the circling car it seemed undecided what to do. I dropped the nose of the car and fired the two heavy strakkakers I had mounted on it.
We weren't used to fighting, and certainly not to killing. Whatever this being was, I didn't want it dismantled like the other. I fired into the cave floor in front of it. Then I brought the strakkakers back to bear on its head.
It couldn't have misunderstood. I knew it was fast, but I was also sure that, injured as it was, I would be faster when pulling a trigger was all I had to do. It was 'at my mercy' as some old book put it. It took a step backward.
I brought the car toward Dimity, keeping the strakkakers trained on it. She jumped aboard and I gave thanks for Wunderland gravity. The creature seemed to have lost its weapons and equipment. I took the car up to near the cave roof, higher, I was sure, than it could jump in its present condition. It stood staring up at us, with those huge intelligent eyes, and suddenly I realized what I had done. We had killed-yes, and even eaten-one intelligent alien and maimed another. They had, it was true, snarled and leaped at us in the cave, but… that might have been self-defense. It might even have been an attempt to communicate. Many a peaceful, herbivorous gorilla had died on Earth because its chestbeating display warnings to 'leave me and my family and our territory alone' had been taken by humans as a signal of attack, and they had shot. As I had.
The dead morlock? But morlocks were aggressive predators. Who had attacked first? But there was something else there too. I thought again of H.G. Wells's Morlocks, the originals, and the fact, intentional or otherwise, that there was no real evidence in his story that they were really hostile. I thought of ancient science-fiction films like It Came from Outer Space, in which it had turned out that grotesque and horrifying aliens had only wanted to make repairs and depart, and had attacked only in self-defense. We had shot without trying to negotiate or make peace. This creature, or some creature like it, had not attacked the monks when it came upon them in the night.
Perhaps they now viewed the human race with as much terror as we viewed them, and with better reason. Perhaps these were peaceful creatures that had found themselves on a planet of horror. If so, no wonder they had not shown themselves! What would we have done in their position? It was armed. Well, so were we, and we had used our arms first and lethally. All this went through my head far quicker than I can tell it.
They looked carnivorous. Well, I had once had a cat, a gentle old female who moved in with me and whose main desires had been to be petted, to curl up on my lap, and to share my bed, and had who brought me gifts of food filched from neighbors' barbecues as offerings of affection. She had had pointed teeth, too, and claws and, until age overtook her, had been a terror to balls of wool. I am a scientist and I don't anthropomorphize animals or their emotions, but I remembered how, purring and kneading me in bed, that tiny-brained creature had gone against her own instincts and kept her claws sheathed. She sometimes bit my fingers in play, but took care never to break the skin or draw blood. Carnivores, even such perfect carnivores as cats, need not be cruel. Humans' front teeth were for meateating, but we were not…
The warnings from Sol? They might mean anything. What had happened light-years away in space might have been an exact parallel to this situation: panicky humans attacking first. We weren't sure what Sol humans were like now. And this creature was in a terrible way, injured and starving-I saw the bones starting through its wasted frame.
It all went through my mind in a few seconds as I circled in the cave, guns trained on the creature. I began to wonder miserably how many laws I might have broken, beginning with the one against murder. I can't kill it, I thought. I don't know that it even meant us any harm.
It would be right, I thought, to land and try to negotiate with the creature, treat its terrible injuries, make amends. But that was impossible. Too much damage had been done.
Whatever its original intentions, it saw me as an enemy now. I had maimed it and killed its companion, or, for all I knew, its mate. It was much darker than the other creature, almost black, though with a white pattern like an old scar on one side, where its stripes did not match, and some part of my professional mind wondered if this was a sexual differentiation. My clothes were still spattered with its companion's blood. And there might be others coming up the cave system.
There was one thing I could do. Round my neck was the belt I had taken from the dead Pseudofelis, the 'kzin.' I had learned little from examining it, but it looked sufficiently like our own equipment for me to guess that it contained utility supplies, including, if there was any parallelism is our species' thinking, medical supplies. I held the belt out and dropped it at the creature's feet.
I had no idea whether or not it could eat our food, but I dropped a package of explorers' rations as well. I raised my hand in a confused gesture of salute, and we headed out of the cave. I felt a deathly misery and guilt as the car shot into the sunlight, like a stake of ice at my heart. 'Are you all right? That was a bit of a fall.'
'No permanent damage. I know how to fall. But it was no fun being on the ground with violet-eyes.'
What else could I have done?' I burst out.
'We're alive,' said Dimity. 'We might very easily not be. Those claws were sharp.'
Perhaps I had read too much. I thought of the Ancient Mariner and the albatross, and suddenly knew what he meant by 'a woeful agony.' He had confessed his crime to a holy man and begged forgiveness. In the abbot I had an official holy man for a friend. I was not a Catholic, but would it help me to make confession?
Not far away to the north a vast cloud of black smoke was rising into the sky, an intense red flame at its core. Smaller fires were burning around it. Once before I had seen something similar. It looked as if something had smashed into the mountain range from space. That, I guessed, was what had caused the shock and the rockslide that had freed us from the cave.
I gave thanks as the ground flashed away below us and the scarp of the Hohe Kalkstein, looking ominous and threatening now rather than wild and fascinatingly mysterious, dwindled behind. Briefly I gave thanks. A red warning light blinked on the dashboard fuel gauge. Behind us in the sky was a white cloud. Pierce a liquid hydrogen system and it vaporizes fast. I wouldn't be able to keep the car in the air for long.
Chapter 11
Again we had reason to be grateful to Wunderland gravity. Cars have limited gliding qualities. I kept the car flying as long as I could, putting more kilometers between us and the caves. We landed on a low mesa in arid, deserted country. The Hohe Kalkstein and the Drachenhohlen were a blue line on the eastern horizon, the farmlands still far to the west.
The damage was obvious. The kzin's claws had opened the metal at the rear of the car and at one point punctured a hydrogen fuel line. It was a tiny puncture, barely visible, but with liquid hydrogen fuel under high pressure it was enough. I doubted the puncture could be plugged reliably. The line and its fittings would have to be replaced. We had been lucky to get as far as we had. I had loaded the car with all sorts of spares, including, of course, spare fuel cells, and mercifully I had secured them thoroughly. But it would be a long job.
As I looked at the evidence of the power of those claws I realized again how lucky we had been. Suddenly we seemed to be still all too close to the Drachenhohlen. I had loaded a camouflaged biologist's field tent among the stores and we draped this over the car. It didn't cover it entirely but I hoped it might break up the silhouette. I would like to have had us both checked by the car's doc, but was not sure I could trust it after the rough time it had had.
Perhaps it was thinking of that which caused the sedatives still washing round in my system to kick in again just as the flight-or-fright was wearing off. I began to remove the damaged panels but started fumbling and dropping tools. Finally I gave it up and mumbled that I would have to rest again. When sleeping out in Wunderland it is ingrained in us to search out any cuddly little Beam's beasts and other small but dangerous creatures. I just about managed to inspect the neighboring small rocks, and we placed a couple on the car to break up its silhouette a little more.
Our elevation gave us a good view in all directions but also made me feel unpleasantly visible. We crawled under the tent and Dimity covered me with a blanket. When I next woke up it was night. My chest felt as if it was on fire. Even for Wunderland, I thought, there seemed once again to be an unusual number of meteors in the sky. I felt my head wasn't working well, but Dimity, sleeping apparently peacefully beside me, was something to cling to. The western sky was particularly bright. I could hear thunder and see distant lightning flashes.
Meteors and lightning storms? Lightning storms in a cloudless sky? Meteors visible in a cloud-covered one? I
