Swearing bitterly, Ellis caught up his Telethink helmet and slid it over his head. He found the net in a welter of confusion. Washington demanded further information; Vann, at the station, was calling him frantically. His own scramble for help-images only added to the mental babel.

On the Federation ship, confusion was nearly as rampant.

Xaxtol’s dilemma still held: he could not make planetfall—time was too short for aid now, in any case—but neither could he, with clear Galactic conscience, desert the harried primitives below while hope remained.

Ellis’ predicament forced Xaxtol to decision; he could only follow the Morid’s aura and relay its progress.

It could not be helped that the relayed image was blurred of definition and weirdly askew; the Morid’s visual and auditory range differed so sharply from either human or Galactic that even over the ship’s wonderfully selective telecommunicator little of the Morid’s immediate surroundings came through clearly. Its aura arrived with a burning intensity that turned Xaxtol and his group faint with empathetic horror, but the fact that the Morid had just made its first kill obliterated all detail for the moment beyond a shocking welter of blood and torn flesh.

Ellis fared a little better under the second telepathic blast than under the first—he managed to snatch off his Telethink helmet just in time.

“The thing just killed something out there,” he yelled at Charlie Trask. “It’s coming this way. Are you going to sit there and—”

Charlie graded his last edible shrimp, took up his bucket and went inside. The leisurely clinking of homebrew bottles drifted after him, clear and musical on the still, hot air.

Ellis looked at his watch and considered prayer. He had three minutes left.

When the Morid came, Ellis was sitting dumbly on the sand, nursing his broken ankle and considering with a shock-detached part of his mind a fragmentary line of some long-forgotten schooldays poem.

What rough beast is this ... the rest eluded him.

The underbrush beyond the shack rustled and the Morid’s ravening image sprang to Ellis’ mind with a clarity that shook his three net-participants to the core—one of them past endurance.

Vann, in the station, said “Dear God,” 

 Prev. P 9/11 next