wouldn’t it? And I’d guess it’s at least five or six times that long-but I can’t see all of the creature.”
“Can you see its head?” Daff asked.
“No. And I won’t swear that it has one.”
“Not important,” Gambiel said. “I know what it is anyway.”
“Bandersnatch?” from Cuiller.
“Yes, Captain. You’ve seen them before?”
“Once, on Jinx. They’re intelligent-and harmless.”
“Right. Sally? Which way is it moving? I can’t tell from down here.”
“Back the way we came, looks like,” she said. “Roughly parallel to our path.”
“I’ll call Jook,” Cuiller said. “Alert him, so he doesn’t do anything rash if it shows up at the ship. And Sally, why don’t you come down and join us now?”
“Aye, Captain.” She paid out line and dropped toward the forest floor.
Her feet touched the ground near where Cuiller was standing, finishing his call back to the ship. Gambiel walked up a moment later. She showed him the dye on the line and explained her reasoning. He nodded thoughtfully.
“But how do I recover the grapple?” she asked, looking up into the trees. “We can’t afford to lose one each fine one of us goes up and comes down.”
The weapons tech reached over to her harness, locked the takeup reel, and thumbed the cover off a protected red stud on the control panel. He pushed it-unconsciously shoving her backward with his latent strength. “Step back and bend your knees,” he said.
She did so, and a moment later something fell out of the canopy. When it hit the ground, she recognized her grapple, with the barbs folded in.
“Radio-controlled unlocking device,” Gambiel said. “Don’t use it while you’re hanging around… Well, reel it in.”
Krater started the winder motor.
“Slowly!” Gambiel ordered. “Or you’ll catch that thing right in the tits.”
She slowed the winding and watched the folded grapple tumble and walk across the scoured dirt toward her. When it was a meter out, she braked the reel, picked up the grapple, and tucked it into her belt loop.
“Now what?” she asked.
“Now, we go on,” Cuiller replied, pointing the way toward their objective, the calculated position of the deep radar’s return image.
Hugh Jook was wedged under-or now over, rather
– the forward control yoke. He was bent around the station-keeping stirrups, stretching as far as he could go with one leg immobilized by the bubble cast. In one hand Jook held a collection of electronics chips, all banded and tagged with alphanumerics to show what each circuit was supposed to do. In the other hand was a socket-puller. He was poking into the guts of the overturned weapons pod, hoping to get enough response from it for the ship’s computer to run a diagnostic. Then it would be thumbs up or thumbs down: reconnect and rebrace the unit, or bleed away its residual charge, cut it apart with a hand-laser, and dump it out on the ground.
With his head inside the access panels, he never saw the Bandersnatch approach Callisto, even though the main window stripe was right behind his ear and oriented up toward the trees. His first sign of trouble was the lurch the ship took as the white beast nuzzled it.
“Yo!” he sang out and straightened up.
The exposed hull scritched and squeaked under the impact of the Bandersnatch’s sensory bristles. Jook looked out into a squash of thick white tubules, like a pot’s view of a scrub brush at work. Although nothing there looked like an eye, he had the uncanny feeling the giant was peering in at him.
“Leave it alone, and it will leave you alone,” Cuiller had told him, when the ground party had called in their sighting of a Bandersnatch. “Nothing on its body is small enough, or delicate enough, to be harmed by our short- range weapons. And there’s nothing much it can do to the ship, even if it sits on the hull.”
“Right,” Jook had agreed over the radio and dismissed the threat. Besides, Bandersnatchi were known to be harmless-and quite intelligent.
But now, with the mass of pallid flesh pushing against the side of Callisto, he wasn’t so sure.
Jook unbent himself, steadied with his hands against the jostling that the hull was taking, and tried to reach the panels of the control yoke. He had no intention of opening hostilities, but he hoped the beast would survive the scatter from Callisto’s ion drive when he departed the scene.
A couple of times he got his fingers up on the buttons for the engine initiation sequence. But each time he tried to key it, the ship lurched and his hand slipped. Then it didn’t matter, because the natural light coming through the window faded entirely. The Bandersnatch was riding up over the ship. It was too late to break away, even at full thrust Jook’s ears popped.
That had to be a pressure variation, but he hadn’t keyed any changes in the atmospheric specs. He looked around. The main hatch, above him and now thirty-five degrees off local vertical with the hull’s current orientation, had worked open-falling inward. The hatch panel was fabricated of aligned-crystal vanadium steel. It was set in a vanadium-steel rim and keyed into the standardized opening in their General Products hull by lipping it both inside and out Short of a patch of GP monomolecule itself, the hatch was the strongest possible seal that human technology could devise. And yet the Bandersnatch had punched it out like a baby poking his thumb through a piecrust.
Ripples of the Bandersnatch’s white underside ballooned into the opening. At first Jook thought it was just normal pressure expansion, the weight of the animal forcing its underside into a new cavity as the Bandersnatch settled its mass over the ship. But as he watched, the volume of white flesh inside the hatch grew. It began lapping around the cross bracing for the portside inertial thrusters and weapons pods. As the flesh made contact there, the Bandersnatch’s belly vibrated and the metal began to scream.
It also began to dissolve. Big, fuming drops of fluid wept from the point of contact and fell into the bilges. Wherever they touched, except on the hull material itself, that spot also started smoking and dissolving.
Jook moved. He climbed along struts and down handholds, swinging his stiffened leg over obstacles and bashing it twice. The pain didn’t slow him down. He made it past the waist, where his nominal duty station was, and kept on going, around the hyperdrive engine. In the rear, about as far forward from the tail as the main hatch was back from the bow, the hull had another opening. This one was smaller and fitted with an airlock. He thought briefly about hiding inside the lock, but he remembered it was constructed of the same vanadium steel that had failed in the main hatch. No, his only option was to climb through while that end of the ship was still uncovered by the creature’s bulk, get to the ground before the Bandersnatch noticed him, and run like hell, or as fast as his bad leg permitted.
To lower himself from the lock entrance, Hugh Jook pulled on a climbing harness and gathered up the grapple, launcher, line cassettes, and gas cartridges. Almost as an afterthought, he broke out a laser rifle and a personal radio.
While dry-locking through, he punched up the radio and whispered into it.
“Captain…!”
Nothing, not even static. “Jared!”
Still nothing.
Of course-inside the lock even the strongest signal would be blocked. He’d have to wait until he was outside and clear before calling the ground party.
The outer hatch opened, and Jook was looking up into a billowing wall of rough, white flesh. There was no time to set the grapple or pay out line. He levered himself up on the hatch coaming, scrambled over the ceramic hull surface trailing down toward the tail, got his good leg lowermost to take up his impact with the ground, and dropped.
He fell over on his bad leg and cried out-then looked up to see if the Bandersnatch was interested in falling on top of him.
It wasn’t. Instead, it rolled back and forth over the hull, driving the bow down and bending out of plumb the trees that had wedged it right and left. The Bandersnatch worked its rasp deeper and deeper into the main hatch, and Jook could faintly hear the screech of breaking metal inside.
Still, he didn’t trust the white beast’s absorption in its task. As soon as his breath was back, Jook picked
