‘Stop!’ Khuv covered his face with a handkerchief. The roaring stream of fire continued for a second or two, hissed into silence as it was shut off at source. But the alien warrior continued to burn. Fire leaped up from him, rising six or seven feet above the black oval core which was his melting head, and there turned to foul, stinking smoke. Jazz hadn’t been able to smell it, but still he’d known how it must have stank.
The flames burned lower, hissing and crackling, and the slumped shape shrank as its juices bubbled and boiled. Something that might have been a long, tapering arm rose up from the tarry remains in the fire, undulated like a crippled cobra in the clouds of smoke, began a violent shuddering which ceased when it collapsed back into the mess on the burning walkway.
‘One more burst,’ said Khuv, and the squad obliged. And in a very short space of time it was finished . . .
Then the film had come to an end and the screen flickered with white light, but Jazz and Khuv had continued to sit and stare at the scenes burned in their minds. Only after the last inch of film clattered from its free-spinning reel had Khuv moved, reaching to switch off the projector and turn up the lights.
After that … it had been time for another drink. And rarely in Jazz’s life had alcohol been more welcome . . .
While Michael J. Simmons sat on his bunk and thought about all the things he’d seen and heard, gradually the heartbeat or pulse of the complex slowed and took on something of a soft regularity. Outside it was night, and so in here it was a time for sleeping. But not all of the Projekt’s staff and supporting units slept (there were, for instance, those who guarded the Gate, who were very much awake) and as for the one creature in the complex which was neither human nor anything else of Man’s world: that hardly seemed to sleep at all.
So thought its keeper, Vasily Agursky, where he sat with his chin and drawn cheeks cupped in the palms of his too-large hands, gazing at Encounter Three through the thick glass wall of its tank. Agursky was a small man, no more than five-three in height, slender, slope-shouldered and with a large head whose dome came shiny and pointed through its uneven halo of dirty-grey down. Behind thick lenses his magnified eyes were light-brown in a pale face; they were red-rimmed, tiredly mobile under thin but expressive eyebrows. Thin-lipped and big-eared, he looked somehow gnomish in a paradoxically uncomical sort of way.
The red lighting of the thing’s room was turned low so as not to frighten it down out of sight beneath the sand of its tank; it ‘knew’ Agursky and rarely became excited in his presence; while he sat observing the thing, with his skinny legs astride a steel chair and his elbows on the backrest, so it sprawled on the floor of its tank watching him. At present it was a leech-thing with a rodent face. A pseudopod, sprouting from a spot on its rear left-hand side, moved slowly on starfish feet, independently examining pebbles and lumps of crusted sand, then laying them aside. The pseudopod’s single rudimentary eye was alert and unblinking.
The creature was hungry, and Agursky – unable to sleep despite the half-bottle of vodka he’d consumed -had decided to come down here and feed it. The queer thing (one of many queer things) was this: that lately he’d noticed how its moods seemed to affect him. When it was restless, so was he. Likewise when it was hungry. Tonight, despite the fact that he’d eaten fairly well during the day, he had felt hungry. And so he’d known that it must be hungry, too. It didn’t really need to eat, not that he’d been able to discover, but it did like to. Offal from the cookhouse, blood of slaughtered beasts, the matted hides and hooves, eyes and brains and guts which men scorned – all of these things were grist for its mill. Ground up, they’d all go in through its feeder tube, and the thing in the tank would devour the lot.