Read Ebook: Arcturus Times Three by Sharkey Jack Schelling George Illustrator

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Ebook has 175 lines and 11396 words, and 4 pages

Jerry's right arm was gone. Tentacles flipped and floundered all about his head-section. The digestive cavity of the jellyfish was widening, trying to take in Jerry's head at a single swallow. He saw, with the five usable eyes remaining, a crystally concavity, the sides glinting with digestive fluid tinted beautiful emerald by the foliage out beyond its semi-transparent body. Then the thing closed over his head, and the last of the eyes began to sear and sting.

Jerry's mind cried out in anguish ... and lightning flashed across his consciousness. White, silent lightning.

Pain ceased.

The time of Contact had passed.

Captain Daniel Peters paced agitatedly back and forth before the couch holding that still figure in its bulky helmet. The last glow of the sunset had vanished behind the trees around the clearing minutes before. Peters took three puffs from a just-ignited cigarette, then crushed the white cylinder under his heel.

"Sir?" said a man at the airlock of the ship.

Peters looked up swiftly, and identified the speaker as the technician for the Contact mechanism.

"How's it going?" he asked, trying to keep his voice matter-of-fact.

"First report's just come in," said the man, with a brief smile. "Information's being coded onto a new card for the roborocket index. I guess Norcriss came through the Contact all right. His life-pulse still shows on the panel. It was flickering badly for a few minutes, though. Think I should terminate?"

Peters hesitated, then shook his head. "No, I guess not. They tell me there are no after-effects to even a hazardous Contact. Norcriss'll be wanting to get on with it ... poor devil," he added, with a wry smile that touched only his lips, didn't reach his eyes. "Proceed, seaman."

The other man nodded, and vanished within the ship....

Vast flat fields of sun-bronzed stone stretched in all direction to the horizon, pockmarked with rimless craters, seething with red liquid which flickered with dusty blue fingers of fire here and there on its surface. Every so often a pale plume of steamy white rose toward the coppery overturned bowl that was the sky.

Cautiously Jerry sniffed the air. Sulphur. That was the red liquid burning in those many pits: Yellow sulphur melted into gluey scarlet pools amid the nearly invisible shimmer of its consuming fires.

"Sulphur doesn't steam," Jerry thought idly, still sniffing at the fumes. "So the white plumes mean there is water, or some volatile liquid, mingled with the deposits in these pits."

After a moment, he realized that he was no longer taking random sniffs of the fumes, but was actually indulging himself in a regular orgy of breathing. The smell of the sulphur was as strong and piercing as he'd ever known it, but absent was the almost simultaneous effect of raw throat, streaming eyes, and hacking cough.

"And I, if I don't keel over in a few more moments, must be a sulphur-breathing creature."

Sunlight, from nearly directly overhead, was warm and comfortable upon his head, back and hindquarters. An unusually flexible feeling in the caudal region of his spine told him that he had a tail, even before he swung his huge head about for a glance at it. The body, as bronzed as the rock on which it stood, was something like a lion's, although the taloned feet, from heel to the first leg-joint, were horny and rough in appearance. They were not unlike those of a barnyard fowl, if considerably thicker and decidedly more lethal.

That, save for a hard-to-see fringe of darker fur that ran up his neck toward where he felt his ears to be, was all of his body that he could view.

"I wonder," he mused, "what my head looks like?"

A brief turning of the problem in his mind gave him the solution to it. It wasn't the best possible way of getting an idea of his latest cranial conformations, but--unless there was a looking-glass lying about--it was the only way at hand.

Very like a lion's, except that it seemed to have no external ear. A single slender silhouette that fell from the forehead region, stiletto-pointed, must be a sort of horn, unless it deciduated periodically, like a deer's antlers.

Further speculation on his appearance was interrupted by the appearance of another creature, trotting like a terrier between the fuming sulphur-pits, coming his way.

It could be a twin to what he now knew he looked like, but it seemed just a bit smaller, somehow. And it was carrying something carefully in its teeth.

"Should I run, fight or just ignore it?" Jerry wondered. "It doesn't seem menacing. But neither does a pekinese till you try to pet it."

He allowed his mind to retreat a fractional bit from control of his host, and watched its reactions to the newcomer. Jerry felt a surge of emotion, a sort of fond, proud, doting feeling, and knew that this approaching creature was his cub. "That's a help," he thought, relieved, and resumed control of the animal.

The cub halted a short distance away, and gently set its burden upon the rock, placing a fore-footful of talons upon the thing before letting go with its jaws. Under the talons, the thing moved. Jerry saw that it was a sort of squirrel, except that it had well-developed forepaws, the pads of which hinted that it undoubtedly ran quadripedally instead of climbing trees. Then the memory of the sort of terrain he was in re-crossed his mind, and Jerry felt foolish.

Naturally it didn't climb trees in a region that was devoid of any vegetation whatsoever.

Jerry noticed that the cub seemed to be waiting for something. He wished he could speak. He had the goofy feeling that he was supposed to say, like a man confronted by a bottle of Chateau Neuf in the hopeful hands of a wine steward, "That'll do nicely, thank you."

A nod was almost universally a sign of acquiescence, so he tried that instead. The cub seemed pleased, and immediately, by lowering that forehead-horn between a pair of the talons enfolding the struggling land-squirrel, snuffed out its life with a thrust through its neck. Then it removed the talons from its prey, and took a backward step.

Apparently, as the sire, Jerry was to get first bite.

"Now don't go all picayune," he cautioned his digestive tract. "Come on, Jerry boy. You eat oysters while they're alive. You should be able to eat a squirrel when it's dead. Besides, if you like the smell of this lion-creature's atmosphere, you'll probably like the taste of its food. Eat hearty."

With that, Jerry lowered his head and let his sharp teeth snap off a haunch of the squirrel-thing. He went to chew it, then realized that--unlike his prior Contact's over-equipage--he had no tongue. This was strictly a bolt-your-food host. So he tossed his head back, and managed, with a spasmodic effort of his thick muscular throat, to get the morsel into his stomach.

The cub stepped forward then, bit off a chunk for itself and got it down with less apparent effort.

"Well, he's had more practice at tongueless eating," Jerry consoled himself. Then, noting that the cub was standing patiently awaiting something, he swayed his head from side to side, trying to convey, "No thanks, it's all yours, kid."

But the cub, its head tipped perplexedly to one side, was still watching him, waiting for something, a sort of puzzled anxiety in its gaze. Jerry reasoned that if he simply backed off, the cub would take that as a gesture of refusal to eat any more, so he took a few steps away from the squirrel-thing.

And the cub, an almost human look of bafflement on its face, gurgled a whine from its throat. It began to bounce about on its legs like a housebroken dog that very urgently wants out.

Mere after-you-Pop protocol could not explain the glint of fright in his cub's eyes. Or could it?

Jerry tried to remain calm and think reasonably. The sire-and-cub relationship was throwing him. Most animals--in the narrow group that remained linked by relationship and affection even after the cubs matured--ran along opposite lines. The parent went out and got food for the kids, and not vice-versa. On this planet, apparently, having a cub was the nearest thing to Social Security.

"Remember, you idiot," Jerry snapped at himself, "this is a species. It is no beast rational mind you are dealing with, but an animal mind. That means that the cub's apparent protocol is instinctive, and not a matter of etiquette. And an instinct has a reason behind it, doesn't it? Only man can skip over protocol. You have to do something before the cub feels that it can do it--and whatever it is you're not doing, it's driving the cub to distraction. You'd better go for a second helping of squirrel, and fast, or you're going to have your kid in a mental institution!"

Not exactly relishing completing the meal, Jerry stepped back to the furry little corpse on the rock, and only as he came near enough to bite into it was he suddenly aware of another odor mingling with that of the sulphur fumes. Unbelieving, he stared at the spreading pool of putrescence that ringed the remains of his cub's prey. He stared, silent and amazed, as flesh and bone crumbled and dissolved there on the ground, until there was nothing there but the noisome liquid and a few tiny teeth.

The sickly retch boiled out from his stomach with a painful expansion, and he scented the same foul odor on his breath as arose from the liquid that now lay drying in the burning sunlight.

His flesh, beneath its bronze-colored fur, felt suddenly cold and greasy. Jerry knew that feeling well, from one summer when he'd eaten a sandwich with mayonnaise that had lain too long outside the refrigerator. It was the onset of ptomaine. He and the cub could be dead, in a very ugly manner, within less time than he had to await his next Contact. Or was it less time? It was subjective, wasn't it? Maybe this period would be over more quickly than the last one. Or maybe more slowly....

Jerry turned to look at the cub. Its eyes were glazing. It was breathing in gasps through its open mouth, staggering as it tried to remain on its feet.

"We're poisoned," Jerry groaned. "And it's not on purpose. That cub didn't trot here with that squirrel just to knock off its old man! There's something else has to be done, something I've overlooked. And my stupidity is killing us."

Weakly, almost automatically, Jerry's conscious mind did the only thing possible under the circumstances. Cliche of old Peters or not, "When in doubt, black out" was the only solution. Jerry swiftly relinquished his grip on the controls, and let the lion-thing take over its own destiny.

The first thing it did was rush toward the scarlet surface of the boiling sulphur pit near the cub. The muscles relaxed and showed no sign of relaxing in that flame-bound gallop, and Jerry grabbed at its mind and got back in control just as its forefeet stood on the brink of that blue-flaming red pool.

"Oh, damn!" he groaned, agonized by both his fear of fire and the growing discomfort within his stomach. "Of all the creatures in the universe, I have to hit one with the lemming-instinct. This damn thing's bent on boiling itself alive if I let go. And if I stay in control, I die of ptomaine!"

Jerry Norcriss wasted nearly thirty seconds feeling sorry for himself. And then he remembered something about lemmings. And also something about cubs.

Lemmings, those strange little rodents that take it periodically in their heads to all go rushing into the ocean and drown, are not suicide-bent. Their ancestry is older than the continent on which they live. At one time the spot wherein they plunge into the ocean was linked with the next continent over. The migration--for that's what it is with lemmings--had at one time been perfectly safe. So safe that the migration of the lemmings became instinctive. And, after the continents separated, or the band of land joining them sank beneath the sea, the lemmings blithely continued their trek, and perished. Lemmings might die, but the ages-old instinct of the specie wouldn't.

No animal, Jerry realized, is deliberately self-destructive. No animal but man--who is more than animal, and can decide upon his own destiny despite what his instincts buck for.

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