Chapter Five
Ansard IV was a hot planet, hot and humid. Almost three-quarters of it consisted of a blue-green freshwater ocean. The rest—one large continent and three island continents—consisted of primeval forests, dense jungles, a trio of awesome mountain ranges, and an occasional desert. The island continents had numerous inland lakes, as well as immense rain forests. The branches of these forests occasionally shut out the sunlight, but somehow the rain managed to get through even where the sunlight couldn’t. It rained every minute of every day in portions of the forest, and enough rain fell in other sections so that the ground was usually submerged beneath a sea of mud and slop.
No one had yet bothered cataloguing the insect life of Ansard IV, but Lane estimated that the man who took on that particular job wouldn’t be finished until well after he’d reached his two millionth species. The air wasn’t quite as oxygen-rich as some jungle worlds he’d been on, but it was sufficient for him to take a depressant every three hours to make sure he kept his senses about him. He had set the Deathmaker down on a sandy ocean beach, as per the Mariner’s instructions. Then he took samplings of the atmosphere, water, some simple specimens of the flora and fauna (i.e., grass and insects), and extracted the equipment he felt he’d need from his cargo hold. He deposited the Mufti in the Deepsleep machine and sought out the Mariner, who was walking around barefoot on the sand outside the ship, his boots in his hands.
“Well?” said Lane.
“Well what?” asked the old man.
“If you want to clear out of here in a week or so and go looking for your Starduster, I’d suggest you tell me how we plan to find and kill two dozen Horndemons.”
“Easy,” said the Mariner. “See that old volcano?” He pointed to a mountain about eight miles distant.
“Yes.”
“That’s where they are.”
“On the slopes or inside it?” asked Lane.
“Inside it. Volcano hasn’t gone off in eons. Its floor is covered with grasses and a couple of forests, and enough water so nothing inside it ever has to leave. Just like the Ngorongoro Crater back on Earth.”
“We saw a lot of craters during our descent,” said Lane. “How can you be sure that this is the one that contains the Horndemons?”
“This is the most convenient one to walk to,” said the Mariner. “That’s why I chose it. They’re just about all the same. As for Horndemons—hell, there’s nothing on this world can give them a tussle. They practically own the damned planet. They live in every forest, every jungle, and every crater.”
“Why didn’t you tell me to land in the crater?” asked Lane. “This is a pretty versatile ship. I could have done it without much difficulty.”
“And take a chance of scaring the critters away? Not a chance, Lane. If I can walk eight miles, so can you.”
“I suppose you have no objection to my setting down in the crater once we’ve killed the damned things,” said Lane. “Or would you rather carry them back here?”
“I hadn’t really thought of that,” admitted the Mariner.
“Nor of how we’re going to keep the insects away from the carcasses while we walk back to the ship?” said Lane. He smiled for an instant as the Mariner looked uncomfortable. “Don’t worry. I’ve got a preservative we can spray them with. It’ll harden on contact and last long enough so that nothing will be able to eat through it before I return with the ship. It’s a derivative of the stuff I use to preserve skins and carcasses in the cargo hold.”
“What are you planning to kill them with?” asked the Mariner.
“A screecher,” said Lane.
“They’re pretty big animals,” said the Mariner dubiously.
“I know,” said Lane. “But they’re for museums. I can’t damage the hides. I’ll take a molecular imploder along too, just in case I run into trouble. I’d rather not use it, though; it leaves a pretty sloppy corpse.”
“You’re the hunter,” shrugged the old man.
“That I am,” said Lane. “Feel up to setting out now, or would you rather wait until tomorrow?”
“The sooner we leave the sooner we’ll get the job done with,” said the Mariner.
They packed food and medical kits, Lane’s weapons, the preservative, a compass, various stimulants and depressants, insect repellent, lanterns and beacons, and water, and began their trek through the primeval forest.
It was slow work, foot-slogging through the mud and climbing over the roots of trees that had to be millennia old. They rested frequently, mostly for the Mariner’s sake, but proceeded at a steady rate of two miles per hour.
Lane was amazed by the variety in size and appearance of the various insects. There was one flying species in particular that fascinated him, a huge dragonfly-type that measured almost forty centimeters in length. They seemed to have no eyes, antennae, or other sensory organs, but they were death and taxes when it came to zeroing in on smaller insects. He couldn’t even discern mouths on the things, nor was their method of attacking at all enlightening. They swooped down, picked the hapless prey up in powerful pincers, and flew off with it. Try as he would, Lane couldn’t figure out how they ingested their food. He asked the Mariner about them, but the old man just shook his head.
“They’re either mutated or localized,” he said. “At any rate, I didn’t see them when I charted the planet. Maybe their mouths are in their pincers.”
“I doubt it,” said Lane. “Too inefficient. The closest I can come to an explanation would be that they crush the smaller insects against their abdomens and feed by a form of osmosis, but it doesn’t seem to me that they could get a hell of a lot of nourishment that way.”
“Who knows?” The old man shrugged. “Kill a couple on the way back and dissect them. When you’re through studying them you can always give ’em to the Mufti.”
“He only likes live insects,” said Lane. He looked around him. “He’d have a field day out here.”
“Let’s get to the crater before the damned insects figure out we’re good to eat and start having a field day of their own,” said the Mariner, increasing his pace.
They walked in silence for another thirty minutes. Then they heard a strange, hollow, hooting scream to the northwest, followed by the sound of branches breaking.
“A Horndemon …?” asked Lane, his casual grip on the imploder suddenly becoming a very businesslike one.
“Too big and loud to be anything else,” said the Mariner.
“Stick close by, Mariner,” said Lane. “I don’t imagine we’ll be coming to any clearings, so we’re going to be running blind, for all practical purposes.”
“Don’t go worrying about any surprise attacks,” said the Mariner. “There’s nothing going to sneak up on us without giving us plenty of warning. The forest is too dense for that.”
“I’ve already been warned,” said Lane. “As for sneaking up on us, I don’t imagine they have any intention of doing so. However, if you can tell me where the damned thing is going to jump us just from hearing a couple of branches break twenty yards away, I’d sure appreciate it if you’d share your knowledge with me. Also, I don’t know for a fact that there’s only one Horndemon out there. In fact, all the information you poured into the computer would lead me to think that a solitary Horndemon is pretty rare.”
“Well, it’s not going to be solitary for long if you keep talking,” said the Mariner.
“It’ll know we’re here whether I talk to you or not,” said Lane, his eyes scanning the bushes that surrounded him. “We make a lot of noise just traipsing through here, and I’m not about to stop and spend the night in this mire. Horndemons or not, I plan to camp on the rim of the crater tonight. This stuff’s too hard to breathe, and I’d be a damned sight happier if I didn’t have to pull insects out of my boots every couple of minutes.”
They continued walking, albeit more cautiously, and reached the base of the volcano without incident three hours later. The jungle thinned as they ascended it, and another four hours found them at the top, just as the huge sun was beginning its descent. They ate a sparse meal, then propped themselves up against a pair of smooth trees and fell asleep, weapons in hand.
Lane awoke with the sunrise, and saw a huge horned creature standing thirty yards away, regarding him curiously. It was reddish-brown in color, its hair wiry in texture. It had four legs, stood approximately the size of a small bison, and had a pair of horns that dwarfed even the legendary greater kudu of old Earth’s African hills. It looked pretty innocuous, like just another species of herbivore, until he saw its feet. They were splayed, and seemed to have retractable claws. That smacked of a carnivore.
He studied its head, briefly but expertly. The eyes weren’t wide-set, which meant that its peripheral vision wasn’t all that good. That, too, smacked of a carnivore. Still, the body was too large for a pure carnivore on this world; there simply weren’t enough game animals to keep it fed. The shape of the jaws reflected this: totally unspecialized, not quite long enough to house the numerous grinding teeth of a pure herbivore, not hinged well enough for a pure carnivore. The ears were large, which seemed appropriate for a world where the jungles limited visibility so much. Right at the moment they were both pricked forward, pointing at Lane.
The Horndemon was staring at him with neither malice nor fear, which was to be expected of a beast that had no natural enemies and had never seen a man before. Lane laid the imploder across his lap and slowly picked up his screecher. Carefully, gently, making sure not to make any sudden movements, he aimed the screecher at the Horndemon and pressed the trigger mechanism.
The results were startling. The Horndemon did a complete backflip in the air, hit the ground with a resounding thud, shook its head vigorously, floundered once, and then began emitting the same hollow hooting noise Lane had heard the previous day. Suddenly its eyes fell on Lane again, and it staggered up and charged across the intervening ground with a swiftness that Lane hadn’t expected in so large a creature. He dropped the screecher and picked up and fired the imploder all in one motion. The Horndemon gave one surprised grunt and turned to jelly in mid-charge.
“I wasn’t kidding when I said they were hard to kill,” said the Mariner, still leaning against his tree.
“You were awake?” said Lane, startled by his voice.
“Yep. I just wanted to see what kind of hunter I’d hooked up with, so I kept quiet and watched.”
“You’ve already been on two hunts with me,” said Lane. “What did you plan to do if the damned thing charged while I was sleeping?”
“Shoot it with my own screecher,” said the Mariner. “You’d have been awake before it got around to doing anything serious. By the way, why’d you kill it with the imploder? You could have jumped behind the tree and kept the screecher on.”
“We couldn’t have loaded this one into the ship,” said Lane. “Even if the screecher killed it I’d have turned the imploder on the carcass.”
“Tough bastards, aren’t they?” said the Mariner, looking at what little remained of the Horndemon.
“Yes, they are,” said Lane. “I’ve had creatures survive the screecher for a while, but they’ve always tried to run away from it. This is the first time I ever saw an animal run right into the sound waves that are scrambling his brain. I don’t think he was disoriented, either; just mean and tough. I don’t see being able to kill one with a screecher in much less than a minute, and probably it’ll go closer to ninety seconds. That means I have to get within about seventy-five yards. Any closer and I might have to use the imploder if it charges; much farther and it could run out of the screecher’s effective range.”
“Beautiful things, screechers,” said the old man. “Stand in front of one and it burns out half your brain circuits; fire it and you don’t even hear a hum.”
“The Horndemon didn’t hear anything either. He just felt it.” Lane stood up, picked up his gear, took one last look at the remains of the Horndemon, and turned to the Mariner. “We might as well get started. The next Horndemon I kill I want to take back with me.”
They reached the floor of the crater in less than five hours. Then, with between eight and nine hours of sunlight left, the hunt began in earnest.
Lane found his first Horndemons in a grove of fruit trees about four hundred yards from the crater wall. It took him almost an hour to isolate one of them from its four companions, but he finally accomplished it and fired the screecher at a distance of eighty yards. This Horndemon reacted even more violently than the one on the rim had done; finally it saw Lane and raced toward him, collapsing less than the length of its body from Lane’s feet.
Lane immediately turned to look at the other four. Two had fled into the denser forest behind the grove, one was staring at him, and one was approaching. He debated killing the nearer one with the imploder and going after the second one with the screecher, but decided to see if he could keep both of them intact. He dispatched the nearer of the Horndemons without much difficulty, and still the other made no motion.
“It’s like shooting fish in a barrel, to borrow an old expression,” said Lane to the Mariner, who was standing a short distance behind him. “No one has ever hunted them before; they don’t know enough to be scared.”
He walked toward the remaining Horndemon. He was just about to aim the screecher when the creature charged down upon him without a sound. Lane was surprised but unexcited. He took careful aim and fired the screecher at thirty yards. The Horndemon fell to its knees for an instant, but almost immediately regained its feet. Lane kept the screecher trained on it. The Horndemon kept coming, but was staggering now, and Lane jumped nimbly aside at the last instant. Then the beast’s eyes fell on the Mariner, and it lowered its horns and charged the old man.
Lane dropped the screecher and fired the imploder. The beast was so close to the Mariner when it died that Lane had to help him out from under what remained of it.
“Thanks, Lane,” said the Mariner, gasping for breath.
“Go to hell, old man!” snapped Lane. “From now on you hold the imploder and keep at least a hundred yards behind me. And God help you if we have to turn another Horndemon into putty.”
He went back to the two usable corpses and applied the preservative. This done, he walked over to the remains of the third carcass and had the Mariner use the imploder on it again, until nothing but liquid remained. Lane stood there until it had all seeped into the soft ground.
“What was that for?” asked the Mariner.
“The Horndemons don’t know that another predator has set up housekeeping here,” said Lane. “Why leave any hints?”
“What about the other two carcasses?”
“The preservative will kill any odor, and from the way these creatures are built, I’d guess they’ll believe their noses before their eyes.”
Lane killed three more Horndemons in late afternoon, then set up camp at the base of the crater wall, surrounding the area with a number of warning devices. None were triggered, and the next day he killed seven more of the beasts.
By the third day they had become more cautious, and he changed his base of operations, moving to the far side of the crater, some nine miles distant. Here he downed eight more Horndemons in the next two days before he found it expedient to move again.
By the morning of the sixth day he had filled his order, and, hardly feeling like a heroic hunter, he returned to the Deathmaker, awoke the Mufti, picked up his Horndemons, and prepared himself for an uneventful six weeks in space while the Mariner chased after his elusive dream.