windward slide of the Skyrie, and slowly approached, beating on the ground with their lances and extending red ruffs to signal displeasure. Fifty feet from the Skyrie they halted and began to hurl mud-balls and twigs. In exasperation Glawen took the Skyrie into the air and flew back toward the river. A half-mile upstream he found a cove shaped by the current and dropped the Skyrie into the water, so it floated on its pontoons. He took it to a tuffet of thorn but was deterred from mooring the flyer by a horde of angry insects, oblivious to the submerged chunks of sharloc — of questionable efficacy in any case, after submersion.
Glawen let the flyer drift on the current to a stand of black dendrons, all pulp, punk and scaly bark, but adequate for the mooring of the flyer, or so it would seem.
Glawen made fast the flyer and took stock of the situation, which was neither the best nor the worst. The sky was overcast; the afternoon rains would shortly be upon him, but these could not be avoided. As for the predators, stinging and biting insects, and other dangers endemic to the country, he had prepared himself to the best of his ability, and now must take his chances.
Glawen unclamped the swamp crawler from its chocks. The evidence seemed to indicate that sharloc stench was repellent, Glawen tied the remaining two segments to front and rear of the crawler, then winched it off the deck into the water, where it floated on its own pontoons. He loaded aboard his backpack and such equipment as he deemed useful, climbed aboard the crawler, and churned toward the shore.
To Glawen’s annoyance the tribe of mud-walkers had arrived on the scene, where they watched his approach in agitation, ruffs displaying the bright red of displeasure and threat. Glawen steered so as to arrive at shore upwind, where he hoped that they might be dissuaded from approach by the stench of sharloc. He did not wish in any way to harm them: an act of incalculable consequence were it to occur regardless of precautions. They might either be driven away in terror or their furious vengeful hostility incurred, against which, in the depths of the jungle, Glawen might have no control. He halted the crawler a hundred yards from shore and let it drift. As he had hoped, the putrid sharloc appeared to dissuade the mud-walkers from further hostile behavior. They turned away with a final barrage of insults and mud balls and wandered off. Of course, thought Glawen, they may simply have become bored.
Cautiously Glawen approached the shore. Syrene was now halfway up the sky and the heat would have been debilitating save for the jungle-suit. A dead hush fell over the swamp, broken only by the whir and buzz of insects. Glawen noted that they seemed to veer away from the crawler, which saved him the necessity of activating the insecticide fogger.
Glawen arrived at the first banks of slime; the crawler churned doggedly forward. He made ready the guns at each side of the crawler, setting the range of response at thirty yards, and setting the mode to 'automatic,' and not a moment too soon. From the slime only twenty feet to the right of the crawler an optic tentacle reared high. Instantly the gun responded, aiming at the motion and destroying the tentacle with a burst of energy. The slime heaved and sucked as the creature below tried to decide what had happened to it. At a distance of a hundred yards the mud-walkers watched in awe, and presently set up a screeching outburst of vituperation, and threw sticks which fell far short and which Glawen ignored.
The crawler slid across the slime and without further incident entered the first fringes of the jungle, and now Glawen was faced with a new problem. The crawler capably negotiated thickets and bushes, tangles of vines, and was even able to push over a small tree. However, when trees with dense and heavy trunks grew so closely as to deny the crawler access, then Glawen was forced to choose a new route, which was often a time-consuming procedure. He discovered, to his discomfiture; that neither the time of torpidity, nor the sharloc stench, nor the automatic gun, nor all three together were enough to protect him from harm. By chance he noted on a branch under which he was about to pass a crouching back creature all maw, fangs, claws, and sinew. It poised immobile and the gun failed to detect its presence. If the crawler had proceeded below, the creature could have dropped directly upon him. Its bulk alone would crush him, even though the automatic gun by that time would have killed it. Glawen destroyed the thing with his handgun and thereafter proceeded in a much more cautious state.
